Death and Dying

In her recent article “The Ontology of Social Groups”, Thomasson (Synthese 196:4829–4845, 2019) argues that social groups can be characterized in terms of the norms that surround them. We show that according to Thomasson’s normativity-based criterion, the dead constitute a social group, since there are widespread and well-defined social norms as to how to treat the dead, such as the norm expressed in the title (“Speak no ill of the dead”). We argue that the example of the dead must not (...) be interpreted as a counterexample to this criterion, and that, rather, there are good reasons to think of the dead as a genuine social group. Furthermore, the dead as a social group exist, regardless of whether or not the dead (i.e. the members of this social group) exist as persons. This view is clearly incompatible with the idea that social groups can be explained by citing features of their members, which is why we take the case of the dead to pose a challenge for the thesis of individualism. We consider the ontological implications of this example and suggest that social groups ought to be seen as reifications of social norms. Another implication of taking the dead to be a social group is that the presence of external norms is sufficient for the existence of a social group, and therefore internal norms are not necessary. We defend this implication against some potential theoretical and moral problems. (shrink)

This is a reference work surveying the literature (as of the publication date) on treatment of the remains of human beings. I discuss leading views on the possibility of posthumous harm, posthumous rights, and rights of the living in the bodies of the dead.

In this paper, I explore the connection between certain metaphysical views of time and emotional attitudes concerning one’s own death and mortality. I argue that one metaphysical view of time, B-theory, offers consolation to mortals in the face of death relative to commonsense and another metaphysical view of time, A-theory. Consolation comes from three places. First, B-theory implies that time does not really pass, and as a result one has less reason to worry about one’s time growing short. Second, B-theory (...) entails that there is a real sense in which one’s death does not result in one’s annihilation, and this fact can temper feelings of existential distress. Third, B-theory has the consequence that the benefits one has lost have concrete existence, and this fact can mitigate the emotional significance of the losses of death. (shrink)

This existential phenomenological exploration concerns how writing is not the mere tool for communication and commemoration, or the supplementary image of a memory, but is closely connected to the phenomenon of the grave. The exploration aims to show a transgenerational mode of human existence and moral life, by considering how the becoming of a historical, which is to say a transgenerational subject through the features that writing and the grave together lets us capture, is also importantly bound to the becoming (...) of a moral subject, or an “I,” in relation to the passed away other. (shrink)

I offer an overview of the book, Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life, summarizing the main issues, arguments, and conclusions. I also present some new ideas and further developments of the material in the book. A big part of this essay is drawing connections between the specific issues treated in the book and those in other areas of philosophy, and in particular, the theory of agency and moral responsibility. I highlight some striking similarities of both structure and content between the (...) death/meaning in life literature and the free will/moral responsibility literature. (shrink)

Lockdowns in Australia have been strict and lengthy. Policy-makers appear to have given the preservation of quantity of lives strong priority over the preservation of quality of lives. But thought-experiments in population ethics suggest that this is not always the right priority. In this paper, I'll discuss both negative impacts on quantity of lives caused by the lockdowns themselves, including an increase in domestic violence, and negative impacts on quality of lives caused by lockdowns, in order to raise the question (...) of whether we each had reason to choose quantity over quality in our own lives in a way that would justify the lockdowns we had. (shrink)

This article discusses the remarkable conversation between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno regarding the relationship between utopia and death. It unpacks the antinomy of death and analyzes the m...

What can Death mean today in times in which the technological conception of life conjures up new visions of overcoming death? We address this question here by critically examining the Heideggerian...

From what standpoint have the canonical philosophies of history looked at death? And, more particularly, at life and death, since these two “events” are intimately linked? According to what idea, n...

Against a certain contemporary style of thinking that wishes to go beyond finitude entirely, I propose a finite praxis modeled after Jean-Luc Nancy’s finite thinking. I argue that the desire to imm...

What conceptual merit does the undying – the one that does not die properly – hold? What form of life is left for those who do not achieve death, those that death (the right, the necessity – to die...

As much as humanity has always been driven by the idea of conquering death, it is also haunted by the impossibility of dying completely; that is, by a possible persistence and recurrence of somethi...

Philosophy prides itself on beginning with Socrates’s death: scandalous with regard to Socrates’s virtue and wisdom, as well as his age, this death is transfigured into an entry into truth. One can...

Around people who were close to him, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe would sometimes cry out with anger: “Death is a scandal! It is intolerable!” When he died almost fourteen years ago, prematurely and af...

