A Death By Design, The Controversy Of The Society

0 / 5. 0

A death by design, the controversy of the society

 

We can choose how to live, why not how are we going? A free society should allow death to be more deliberate and imaginative.

One day you get up early, you walk towards the city, and a large advertising poster attracts your attention. The image of the poster is mysterious but seems to represent a ceremony in a forest. You did not choose to come to this world, says the medium text, but you can choose how to get out. In the lower right part of the poster there is a company name, Designer Endings, and contact data. You call the number and confirm that what is offered is, in fact, the opportunity to die in the way you would like.

The description is fiction – currently there is no organization or company of designer euthanasia – but it is worth asking why it is not yet a fact. Many people no longer have the type of religious views according to which the time of death cannot be of our choice. There is a growing number of countries where suicide assisted by doctors and euthanasia is allowed in a medical context. But why think that the right to choose our final is only legitimized, if it is legitimized, for health reasons? Why don’t we have the right to finish our lives not only when we want but also in style?

The word ‘euthanasia’ comes from Greek and means ‘good death’. However, this idea of ​​a good death can easily be lost in contemporary debates about euthanasia, where the emphasis is typically in the rights of a person in very poor state of health. I will touch the family issues of medical ethics in what follows. But my broader objective is to free the discussion about the right to die of medical environments in which it is now more familiar. Doing so allows us to think about euthanasia – a good death – in less gloomy circumstances.

Never, strictly speaking, we get to experience death, since death is the end of experience. As the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, death is not an event in life. But there is no reason why death cannot be an event in the sense that a wedding is an event. You could decide the date and make extensive arrangements for the place and nature of the ceremony. You could make a guest list. You could plan that friends read farewells and verses. You could give their own speech or, for those who incline to karaoke, sing ‘My way’.

You may not have many family or friends – or do not want them there in any case. Undoubtedly a company like my fictitious ‘Designer Endings’ could provide staff for the ceremony you have in mind. This could cause controversy: without a doubt the visions of some people for their death ceremony would be bachanal and orgiastic. You can imagine the many cheesy ideas about how to go with a groan but with a burst. People could seek inspiration in pagan festivals such as Burning Man in Nevada. Others, without a doubt, would seek in cinema and literature the design of the stage for departure. The tastes, especially once they are allowed to flourish, would vary: we differ both in how we want to leave and how we want to live. Some want the intensity of chemotherapy, others the calm of a cup of tea. The very rich could try to hire singers such as Lana del Rey for their farewell ceremony. Others could opt for a death metal band.

We do not lack examples of imaginative funerals and creative posthumous plans. In 2005, the ashes of American writer Hunter S Thompson were fired from a cannon in an elaborate 3 million dollars event financed by actor Johnny Depp. Public members, such as his colleagues Bill Murray and Benicio del Toro, saw how Thompson’s remains were thrown into the air with the melody of ‘Spirit in the Sky’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Sir Clough Williams-Cellis, the creator of the Italian people Portmeirion in northern Wales, also made his ashes propelled in the air by a marine rocket in 1998. That is just an idea about what to do after you go. Consider all ways in which the death of a person has been marked by cultures around the world and throughout history. There is no reason to think that people’s euthanasia plans are not so inventive. Sky is not the limit.

Traditional arguments for assisted suicide and euthanasia appeal to compassion and individual freedom. Think, first, in the case of compassion. Sometimes ‘death is a goodness’, as the leader of the band turned into deputy Tommy Shelby says in the BBC Drama Peaky Blinders (2013-). Consider how we treat other animals. Why insist that humans must continue to suffer – after making it clear that they do not want to do it – when we would relieve a dog or a horse? So empathy and compassion could lead you to defend the right to assisted suicide and euthanasia. And could lead you to defend the right to choose the stage for the end of one. If a human being is helped to die, then there is no reason for the end to always be in a hospice or hospital although, for practical reasons, this is sometimes necessary.

