Abstract
Palliative Care and the Ethics of Hospitality
Highlights
The contradiction presented in the binary opposition between euthanasia and palliative care confirms this
If the medically defined health and well-being become the new yardstick to measure happiness, what place does the reality of death have in life? Instead of patiently awaiting death— living is learning to die—do we attempt to take recourse to medical technology to decide the hour of death under the pretext of ending life in a dignified manner? Amidst these intriguing questions, in this paper we attempt to explore if palliative care helps us to invent an ethic of radical hospitality to the patients at the end of life
We find ourselves in what Jacques Ellul called the “Technological system.”[4]. Technology has become autonomous to produce its own values: efficient, cost-effective and useful
Summary
The contradiction presented in the binary opposition between euthanasia and palliative care confirms this. In this binary, the first adheres to the position that time prolonged for a terminal patient is useless, while the second holds that a patient waiting at the end of time, prolonged it may be, is meaningful. Instead of patiently awaiting death— living is learning to die—do we attempt to take recourse to medical technology to decide the hour of death under the pretext of ending life in a dignified manner? In this paper we attempt to explore if palliative care helps us to invent an ethic of radical hospitality to the patients at the end of life If the medically defined health and well-being become the new yardstick to measure happiness, what place does the reality of death have in life? Instead of patiently awaiting death— living is learning to die—do we attempt to take recourse to medical technology to decide the hour of death under the pretext of ending life in a dignified manner? Amidst these intriguing questions, in this paper we attempt to explore if palliative care helps us to invent an ethic of radical hospitality to the patients at the end of life
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