death rites: assisted suicide and existential rights

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
melanie l. williams

modern life presents us with new, as well as perennial perspectives upon death. this essay explores how we might articulate an apposite conception of rights in relation to death, in a time of a declared respect for individual autonomy and waning adherence to religious belief, and considers these questions with particular reference to the challenges to law and state made by dianne pretty in the months leading up to her death. to such an applicant, with a ‘lay’ experience and apprehension of the role and meaning of law, the prognostications of the court regarding the status of the claim must have seemed surreal indeed – especially where disputable, patchwork value-systems are called upon to lend authority to the decision. the essay concludes that such peregrinations have implications not only for the individual claimant, but for the credibility of law and associated ethics and that the writings of existential philosophers on the subject of death can assist in modelling a more consistent, secular notion of ethics in relation to assisted suicide.

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2(14)) ◽  
pp. 99-102
Author(s):  
Halyna Volodymyrivna Zadorozhnia ◽  
Yurij Anatoliyovych Zadorozhnyi ◽  
Ruslana Оlexandrivna Kotsiuba

Urgency of the research. Study of the problem of implementation of monetary obligations in the field of banking relations is determined by violation of the principle of equity in relation to individuals. Target setting. The state has actually removed from the regulation of credit relations in the field of ensuring the fulfilment of monetary obligations that arise between the individual and the bank. Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. Many modern scientists (I. Bezklubyi, T. Bodnar, A. Dzera, A. Kolodiy, V. Lutz, I. Opadchiy and others) studied the institution of the fulfilment of monetary obligations. Uninvestigated parts of general matters defining. Behind attention of scientists was left the issue of protecting the rights of individuals who have monetary obligations to the bank and do not have the status of the subject of entrepreneurial activity. The research objective. The purpose of the article is to develop legislative proposals taking into account international and foreign practice in the aspect of protecting the rights of individuals who have monetary obligations to the bank. The statement of basic materials. Specifics of legal regulation of contractual relations is determined between banks and recipients of funds in the aspect of liability for late fulfilment of monetary obligations, propositions to the legislation were substantiated. Conclusions. It is offered to solve the problem of violation of the principle of fairness in the aspect of fulfilment of monetary obligations in the field of banking relations through legislative changes.


Author(s):  
Frederick F. Schmitt

Social epistemology is the conceptual and normative study of the relevance to knowledge of social relations, interests and institutions. It is thus to be distinguished from the sociology of knowledge, which is an empirical study of the contingent social conditions or causes of what is commonly taken to be knowledge. Social epistemology revolves around the question of whether knowledge is to be understood individualistically or socially. Epistemology has traditionally ascribed a secondary status to beliefs indebted to social relations – to testimony, expert authority, consensus, common sense and received wisdom. Such beliefs could attain the status of knowledge, if at all, only by being based on first-hand knowledge – that is, knowledge justified by the experience or reason of the individual knower. Since the work of the common sense Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid in the mid-eighteenth century, epistemologists have from time to time taken seriously the idea that beliefs indebted to social relations have a primary and not merely secondary epistemic status. The bulk of work in social epistemology has, however, been done since Thomas Kuhn depicted scientific revolutions as involving social changes in science. Work on the subject since 1980 has been inspired by the ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of science, by feminist epistemology and by the naturalistic epistemology of W.V. Quine. These influences have inspired epistemologists to rethink the role of social relations – especially testimony – in knowledge. The subject that has emerged may be divided into three branches: the place of social factors in the knowledge possessed by individuals; the organization of individuals’ cognitive labour; and the nature of collective knowledge, including common sense, consensus and common, group, communal and impersonal knowledge.


1997 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 71-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
GS Wlody

The passage of the Oregon Death With Dignity Act on November 8, 1994, heralded a wake-up call for healthcare professionals. Oregon, the first state to systematically "ration care" was thought to be a fertile ground for testing new and, some say, radical concepts in healthcare and government. Although the act was not implemented because it was tied up in legal action until February 1997, the fact that more than 50% of the voters in Oregon voted for it mandates that healthcare providers listen to their patients. Patients want more control of their pain, the way they die, and the resources spent on their care in the final days of their lives. Thoughts of future suffering engender great fear on the part of healthcare consumers. Concern exists that physician-assisted suicide in the ICU will affect not only physicians but also nurses, pharmacists, respiratory therapists, and other clinicians as terminally ill patients make requests for assisted suicide while in the acute and critical care setting of the hospital. Critical care nurses must examine their value systems, review the Code for Nurses, and make their own decisions about participation in deliberately ending lives of patients. With the impending Supreme Court decision due in July 1997, the court may leave these issues to the individual states, opening the door for assisted suicide to occur throughout the United States. Therefore, the possibility will remain that critical care nurses may be put in positions in which physicians are providing assistance to patients who wish to commit suicide and are requesting nurses' assistance to do so.