Fetal reduction is the practice of reducing the number of fetuses in a multiple pregnancy, such as quadruplets, to a twin or singleton pregnancy. Use of assisted reproductive technologies increases the likelihood of multiple pregnancies, and many fetal reductions are done after in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer, either because of social or health-related reasons. In this paper, I apply Joe Horton’s all or nothing problem to the ethics of fetal reduction in the case of a twin pregnancy. I argue (...) that in the case of a twin pregnancy, there are two intuitively plausible claims: abortion is morally permissible, and it is morally wrong to abort just one of the fetuses. But since we should choose morally permissible acts rather than impermissible ones, the two claims lead to another highly implausible claim: the woman ought to abort both fetuses rather than only one. Yet, this does not seem right. A plausible moral theory cannot advocate such a pro-death view. Or can it? I suggest ways to solve this problem and draw implications for each solution. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Geleneksel tıptaki büyük ilerlemelere rağmen tamamlayıcı ve alternatif tıp (TAT) uygulamaları hala yaygın olarak kullanılmaktadır. TAT, geleneksel tıbbın bir parçası olarak görülmeyen, çeşitli tıbbi ve sağlık sistemlerini ve ürünlerini içeren uygulamalardır. Bu derlemede kalp hastalıklarında sıklıkla kullanılan TAT yöntemleri, hasta ve hastalık üzerine etkilerinden bahsedilecektir.

Disorders of Consciousness (DoCs) raise difficult and complex questions about the value of life for persons with impaired consciousness, the rights of persons unable to make medical decisions, and our social, medical, and ethical obligations to patients whose personhood has frequently been challenged and neglected. Recent neuroscientific discoveries have led to enhanced understanding of the heterogeneity of these disorders, and focused renewed attention on the medical and ethical problem of misdiagnosis. -/- This book examines the entanglement of epistemic and ethical (...) uncertainty in DoCs and other medical contexts, and how they interact to create both epistemic and ethical risks. Philosopher and bioethicist L. Syd M Johnson pulls together multiple threads in this work: the ontological mysteries of consciousness, medical uncertainty about unconsciousness, ableist bias, withdrawal of treatment in neurointensive care, and the rarely questioned view that consciousness is essential to personhood and moral status. Johnson challenges longstanding bioethical dogmas about DoC patients, and argues for an ethics of uncertainty for contexts where there is a need for decisive action in the presence of unavoidable uncertainty. The ethics of uncertainty refocuses ethical inquiry concerning persons with DoCs, placing less emphasis on their contested personhood, and more on inductive risk and uncertainty, on respect for autonomy, and especially on epistemic justice. With applications to various decisional contexts where uncertainty and ethical risk interact, this ethical approach enables surrogate decision makers facing fraught and risky choices to fulfill their obligations as moral and epistemic agents. (shrink)

The academic medical center provides a dramatic space for liturgies through various enactments of death and dying. I argue that anatomical dissection and organ transplantation are ersatz liturgies of death that parody the Eucharist – ‘this is my body given for you’ – and perpetuate a biopolitics of the sovereign subject. To this end, I employ two differing yet complementary conceptions of liturgy: James Smith’s concept of cultural liturgies and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of Christian liturgy as the paradigm for modernity’s (...) conception of effectiveness. Cultural liturgies are pedagogical rituals of ultimate concern, whether secular or religious. For Agamben, Christian liturgy provides the paradigm for modern effectiveness and duty ethics, such that actions are effective regardless of the virtue of the actor. I apply these dual notions to show how anatomical dissection and organ transplantation are medical ersatz liturgies of death. Anatomical dissection is a pedagogical liturgy because it forms the vision of medical trainees to see the body with a medical gaze. Organ donation is a biopolitical liturgy that requires the death of another, made wholly effective by the physician‐priest. Finally, I end with a brief reflection on how the liturgy of the Church re‐narrates death into a life everlasting. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose the concept of the “animated persona,” a soundless voice that says, “I am here” and appears on the surface of someone or something. This concept can bring clarity to the experience of perceiving a kind of personhood on a corpse, a wooden mask, or even a tree. In the first half of this paper, I will examine some Japanese literature and a work of Viktor Frankl’s that discuss these phenomena. In the second half, I will (...) analyze the concept of animated persona from five perspectives: (1) a compelling power, (2) surface-ness, (3) religious experience, (4) universality, and (5) the meaning of “I.” Lastly, I will discuss the relationship among the three layers of biological object, animated persona, and self-conscious being. My aim is to shed new light on the meaning of the encounter between the living and the dead. (shrink)

