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Texte intégral
Conference paper (in proceedings)

The Quest for a Perfect Death. Thoughts on Death and Dying in the Future

    2013
Published in:
  • Proceedings from the Societas Ethica Annual Conference 2011, The Quest for perfection. The Future of Medicine/Medicine of the future, August 25–28, 2011, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland. - 2013, p. 75-83
Good death
dying well
finitude of life
assisted suicide
palliative care
selfdetermination
ars moriendi
ars vivendi
Sterben
Ethik
English From the title of the conference I’d like to call my essay The quest for a perfect death. Thoughts on death and dying in the future. I’ve divided my text into three parts: In the first almost descriptive and hermeneutical part I give some insights into present social developments concerning death and dying in our high income societies. Inspired by the guiding questions in the program of the Conference I sketch two extreme future scenarios in the second part: the assisted suicide scenario and the “palliative care” scenario. As the labeling of the two outlines already reveals I presuppose value judgments, respectively assumptions, about a good and bad death without opening them up to discussion. In the third part I try to outline a desirable future scenario with regard to recent developments. That third part is normative since I draft some moral arguments concerning death and dying in the near future. The central idea of my vision of the future is centered on the assumption that an art of dying (ars moriendi) is identical to an art of living (ars vivendi). Because an over-planned life could end up in a state of self-blockade, we should envision the rediscovering of acceptance of what once was called “fate”.
Faculty
Faculté de théologie
Department
Département de Théologie morale et d'Ethique
Language
  • English
Classification
Religion, theology
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Publisher's version

License
License undefined
Identifiers
  • RERO DOC 323953
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/307266
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