1999 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
MIRIAM MÜLLER

Since Vinogradoff described merchet payments as ‘the most odious’ of the numerous manorial exactions for which villein tenants were liable, the fine for marriage, classically defined as a levy due from the villein upon the marriage of his daughter, has received a good deal of attention from historians. Although the issue of marriage licences has accordingly been tackled from various perspectives, in recent years the subject at the heart of a number of contributions to the topic was the question of seigneurial control. In tackling this matter, one has to ask what kind of control a manorial lord could or would want to exercise over the matters of matrimony of his social inferiors.An important contribution to the debate was provided in 1979 by Eleanor Searle. A key element in her argument was that marriage licences essentially constituted a tax on the chattels taken as dowry by the bride into her marriage, and as such were not universally enforced. Further, in her view merchet did not so much constitute a test of the status of the individual as one of tenure. At the same time she argued that merchets could be used by the lord to vet prospective marriage partners and thus control the transfers of tenant property lest the latter should slip into freehold tenure. By imposing financial disincentives, merchets, it was argued, also encouraged endogenous marriages. Richard Smith, while arguing that the rates of licences to marry were unlikely to reflect a proportional tax on dowries, nevertheless showed that merchets were not universally exacted and tended to fall predominantly upon richer tenants. Thus he took issue with R. Faith, who in a rejoinder to Searle's contribution suggested that the marriage licence constituted a tax on the marriage itself and was as such universally exacted.In order to consider these problems and test some of the propositions that have been made, this study aims to examine the practice of seigneurial exaction and hence the function of marriage licences, on the one hand, and the relevance and nature of tenant evasion of merchet payments on the other, on one manor from 1330 to 1377. Changes in seigneurial policy towards merchet payments will be analysed and placed in the wider context of the demographic and socio-economic changes affecting manorial life in this period. Within this framework three intertwined aspects of the licence to marry will be examined. First, focusing on the question of which tenants were liable to pay merchets and what constituted the criteria for this liability, the theory and practice of merchet exaction will be considered. Secondly the reasons for the lord's interest in the marriages of his tenants in conjunction with the routes open to him to influence villein marriages to his advantage will be explored. Thirdly the extent and consequences of tenant evasion of merchet fines will be assessed, whilst the clash between lord and tenant over marriage fines will be viewed in the wider context of lord–tenant friction, especially in the post-Black Death period. Central to this discussion, the role and importance of women in this particular act of non-compliance will be examined.


Author(s):  
Daria Bieńkowska

The issue of decisions made at the end of life relating to the so-called “Right to death”, “death in dignity”, which in the literature on the subject is referred to as end-of-life decision making in the legal and medical space, arouses the interest of lawyers and doctors, and due to the specific gravity of the topic, it is also the subject of public debate. This article presents the issue of end-of-life decision making in health care in the light of the standards of the Council of Europe. The main purpose of the problem outlined in this way will be to analyze the legal admissibility of decisions concerning the end of life at the request of the interested person in the legal and human perspective. The summary indicates that despite the lack of a consensus in contemporary Europe as to the understanding of human rights, and hence the admissibility of active euthanasia and assisted suicide, the situation may change with the increasing emphasis on individual autonomy in medical law.


Author(s):  
Theofanis Tassis ◽  

During the last decade Castoriadis’ questioning has become a reference point in contemporary social theory. In this article I examine some of the key notions in Castoriadis’ work and explore how he strives to develop a theory on the irreducible creativity in the radical imagination of the individual and in the institution of the social-historical sphere. Firstly, I briefly discuss his conception of modem capitalism as bureaucratic capitalism, a view initiated by his criticism of the USSR regime. The following break up with Marxist theory and his psychoanalytic interests empowered him to criticize Lacan and read Freud in an imaginative, though unorthodox, fashion. I argue that this criticai enterprise assisted greatly Castoriadis in his conception of the radical imaginary and in his unveiling of the political aspects of psychoanalysis. On the issue of the radical imaginary and its methodological repercussions, I’m focusing mainly on the radical imagination o f the subject and its importance in the transition from the “psychic” to the “subject”. Taking up the notion of “Being” as a starting point, I examine the notion of autonomy, seeking its roots in the ancient Greek world. By looking at notions such as “praxis”, “doing”, “project” and “elucidation”, I show how Castoriadis sought to redefine revolution as a means for social and individual autonomy. Finally I attempt to clarify the meaning of “democracy” and “democratic society” in the context of the social imaginary and its creations, the social imaginary significations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-85
Author(s):  
Dejan Djordjevic ◽  
Tijana Dabovic ◽  
Bojana Poledica

