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Why do People Want to Die?: The Meaning of Life from the Perspective of Euthanasia
Södertörn University, School of Culture and Education, Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-8973-8591
2021 (English)In: Royal Society of Philosophy Supplements, ISSN 1358-2461, Vol. 90, p. 297-311Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

One way to examine the enigmatic meaningfulness of human life is to ask under which conditions persons ask in earnest for assistance to die, either through euthanasia or physician assisted suicide. The counterpart of intolerable suffering must consist in some form of, however minimal, flourishing that makes people want to go on with their lives, disregarding other reasons to reject assisted dying that have more to do with religious prohibitions. To learn more about why persons want to hasten death during the last days, weeks or months of their lives, what kinds of suffering they fear and what they hold to be the main reasons to carry on or not carry on living, the paper offers some examples from a book written by the physician Uwe-Christian Arnold. He has helped hundreds of persons in Germany to die with the aid of sedative drugs the last 25 years, despite the professional societies and codes in Germany that prohibit such actions. The paper discusses various examples from Arnold’s book and makes use of them to better understand not only why people sometimes want to die but what made their lives meaningful before they reached this final decision.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Vol. 90, p. 297-311
National Category
Other Health Sciences Nursing Philosophy
Research subject
Critical and Cultural Theory
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-47650DOI: 10.1017/S1358246121000333OAI: oai:DiVA.org:sh-47650DiVA, id: diva2:1615966
Part of project
The Role of Existential Philosophy in Health Care: The Cases of Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, The Foundation for Baltic and East European StudiesAvailable from: 2021-12-01 Created: 2021-12-01 Last updated: 2021-12-02Bibliographically approved

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Svenaeus, Fredrik

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CiteExportLink to record
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Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • harvard-anglia-ruskin-university
  • apa-old-doi-prefix.csl
  • sodertorns-hogskola-harvard.csl
  • sodertorns-hogskola-oxford.csl
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf