suffering

Elderly people, ‘completed lives’, and ‘assisted dying’

The back cover text of Els van Wijngaarden’s dissertation Ready to give up on life goes as follows. Older people who consider their lives to be ‘completed’, who suffer from the prospect of having to live on and therefore prefer a self-chosen death: it’s not a new issue. What is relatively new, though, is the current Dutch debate about whether we should legalize, facilitate and institutionalize assisted dying in such cases. Continue reading Elderly people, ‘completed lives’, and ‘assisted dying’

Empirically grounded ethics of care

Ethics of care – with its emphasis on care instead of fairness, relationships instead of rules, conflicting responsibilities instead of competing rights, contextual and narrative thinking instead of formal and abstract thinking – originates in the empirical research of Carol Gilligan and her co-workers. Continue reading Empirically grounded ethics of care