The value of individual freedom also points to the right to end one’s life. The most central idea of ​​liberal individualism is that your life is yours and that you have the right to live it as it seems: you decide your work, your religion, if you want to have blue hair, etc. This individualistic ideal, perhaps more impressively articulated by the English social liberal John Stuart Mill in his essay on freedom (1859), has clearly had an enormous influence on many contemporary societies. And it is surely in line with the spirit of this convincing ideal that the right to lead your life as you want includes the right to finish it whenever you want. That is: you have the right to die.

Mill thought that individual freedom had to include the right to do what one wants with their own being – even damaging (either intentionally or not) through drinking, game and others. For Mill, that’s what it means to be a free person. So it is difficult to see how a liberal can oppose the right to take his own life, since such right is perhaps the maximum expression of the unique rights of one against oneself. This is true even if it is recognized that the claims of individual freedom always have to be balanced with other claims. Mill, for example, clarified his position to allow society to be justified to intervene in cases of self-harm when a person is in charge (such as children). And a plausible position on the right to die will allow carefully considered social interventions in the case of suicidal mental illnesses.

Mill argued that a free person had the right to do what he wanted as long as he did not harm other people. But surely, one could object, the ‘principle of damage’ must prohibit euthanasia, because death is damage. Doctors who oppose euthanasia, after all, often do precisely on the basis that the hypocratic oath requires not harming. In fact, some establish an ethical line between the permissibility of assisted suicide and that of euthanasia, for this reason. When it comes to assisted suicide, even if a person is helped to take their lives, the final action (for example, swallow pills) is yours. Assisted suicide still is, ultimately, suicide. And Mill’s ‘principle of damage’ allows you to harm yourself. But, in euthanasia, the action that takes someone’s life (for example, a lethal injection) is not performed by the patient but by him. Euthanasia is ultimately an act of murder, even if done according to the desires of the dying person.

It could be argued in response that, although euthanasia implies killing, death is not always damage. Maybe being alive in some situations is a destination worse than death, and death in such circumstances would be a benefit. Some might argue that allowing assisted suicide and, nevertheless, not allowing euthanasia is unfair to those who are physically unable to take their lives. Others could add that, in a free society, individuals should be left to the decision of what constitutes damage or a benefit with respect to their own lives. Finally – and this is perhaps the strongest replica of all – it could be argued that the norm that matters in liberal societies is not the damage but the consent of adults. If two or more adults respect the consent freely given by the other, then they should be able to do what they want.

Many of us already live in societies that allow adults who give their consent damage each. Consider, more worldly, the sale and consumption of those sugary drinks that we all know are harmful to health. It is your life, as we say, it depends on you. If, to adapt to Cole Porter, anything (consensually) goes, then it is difficult to see why individuals should not have the ability to form agreements with companies like Designer Endings. Governments should not, as the American libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick wrote in anarchy, state and utopia (1974), ‘prohibit capitalist acts among adults that consent’.

The idea of ​​design euthanasia flows naturally from what many consider a positive development in the modern world – the enormous value given to free will and voluntary. The ideal of individual freedom has already demolished many social and sexual taboos: why not death? And if the concern is that the legalization of design euthanasia would send everyone hastily to organize their death, then I think we should worry about the reason for this concern. Have we made life on earth so terrible that death is an alternative welcome? Do we have to keep all attractive escape routes not available? The result of anxiety about the idea of ​​designers’ endings should be to take a greater responsibility for the social world that we have created. It is undesirable, in a free society, to make the prisoner of existence.

But is the way to follow to turn death into a market? Many of us already live in obsessed cultures with businesses that threaten to turn life into a long sales speech. Capitalism, as Marxists have observed for a long time, grows in part colonizing aspects of life that once considered themselves too precious to be framed as a business opportunity. These business opportunities are often celebrated as new freedoms – such as when a religious rest day opens to go shopping – but it can be faced with the sad feeling that life has become something entirely commercial. Therefore, the idea that people design their death in coordination with Euthanasia bus. The perspective could produce not only moral outrage but also aesthetic horror, such as when proposals are heard to send advertising to the moon.

