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Death Talk asks why, when our society has rejected euthanasia for over two thousand years, are we now considering legalizing it? Has euthanasia been promoted by deliberately confusing it with other ethically acceptable acts? What is the relation between pain relief treatments that could shorten life and euthanasia? How do journalistic values and media ethics affect the public's perception of euthanasia? What impact would the legalization of euthanasia have on concepts of human rights, human responsibilities, and human ethics? Can we imagine teaching young physicians how to put their patients to death? There are vast ethical, legal, and social differences between natural death and euthanasia. In Death Talk, Margaret Somerville argues that legalizing euthanasia would cause irreparable harm to society's value of respect for human life, which in secular societies is carried primarily by the institutions of law and medicine. Death has always been a central focus of the discussion that we engage in as individuals and as a society in searching for meaning in life. Moreover, we accommodate the inevitable reality of death into the living of our lives by discussing it, that is, through "death talk." Until the last twenty years this discussion occurred largely as part of the practice of organized religion. Today, in industrialized western societies, the euthanasia debate provides a context for such discussion and is part of the search for a new societal-cultural paradigm. Seeking to balance the "death talk" articulated in the euthanasia debate with "life talk," Somerville identifies the very serious harms for individuals and society that would result from accepting euthanasia. A sense of the unfolding euthanasia debate is captured through the inclusion of Somerville's responses to or commentaries on several other authors' contributions.
Euthanasia. --- Assisted suicide. --- Assisted death (Assisted suicide) --- Assisted dying (Assisted suicide) --- Death, Assisted (Assisted suicide) --- Doctor-assisted suicide --- Dying, Assisted (Assisted suicide) --- Patient-directed death --- Patient-directed dying --- Physician-assisted suicide --- Suicide --- Euthanasia --- Assisted death (Euthanasia) --- Assisted dying (Euthanasia) --- Death, Assisted (Euthanasia) --- Death, Mercy --- Dying, Assisted (Euthanasia) --- Killing, Mercy --- Mercy death --- Mercy killing --- Homicide --- Medical ethics --- Assisted suicide --- Right to die
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The right-to-die debate has gone on for centuries, playing out most recently as a spectacle of protest surrounding figures such as Terry Schiavo. In Deconstructing Dignity, Scott Cutler Shershow offers a powerful new way of thinking about it philosophically. Focusing on the concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life, he employs Derridean deconstruction to uncover self-contradictory and damaging assumptions that underlie both sides of the debate. Shershow examines texts from Cicero's De Officiis to Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to court decisions and religious declarations. Through them he reveals how arguments both supporting and denying the right to die undermine their own unconditional concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life with a hidden conditional logic, one often tied to practical economic concerns and the scarcity or unequal distribution of medical resources. He goes on to examine the exceptional case of self-sacrifice, closing with a vision of a society-one whose conditions we are far from meeting-in which the debate can finally be resolved. A sophisticated analysis of a heated topic, Deconstructing Dignity is also a masterful example of deconstructionist methods at work.
Right to die. --- Dignity. --- Human dignity --- Values --- Death, Right to --- Death with dignity --- Natural death (Right to die) --- Death --- Life and death, Power over --- Advance directives (Medical care) --- Do-not-resuscitate orders --- Euthanasia --- Suicide --- death, physician assisted suicide, dignity, right to die, terry schiavo, philosophy, sanctity of life, de officiis, cicero, groundwork metaphysics morals, kant, self sacrifice, terminal illness, aging, control, medicine, healthcare, cancer, coma, brain dead, sovereignty, plato, nonfiction, ethics, ronald dworkin, discourse, rhetoric.
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