Some people willingly risk or give up their lives for something they deeply believe in, for instance standing up to a dictator. A good example of this are members of the White Rose student resistance group, who rebelled against the Nazi regime and paid for it with their lives. I argue that when the cause is good, such risky activities (and even deaths themselves) can contribute to meaning in life in its different forms – meaning-as-mattering, meaning-as-purpose, and meaning-as-intelligibility. Such cases (...) highlight the importance of integrity, or living up to one’s commitments, in meaningful living, or dying, as it may be, as well as the risk involved in commitment, since if you die for a bad cause, you have only harmed yourself. However, if leading a more rather than less meaningful life benefits rather than harms you, there are possible scenarios in which you yourself are better off dying for a good cause than living a longer moderately happy life. This presents a version of a well-known puzzle: what, then, makes dying for a cause a self-sacrifice, as it usually seems to be? I sketch some possible answers, and try to make sense of relevant work in empirical psychology. (shrink)

Cuando la zarigüeya se siente amenazada, se paraliza, con los ojos y la boca abiertos en una mueca petrificada, la temperatura corporal y respiración reducidas al mínimo, la lengua desplegando un tono azulado y sus glándulas anales oliendo a podrido. Pese a este disfraz de cadáver putrefacto, sigue pendiente de su entorno, lista para volver a la acción. Como el gato en la famosa paradoja de Schrödinger, la zarigüeya está viva y muerta al mismo tiempo. -/- En este libro exploraremos (...) lo que la zarigüeya nos puede enseñar acerca del concepto de la muerte de otras especies. Asimismo, aprenderemos cómo los animales viven la mortalidad de la mano de hormigas que asisten a su propio entierro, chimpancés que limpian los dientes a cadáveres, perros que se meriendan a sus dueños, cuervos que evitan los sitios donde vieron un muerto, elefantes obsesionados con recolectar marfil y ballenas que cargan con sus fallecidos durante semanas. -/- A lo largo de la historia, el ser humano se ha creído el único animal con una consciencia de la mortalidad. En este libro, que mezcla teoría filosófica con los últimos descubrimientos en etología y psicología comparada, veremos que esta creencia no obedece más que a nuestros sesgos antropocéntricos y que, también en nuestra relación con la muerte, somos tan solo un animal más. (shrink)

In paleontology, the discovery of funeral rites is an important factor in determining the degree of social awakening of a hominid. This awareness of death is an engine of social cohesion (uniting to resist disasters and enemies) and action (to do something to leave a trace). It is an important element of metaphysical reflection. This is also what gives the symbolic power to acts such as homicide and suicide. According to Plato, death is the separation of soul and body. Finally (...) freed from his fleshly prison, the immortal soul can freely reach the sky of Ideas, Eternity, the domain of philosophers. (cf. Phaedo). (shrink)

The Buddhist Nikāya Suttas frequently mention the concept of fear (bhaya) and related synonyms. This concept does not receive much scholarly attention by subsequent Buddhist philosophers. Recent scholars identify a ‘paradox of fear’ in several traditions of classical Indian Buddhism (Brekke 1999, Finnigan 2019, Giustarini 2012). Each scholar points out, in their respective textual contexts, that fear is evaluated in two ways; one positive and the other negative. Brekke calls this the “double role” of fear (1999: 443). Each also identify (...) fear as purposely elicited to motivate acts aimed at achieving fearlessness, where freedom from fear is characteristic of nibbāna. They all find this puzzling. Finnigan asks: “Why would one purposefully incite fear if one’s goal is its elimination?” (2019: 221). Giustarini says that fear has a “contradictory nature” (2012: 513); Brekke calls it “the paradox of fear” (1999: 442). This article introduces the ‘paradox of fear’ as it appears in the Bodhicaryāvatāra of Śāntideva and the Nikāya suttas. It then critically examines Brekke and Giustarini’s proposed solutions. It argues that they get some things right in ways that are both supported by the Nikāyas and relevant to Śāntideva but that they leave some important questions unanswered. The article contends that these questions are best answered if fear is analysed as appropriate when its objects are related to karma and rebirth. (shrink)