Karl Marx marveled at the creative agitation of capitalism: he was both an admirer and a critic. But if the idea of ​​converting euthanasia into a business is what bothers you most about the euthanasia of designers, then think of Designer Endings as a non -profit cooperative directed by a group of anarchists friends friends. The point, ultimately, is to free the discussion about the euthanasia of its standard medical context, and cultivate our sense of possibilities with respect to death. We cannot, for practical medical reasons, always remove euthanasia from doctors, but it is worth thinking about how euthanasia can be released from medicine in the same way as, for example, weddings have been released from religion. There is a wide and wild range of ways in which we might want to have the freedom to die. The chosen death does not always have to be desperate or the best of bad options.

Consider why a person could reasonably decide that now is the right time to die, and not for immediate medical reasons. Maybe someone looks at his life and does not want. He wants to die happily. Who can say that this cannot be a cunning evaluation made with a clear understanding of the fact that we must all go at some point? We can imagine other more controversial cases. What about a couple who wants to organize a liebestod or a ‘death for love’? Should they be allowed to design a romantic and erotic ending together, as is your desire? What about those who want to die young people? Or die fighting?

In the debates about the right to die, a distinction between negative rights and positive rights tends to establish. The so -called negative rights are simply rights to non -interference. The right to die, understood from this perspective as a negative right, is simply a right that requires others to remain out. Positive rights, on the contrary, are rights to active aid. Thus, the positive right of a child to education could be interpreted as a right to free schooling. You have to be careful, when politicians tell you that you have the right to something, what kind of right they have in mind. Think about the debate on health care in the United States. The right to medical care could mean a positive right to receive free medical care, or could simply mean the negative right to buy medical care without interference – in the same way you have the right to buy a Ferrari if you can pay it.

New freedoms and new skills often generate new inequalities. Many will think that, if there is a right to die, then it is a negative right: simply a protected space so that you decide to finish your life as you want without interference. The euthanasia of the designers, in such circumstances, could be legal – the question would then be, if you want it, can you afford it? Death, as the old refraine says, is the great leveling, and at least one of the ideas that this expression contains is the thought that none of us can control when or how we die. But design euthanasia would change this. The poor could continue dying in a painful and natural way, without being chosen, while the rich make great farewell parties. This is not necessarily an argument against allowing chosen endings: after all, it is also an argument for a fairer distribution of wealth. But it is undoubtedly one of the potential consequences of legally allowing people to choose and control the moment and the form of their death.

A free society should recognize one of the most basic freedoms of all: the freedom to die when you want. What I have argued is that liberal reasons to allow medical euthanasia are also reasons to allow death by choice more broadly, that is, not only for medical reasons, and not necessarily in a medical environment. We can think more widely about what type of endings we could choose if we are given social and political freedom to do so. There is space to be much more active and imaginative, and less passive and resigned, in relation to death. We have the ability to transform what might seem like a fantasy into a practical and living question: if you could choose, what would be a good death?

Imagine that a routine exploration reveals that it has incurable cancer. The medical consultant estimates that he has three months of life maximum. You remember Designer Endings poster. Six weeks later, and after rapid planning, you are partying in a forest. You have swallowed a drug cocktail that will end your life in a matter of hours. The only side effect is a mild euphoria that you would be experiencing anyway. Music clicks through your body for what will be the last time. You talk and hug your friends. You kiss your children. Sun light becomes golden through trees. You experience the feeling of unity with the universe that Sigmund Freud called Oceanic. You are glad, while tears fill your eyes, that this is how you say goodbye. 

Free A Death By Design, The Controversy Of The Society Essay Sample

Related samples

Zika virus: Transmission form Introduction The Zika virus belongs to the Flaviviradae family, was found for the first time in a monkey called Rhesus febrile and in...

Zika virus: cases and prevention Introduction The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed that Zika is a virus caused through the mosquito bite which is...

Zeus The King of Greek mythology Introduction Zeus is the Olympic God of heaven and thunder, the king of all other gods and men and, consequently, the main figure...

Zeus's punishment to Prometheus Introduction Prometheus, punished by Zeus Prometheus, punished by Zeus. Prometheus is a ‘cousin’ of Zeus. He is the son of the...

Comments

Leave feedback

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *