scholarly journals Counteracting Throwaway Culture in Daily Clinical Practice

2020 ◽  
pp. 002436392093608
Author(s):  
Jeffrey W. Fuchs ◽  
Joseph R. Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Daily Clinical Practice ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Pope Francis ◽  
Translation Services

Since his election in March 2013, Pope Francis has brought significant attention to the concept of “throwaway culture.” This moral paradigm—which has been defined by Francis in various speeches and the encyclical Laudato si’—characterizes a present-day culture in which food, disposable objects, and even human beings themselves are “discarded as ‘unnecessary.’” As Catholic physicians, it is our duty to ensure that we are working to counteract throwaway culture in our daily clinical practice by embracing and exhibiting a culture of encounter. When throwaway culture is discussed within the context of medical practice, it is easy to think of major life and systemic issues including abortion, assistive reproductive technology, physician assisted suicide, and so on. However, rejection of throwaway culture has much broader implications for Catholic physicians. We are called to resist this perverse culture whenever we experience a situation that requires special attention to the respect of human dignity. In this article, we present two common situations encountered in clinical practice in which it is essential to counteract throwaway culture and embrace a culture of encounter: in working with patients who are isolation settings and those who require translation services. Various studies are cited which demonstrate a lack of respect for human dignity that can be seen when working with these patient populations, and recommendations are provided which illustrate how to embrace a culture of encounter in each scenario. The authors conclude that through adoption of a culture of encounter, Catholic physicians as a community can be role models for coworkers, trainees, and students, promoting a culture in which we validate human dignity and ensure the quality and just care of even our most vulnerable patients. Summary: Pope Francis had defined a “throwaway culture” in which “Human life, the person, are no longer seen as a primary value to be respected and safeguarded.” In this article we present two common situations encountered in clinical practice in which it is essential to counteract throwaway culture and embrace a culture of encounter: in working with patients who are isolation settings and those who require translation services. We conclude that, as Catholic physicians, it is our duty to ensure that we are working to counteract throwaway culture in our daily clinical practice by embracing and exhibiting a culture of encounter.

Dignity and the Case in Favor of Assisted Suicide

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralf Stoecker
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Ethical Perspective ◽  
Commit Suicide

Advocates of legalization of physician-assisted suicide usually argue that it is as matter of respect for human dignity that people get help in ending their lives (1) because the prohibition interferes with a fundamental liberty to conduct life according to one’s own preferences and (2) because sometimes suicide is an appropriate measure to avoid living an undignified life. In this chapter, it is argued that although the first argument is strong, the second argument is misguided. Hence, from an ethical perspective, society should not legally prohibit physician-assisted suicide. Yet, the person him- or herself should not commit suicide either. In particularly, the person should not regard such a suicide as a demand of his or her dignity.

scholarly journals Euthanasia and suicide: a medical and social discourse

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-112
Author(s):  
V. N. Ostapenko ◽  
I. V. Lantukh ◽  
A. P. Lantukh
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Adequate Quality ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Strong Explosion ◽  
The Right

Annotation. The problem of suicide and euthanasia has been particularly updated with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a strong explosion of suicide, because medicine was not ready for it, and the man was too weak in front of its pressure. The article considers the issue of euthanasia and suicide based on philosophical messages from the position of a doctor, which today goes beyond medicine and medical ethics and becomes one of the important aspects of society. Medicine has achieved success in the continuation of human life, but it is unable to ensure the quality of life of those who are forced to continue it. In these circumstances, the admission of suicide or euthanasia pursues the refusal of the subject to achieve an adequate quality of life; an end to suffering for those who find their lives unacceptable. The reasoning that banned suicide: no one should harm or destroy the basic virtues of human nature; deliberate suicide is an attempt to harm a person or destroy human life; no one should kill himself. The criterion may be that suicide should not take place when it is committed at the request of the subject when he devalues his own life. According to supporters of euthanasia, in the conditions of the progress of modern science, many come to the erroneous opinion that medicine can have total control over human life and death. But people have the right to determine the end of their lives while using the achievements of medicine, as well as the right to demand an extension of life with the help of the same medicine. They believe that in the era of a civilized state, the right to die with medical help should be as natural as the right to receive medical care. At the same time, the patient cannot demand death as a solution to the problem, even if all means of relieving him from suffering have been exhausted. In defense of his claims, he turns to the principle of beneficence. The task of medicine is to alleviate the suffering of the patient. But if physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia become part of health care, theoretical and practical medicine will be deprived of advances in palliative and supportive therapies. Lack of adequate palliative care is a medical, ethical, psychological, and social problem that needs to be addressed before resorting to such radical methods as legalizing euthanasia.