The relevance of double effect for end-of-life decision-making has been challenged recently by a number of scholars. The principal reason is that opioids such as morphine do not usually hasten death when administered to relieve pain at the end of life; therefore, no secondary “double” effect is brought about. In my article, I argue against this view, showing how the doctrine of double effect is relevant to the administration of opioids at the end of life. I contend that the prevailing (...) view suffers from a misunderstanding of the nature of double effect, which includes application to risking a grave harm. (shrink)

The deaths of those on whom our practical identities rely generate a sense of disorientation or alienation from the world seemingly at odds with life being meaningful. In the terms put forth in Cheshire Calhoun’s recent account of meaningfulness in life, because their existence serves as a metaphysical presupposition of our practical identities, their deaths threaten to upend a background frame of agency against which much of our choice and deliberation takes place. Here I argue for a dual role for (...) grief in addressing this threat to life’s meaningfulness. Inasmuch as grief’s object is the loss of our relationship with the deceased as it was prior to their death, grief serves to alert us to the threat to our practical identities that their deaths pose to us and motivates us to defuse this threat by revising our practical identities to reflect the modification in our relationship necessitated by their deaths. Simultaneously, the emotional complexity and richness of grief episodes provides an abundance of normative evidence regarding our relationship with the deceased and our practical identities, evidence that can enable us to re-establish our practical identities and thereby recover a sense of our lives as meaningful. (shrink)

Individuals suffering from anorexia-nervosa experience dysmorphic perceptions of their body and desire to act on these perceptions by refusing food. In some cases, anorexics want to refuse food to the point of death. In this paper, I answer this question: if an anorexic, A, wants to refuse food when the food would either be life-saving or prevent serious bodily harm, can A’s refusal be valid? I argue that there is compelling reason to think that anorexics can validly refuse food, even (...) in these extreme circumstances. (shrink)

One popular rival to Epicureanism is deprivationism, which maintains that a person’s death at a given time is bad for her to the extent that, and because, it prevents her from having a longer life that would have been, on the whole, good. Deprivationism has the surprising implication that we can lessen how bad a person’s death is for them by changing the life they would have had if they lived longer (for example, by convincing a person’s favorite author to (...) stop writing additional books). Some have found this possibility to be “self-defeating”; Egerstrom defends deprivationism against this objection. (shrink)

From Editors' Introduction: "With our invitation to turn over (re-turn) hospitality in these times Marietta Radomska’s response combines her own research within the emerging field of Queer Death Studies6 with a detailed reading of the coronavirus disease pandemic. In her essay, “Viral queerings, amplified vulnerabilities”, Marietta seeks to subvert normative and simplified understandings of our present. Following the thread that the pandemic affects some bodies more than others, Marietta highlights how “the exploitation and degradation of nature mixed with intensifying socio-economic (...) inequalities directly contribute to the emergence of zoonoses”. Untangling the myth of the containable body and human-exceptionalism, Marietta challenges which lives are considered grievable drawing our attention to “more-than-human necropolitics”. In queering the pandemic she asks us to “reimagine the ways we relate to human and nonhuman others, perhaps in a more hospitable register”." Edited by Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela. (shrink)

In a recent JME paper, Matthew John Minehan applies John Rawls’ veil of ignorance against Judith Thomson’s famous violinist argument for the permissibility of abortion. Minehan asks readers to ‘imagine that one morning you are back to back in bed with another person. One of you is conscious and the other unconscious. You do not know which one you are’. Since from this position of ignorance, you have an equal chance of being the unconscious violinist and the conscious person attached (...) to him, it would be rational to oppose a right for detachment. Likewise, behind the veil of ignorance, it is rational to oppose abortions since you could be the fetus, Minehan claims. This paper provides a plausible reply to this argument. (shrink)

The development of artificial womb technology is proceeding rapidly and will present important ethical and theological challenges for Christians. While there has been extensive secular discourse on artificial wombs in recent years, there has been little Christian engagement with this topic. There are broadly two primary uses of artificial womb technology—ectogestation as a form of enhanced neonatal care, where some of the gestation period takes place in an artificial womb, and ectogenesis, where the entire gestation period is within an artificial (...) womb. Ectogestation for the latter weeks or months of pregnancy could be possible within a decade or so, while ectogenesis for humans is far more speculative. Ectogestation is likely to significantly decrease maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality, and so there is a strong case for supporting its development. Ectogenesis, however, may bring a number of challenges, including the commodification of children, and the pathologizing of pregnancy and childbirth. Its long-term effects on those who are created through this process are also unknown. In the event that it becomes ubiquitous, we may also find the central theological significance of pregnancy and birth diminished. The dilemma for Christians is that the development of ectogestation seems likely to normalise the use of artificial gestation, and, in time, pave the way for ectogenesis. (shrink)

