Professor Cavanaugh's research and teaching interests
concern the conjunction of philosophical and theological ethics as
found in everyday life as well as in the medical and military
arenas. An allied area of research and teaching concerns his
interest in the Western religious tradition of thought, with a
focus on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.
He regularly teaches Medical Ethics and an Introduction to
Philosophy in which students read great Western intellectual
seekers such as: Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, and Pascal. In 2006,
the Clarendon Press of Oxford University published Professor
Cavanaugh's book entitled Double-Effect Reasoning: Doing
Good and Avoiding Evil (Clarendon Press: Oxford) in Oxford Studies
in Theological Ethics. Double-effect reasoning arises out of
Western religious ethics. Specifically, it originates in the
ethical thought of the medieval moral theologian Thomas Aquinas who
introduces an embryonic form of double effect in response to the
thought of Augustine of Hippo, another of the West's great
religious moralists. To this day, thinkers rely on double-effect
reasoning to evaluate actions from everyday life and the medical
and military fora. They do so to distinguish consequentially
similar acts with different intentional structures.
In his work, Professor Cavanaugh offers a contemporary account
of double effect that responds to modern critics who claim that
acts which have similar consequences are morally equivalent,
regardless of the respective agents' intentions. In this
book, Professor Cavanaugh argues that two consequentially similar
acts shaped by different intentions can significantly differ
morally. Currently, Professor Cavanaugh builds on his work found in
Double-effect Reasoning in another book project. In this project,
entitled Hippocrates' Oath and Asclepius' Snake,
Professor Cavanaugh argues that from the time of Hippocrates (or
the writer of the Hippocratic Oath) to its adoption by early
Christian physicians, at the heart of this Western medical ethic
one finds a profound concern to separate the role of healing from
that of wounding. In this work, Professor Cavanaugh presents a
contemporary articulation of the philosophical, religious and
historically-grounded bases for a medical ethic which regards human
life as inviolable.