AMA Reconsiders Opposition to Physician-Assisted Suicide

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (10) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Ralph A. Capone ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Code Of Ethics ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Judicial Affairs ◽  
Aid In Dying ◽  
Recent Edition

In 1847, the American Medical Association established the first professional code of ethics for physicians in the United States. Expanded over the years to meet the needs of the medical profession, its most recent edition, adopted in 2016, includes a statement of AMA principles of medical ethics and eleven sets of opinions on various topics. After 169 years of opposition to physician involvement in directly causing patients’ deaths, the AMA is considering a change in its position—a position that has always averred the sacredness of every human life, asserting that the physician’s role is to cure when possible, care always, and ultimately err on the side of protecting and preserving human life. Following its annual meeting this past June, the AMA House of Delegates recommended that the Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs study aid-in-dying as an end-of- life option and report back at the annual meeting in 2017.

The Oxford Handbook of Ethics at the End of Life

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
End Of Life ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Clinical Decision Making ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Persons With Disabilities

This handbook explores the topic of death and dying from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries, with particular emphasis on the United States. In this period, technology has radically changed medical practices and the way we die as structures of power have been reshaped by the rights claims of African Americans, women, gays, students, and, most relevant here, patients. Respecting patients’ values has been recognized as the essential moral component of clinical decision making. Technology’s promise has been seen to have a dark side: it prolongs the dying process. For the first time in history, human beings have the ability to control the timing of death. With this ability comes a responsibility that is awesome and inescapable. How we understand and manage this responsibility is the theme of this volume. The book has six sections. Section I examines how the law has helped shape clinical practice, emphasizing the roles of rights and patient autonomy. Section II focuses on specific clinical issues, including death and dying in children, continuous sedation as a way to relieve suffering at the end of life, and the problem of prognostication in patients who are thought to be dying. Section III considers psychosocial and cultural issues. Section IV discusses death and dying among various vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and persons with disabilities. Section V deals with physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia (lethal injection). Finally, Section VI looks at hospice and palliative care as ways to address the psychosocial and ethical problems of death and dying.

scholarly journals El reconocimiento de la dignidad humana ante los avances de la genética

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gisela Giner Rommel
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Reality ◽  
The Face ◽  
One Step

La llamada era o siglo de la biotecnología, y con ella, una nueva realidad genética artificial, va abriéndose camino inexorablemente. La misma supone nuevas formas de dominio de la vida natural y humana sin precedentes. El hombre puede ya alterar nada menos que el curso de la evolución de las especies. Es fácil adivinar entonces por qué la genética traspasa su propio ámbito científico: se encuentra ineludiblemente cargada de dilemas éticos de toda índole, y unida al mundo filosófico y moral por su urgente necesidad de respuestas. La primera gran reflexión que la genética plantea a la ética es de tal calibre, que zozobra los cimientos de la propia tradición filosófica occidental y su concepción de la dignidad humana. Si el hallazgo del genoma humano lleva consigo una propensión de la visión de la realidad humana exclusivamente cientificista y biológica, procediendo a realizar una verdadera «sacralización de la ciencia» ¿Supone ello el derrumbe, la invalidación de la condición ética y libre del hombre? ¿Debemos renunciar a una visión del mismo como un ser digno y reducirlo a un animal más? ¿Debemos, en definitiva, dar carpetazo al humanismo, poniendo en tela de juicio la calidad moral del hombre? ¿Cerrar entonces los espacios de la ética o la filosofía, declarando que todos los aspectos que encierran la condición humana se consumen en una explicación científica? ¿Cómo afrontar otros posibles ataques a dimensiones de la dignidad humana como la libertad, la igualdad, la intimidad? ¿Precisan de disciplinas distintas, como la filosofía y el derecho, en busca de soluciones que exceden del campo científico y a los que éste no puede dar respuestas? Ante los nuevos poderes y responsabilidades que trae consigo el progreso científico, la explicación ética y la científica no deben sino reencontrarse. Apostar por el control ético del rumbo del proceso científico y tecnológico a través del paradigma de la dignidad humana se torna imprescindible. En definitiva, tratar de llevar a cabo el sueño del progreso universal, real, en el que la genética constituya un eslabón, un peldaño más en su consecución efectiva no puede darse sin intervención de la reflexión ética.This is definitely the age of biotechnology and with it comes a new artificial genetic reality. Biotechnology gives us never seen before control over plant, animal and human life. Mankind may now even be able to change the course of evolution in all living creatures, no less. That is why it is easy to understand that the science of genetics transcends its own domain; it is unavoidably confronted with ethical dilemmas of all kind and it is compelled to turn to philosophy and morality because of its need to find answers urgently. The first question raised by genetics is of such a magnitude that it overturns the basis of the Western philosophical tradition and its concept of human dignity. If the decoding of the human genome leads to an exclusively scientific and biological vision of human reality, to what you could call a «sacralisation of science», then what happens to free will, to man as an ethical being? Should we henceforth refuse to consider Man as a creature of Dignity and reduce him to just another animal? Should we, in short, abandon all humanistic idealism and question even the morality of human beings? Should we forget about ethics and philosophy and agree that all the aspects, implicit in the human condition, can find a scientific explanation? But how then should we deal with other attacks that may be made against such dimensions of human dignity as liberty, equality and privacy? Will there be no need for other disciplines, such as philosophy and law, to find solutions to problems which exceed the field of science and for which science has no answers to give?. In the face of all the new powers, potential and responsibilities brought about by scientific progress, ethics and science should not become adversaries. Ethical control over the course of scientific and technological progress based on the paradigm of human dignity is becoming essential. To summarise, it will be impossible to realise the dream of true progress, in which the science of genetics is but one step, without answering ethical questions.