Advance directives are intended to extend patient autonomy by enabling patients to prospectively direct the care of their future incapacitated selves. There has been much discussion about issues such as whether the future incompetent self is identical to the agent who issues the advance directives or whether advance directives can legitimately secure patient autonomy. However, there is another important question to ask: to what extent and in what conditions is it ethically appropriate for one to limit the liberty or agency (...) of one’s future incompetent self by issuing an advance directive? -/- In this paper, I use a virtue-ethical approach to explore this question, focusing on the case of an advance directive for the future self with moderate dementia. First, I examine virtuous attitudes with regard to autonomy and argue that one can manifest vices or ethically undesirable character traits in trying to intervene in the future self’s life. In particular, I argue that this case can manifest vices such as disdainfulness, intellectual arrogance, and self-dictatorship, which is the vice of trying to control one’s life to an excessive degree, and that a self-dictator fails to give due moral consideration to the future self’s liberty or agency. I then introduce the Daoist idea of wu-wei, which recommends embracement of what happens in one’s life, as one of the possible remedies for the overemphasis on the value of autonomy and control. (shrink)

Parents respond to the death of a child in very different ways. Some parents may be violent or angry, some sad and tearful, some quiet and withdrawn, and some frankly delusional. We present a case in which a father’s reaction to his daughter’s death is a desire to protect his wife from the stressful information. The wife is in the second trimester of a high-risk pregnancy and so is particularly fragile. We asked pediatricians and bioethicists to discuss the ways in (...) which they might respond to the father’s understandable but troubling request. -/- The death of a young child is one of the most stressful events that can happen to parents. The stress of such a loss is compounded if the parents are in a foreign country, far from home, and without a network of family and friends to provide social support. The stress may be more difficult to deal with if the parents have acute health problems of their own. In this month’s “Ethics Rounds,” we present a case in which a father whose daughter died requested that the doctors delay telling his wife. His reason: She is pregnant, in the second trimester, and on bed rest because of preterm labor. He does not want to add to her stress. We asked both pediatricians and bioethicists to respond to this request. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has been analysed as a distinct from, but concurrent with, more typical racist events, such as police killings in the United States. This article argues that one can conceptualise these two events as inter-related and synergistically enhanced. Anti-Black racism is a dynamic that utilises different social inequalities and violent events to manage the Black population within the United States. This article suggests that theorists would benefit from a syndemic analysis of disease and anti-Black violence in future theorisations (...) of Black oppression. (shrink)

Pro-life advocates commonly argue that fetuses have the moral status of persons, and an accompanying right to life, a view most pro-choice advocates deny. A difficulty for this pro-life position has been Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist analogy, in which she argues that even if the fetus is a person, abortion is often permissible because a pregnant woman is not obliged to continue to offer her body as life support. Here, we outline the moral theories underlying public health ethics, and examine (...) the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of public health considerations overriding individual rights. We argue that if fetuses are regarded as persons, then abortion is of such prevalence in society that it also constitutes a significant public health crisis. We show that on public health considerations, we are justified in overriding individual rights to bodily autonomy by prohibiting abortion. We conclude that in a society that values public health, abortion can only be tolerated if fetuses are not regarded as persons. (shrink)

In the Netherlands and Belgium, it is lawful for voluntary euthanasia to be offered on the grounds of psychiatric suffering. A recent case that has sparked much debate is that of Aurelia Brouwers, who was helped to die in the Netherlands on account of her suffering from borderline personality disorder. It is sometimes claimed that whether or not a mentally ill person’s wish to die is valid hinges on whether or not that wish is a symptom of the person’s mental (...) disorder. This article addresses the philosophical problems raised by this claim, with a specific focus on the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. After considering descriptivist and causal conceptualizations of mental disorder, I argue that the current approach to borderline personality disorder in psychiatry precludes the possibility of dissociating the wish to die from the disorder. I then examine the implications of this analysis for the question of whether or not the request for voluntary euthanasia in the case of borderline personality disorder can be considered valid. Ultimately, I conclude that the inability to dissociate the wish to die from the disorder does not invalidate the wish in the case of borderline personality disorder. (shrink)