Over the last decade of the 20th century the history of the spatial planning was accredited as a subject at schools worldwide, gained its special periodical and accompanying professional organization. When it comes to the Belgrade school of planning, the subject called spatial planning was introduced by the accreditation of the new curriculum at the Department of Spatial Planning of the Faculty of Geography in Belgrade in 2007. Nowadays at the international level and in our country, a serious theoretical discussion on the reach, direction and practical purpose of this subject is underway, and the questions which are posed thereby are sometimes provocative, controversial and far-reaching. These are the most common questions: What is the definition of the planning history? Why teach it? Who can teach it? How to teach it? What is the suitable content of the curriculum of the planning history? Although, this paper aims at the consolidation of the topics and providing the logical connections between the answers to the above questions, it, at same time, reflects the diversity of the individual approaches to planning history, which are the result of the peculiar circumstances in which spatial planning is taught in some countries, with different traditions of planning and different value systems. Nevertheless, the aim of the paper is the definition of something which can be called "intellectual nucleus" of a great topic called history (of spatial and urban) planning and which should be based on the logical theoretical and methodological premises, and, at the same time, should be comprehensible to students, through the flexible curriculum, and it should be applicable in practice.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68
Author(s):  
Adam Chmielewski

The aim of this paper is to submit the doctrine of methodological individualism to a reconsideration from the point of view of the arguments formulated by contemporary communitarian philosophy. I propose to approach the opposition between the individual and the community, constitutive for the liberal– communitarian debate, by means of two concepts, i.e. those of recognition and order. I argue that for the individualists a social order emerges through a process of mutual recognition of the pre-existing individuals and their interests, while the communitarians claim that the task of individuals is to recognize values and norms of a pre-existing social order which is to become their own. The difference between them thus resides primarily in the ontological distinction between the respective objects of these two divergent concepts of recognition. The argument is developed through an analysis of David Hume’s concept of the individual. In opposition to some communitarian claims, I maintain that his approach may be interpreted as an antecedent of the communitarian views on the subject. I also outline a view of moral rules as neither universal, absolutist, nor purely emotivist in character, but as social constructions endowed with the status of “contingent permanence.”


Author(s):  
Monika Coghen

The starting point for Polish Romantics was, as for many of their Western counterparts, the focus on the self. But personal existence was represented as a worthy sacrifice for the sake of the national cause. In the aftermath of the failure of the 1830 Uprising, pessimism, melancholy, and metaphysical and political rebellion were countered by messianic ideas of the émigré poets. Idealism, led to religious belief, whether Catholicism or less orthodox systems. The confrontation of the individual with history was therefore enacted on the metaphysical plane, and presented mainly in the dramatic form, which became the domineering genre in the post-1831 period. Through the deep belief in the ethical and social roles of poetry Polish Romantics played a crucial part in preserving the national identity of their readers, truly earning the status ofwieszcz, the poet-prophet.


Author(s):  
Irina O. Shchedrina

The subject of analysis in the article is the cognitive characteristics of autobiographical memory. The idea is that, being an indisputable cognitive phenomenon, autobiographical memory, nevertheless, has a specific internal structure, which implies the obligatory immersion of the cognitive characteristics of autobiographical memory in specific cultural and historical contexts. And therefore, the author believes, these characteristics themselves acquire additional cognitive potential. Thus, autobiographical memory's cognitive nature allows us to take a special look at the memories and their presentation, expressed in the texts of historical materials. The article talks about the interpenetrating relationship of cognitive and historical in autobiographical memories and their embodiment in autobiographical narratives. Individual memories are a fusion of autobiographical, that is, subjective, and attempts at narrativization, which gives memories the status of a historical event. We can say that in the “texts of memory”, the cognitive is revealed from the historical perspective; and, at the same time, the historical as the concentration of autobiographical memory acquires the character of a cognitive phenomenon. And sometimes, these autobiographical texts are the only material that makes it possible to learn something about the peculiarities of individual life in a particular historical era (including the cognitive aspects of the individual life of that time).


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document