Right to Life in the American Medical System

1996 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 1151-1161
Author(s):  
Denis Cavanagh
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Terminal Illness ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Hippocratic Oath ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Legalize Abortion ◽  
The Right ◽  
Supreme Court Rulings ◽  
The Impact

The article deals with the impact of the so called “culture of death” on medical practice in United States (US). In fact, in America, while the pretence is being kept up on the importance of the Hippocratic oath and the evangelic benevolence of the Good Samaritan, the strategy of the secular humanists is to try to make these irrelevant in the twin interests of social convenience and fiscal security. This campaign has been quietly waged in the media, in the courts, in public schools and universities. According this strategy, the threats to human life are, namely, two: abortion and euthanasia. On the first issue, in US the situation is discouraging because the US Supreme Court rulings Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in 1973, that have made abortion a woman’s choice for any reason in the first and second trimester and available with medical consultation for almost any reason in the third trimester of pregnancy. Regarding the euthanasia, the campaign strategy is following the same pattern as that used to legalize abortion: the Euthanasia Lobby is claiming that millions of people in America are suffering unbearable pain because of terminal illness and so ought to have the right to end their pain with physician- assisted suicide. On the contrary, the author assert that there is no right to destroy any human life or participate in its destruction and there is no good moral reason for abortion or euthanasia, including the physician-assisted suicide. Finally, the author think that it is vital that Catholic activists, allied with Christian church-going brethren, should resist with all the power they can muster to the “culture of death”.

Autonomy and the Value of Life as Elements of Human Dignity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Muders
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
Combined Approach ◽  
Special Value ◽  
Strict Priority ◽  
Normative Role

Within the debate on assisted suicide and euthanasia, the arguments from autonomy and from the special value of life are often linked to human dignity in order to make the normative principles they defend more resistant against competing considerations. However, the resulting conceptions of dignity are usually presented as competing with each other; that is, either one spells out human dignity in terms of autonomy, or one explicates it in terms of the value of human life. As an alternative, this chapter offers a “combined approach”: It seeks to explicate dignity in terms of specific interpretations of both autonomy and life’s value in a way that ascribes a unique normative role to both. This can help explain the complex attitudes toward various cases that are discussed in the debate on assisted suicide and euthanasia. The upshot will be that the arguments from autonomy and from the value of life can be recognized as valid without having strict priority with respect to one another. Still, each one might be employed for turning the tide in favour or against assisted suicide and euthanasia within specific cases.

Death with Dignity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Kaczor ◽  
Robert P. George
Keyword(s):  
End Of Life ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Death With Dignity

Advocates of euthanasia use the phrase “death with dignity” to suggest that intentional killing at the end of life secures and protects human dignity. Critics of euthanasia insist that intentional killing violates human dignity. To adjudicate between these views, four senses of the term are distinguished: dignity as flourishing, dignity as attributed, dignity as intrinsic worth, and dignity as autonomy. Dignity as attributed concerns the worth human beings confer on others or on themselves. Dignity as intrinsic worth is understood as the value human beings have simply because they are human beings. Dignity as flourishing is understood as the excellence of a human life consistent with, and expressive of, intrinsic dignity. Dignity as autonomy is defined as showing respect for other people by endorsing or at least not interfering with their autonomous choices. In this chapter, it is argued that none of these senses of dignity justify intentional killing.

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