We wake each morning to news on the glaring statistics of people infected by COVID-19 and others reportedly dying from complications thereto; the numbers are not receding in at least a number of countries across the world. It is hard to imagine a moment such as this that most of us have lived through in our life-time; but it is a reality and public challenge that we can neither ignore nor look away from. In what follows I will explore perspectives (...) on death from the Hindu tradition and the kinds of response—and solace or wisdom—afforded by the tradition to the angst and fears evoked by this pandemic situation. In concluding the discussion, I shall offer tentative reflections on how the Hindu perspective may be universalized, such as might invite conversations with therapists and care workers who may be seeking alternative resources to help expand the therapeutic space in more beneficent ways during the Covid-19 pandemic and its after-effects. (shrink)

Most discussions of near-death experiences (NDEs) in both the academic and popular literature contend that they establish ('prove') supernaturalism (about NDEs): they show that the mind is not the brain (and can continue after the brain stops functioning), and they bring us into contact with non-physical realms. I believe that the evidence provided by NDEs for supernaturalism is not persuasive, but I offer an alternative, naturalistic interpretation of these phenomena. On this interpretation, NDEs are 'real' in both senses of the (...) term: they really occur (people really have them, with the experiential content ascribed to them), and they are accurate. On this interpretation, NDEs are fundamentally about a journey from the known to the unknown, guided by a trusted mentor. Thus, NDEs accurately depict the possibilities for dying. Negative NDEs indicate the possibility of dying in cold, sterile, lonely circumstances, whereas positive NDEs point to the possibility of 'dying well', surrounded by loved ones. This is an interpretation that avoids the problems for supernaturalism of the gap between evidence and conclusion, and the commitment to causal interaction between physical and non-physical realms. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s notions of mood and earnestness are underlined by two understandings of equality. Mood conceives of our equality in mortality as the fate common to all human beings, where existence is comprehended in natural or biological thought categories. On such a view, man’s essence is to be regarded as a corporal substance that can be fully appropriated or posited; consequently, our common humanity is reduced to formal equality in annihilation that ignores individual distinctiveness and differences. Earnestness, by contrast, understands human (...) beings’ equality in mortality as a share in a quality that cannot be fully posited, recognized or appropriated—an equality (un-)grounded in our essential communality and solidarity before God. I thus conclude that earnestness involves an ambiguous notion of responsibility: while the proper relation to one’s demise is a personal task that seems to isolate the individual from human association, earnestness points to an original dimension of communality within the individual, a shared space in which the person is called to be responsible towards her neighbor. (shrink)

I briefly discuss the philosophical reasons for preferring the future over the present.

O scurtă retrospectivă a virusul COVID-19 care a cauzat actuala pandemie, a cilului său de viață și a istoriei sale. Reacții, măsuri și efecte ale pandemiei COVID-19. O prezentare a diverselor abordări filosofice, cu accent pe filosofia morții, ecopsihanaliză, și apel la filosofiile lui Sigmund Freud și Albert Camus. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.17900.59528.

If federal health reforms continue to rely on employer-sponsored health care coverage, ERISA preemption reform should be part of the next steps. State-level reform has acquired greater urgency, while the justifications for preempting that source of reform has eroded. This article recommends a statutory waiver for ERISA preemption as a feasible way to adapt to these circumstances. It offers proposed statutory text for reformers inclined to pursue ERISA reform as health reform.

This book is at once incisive and exploratory, interpretive and historic scholarship. It appeals to both general and specialized readers. It uniquely takes a common philosophical theme, the meaning of life, and traces it through many philosophers’ and novelists' works. Sometimes the theme is buried and implicit, and offers a plausible distillation of each author's view. The result is a title that may sound like a self-help book’s—except the contents expand in manifold directions rather than narrow to easy advice. The (...) reader, not spoon fed, is provided only one advice: Read these, and decide for onerself, especially if none of them answers sufficiently for each reader. Philosophers represnted include Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard. Nietzche, James, Wittgenstein, Novelists include Melville, Tolstoy, Proust, and Camus. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that efforts to legalize aid-in-dying or physician-assisted suicide are attempts to rebrand this sort of death as a good choice. It is common to justify physician-assisted suicide through arguments for a) relieving suffering or b) allowing individual autonomy, but I will show that the problem with these justifications is that once this type of death is judged as acceptable, it is difficult to justify limiting it to a narrow group such as the mentally competent, (...) communicatively able, terminally ill adults designated by these legalization bills. Ultimately, we must either label many more deaths as good deaths, destigmatizing suicide, or we must reject the notion that death at the time we choose is acceptable. I will argue for the latter. (shrink)