Session 9 Suffering, Dying, Palliating
2nd Global Conference
Sunday 22nd May – Tuesday 24th May 2011
Warsaw, Poland
Annihilating Pain: A Study of Peter Singer’s Position on Voluntary Euthanasia
V Prabhul
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
Recent developments in some pertinent issues in ethics have a strong orientation towards understanding pain and trying to alleviate/ annihilate it. In this paper, we will make an attempt to study Peter Singer, who bases his ethics on this notion of suffering. Here, we will try to explore Singer’s view of euthanasia. Singer maintains that euthanasia can be justified as it helps one to annihilate one’s pain. In this case, the annihilation of oneself is the process of getting away from one’s pain and Singer justifies such an act to be an ethical one. According to Peter Singer euthanasia can be justified in two grounds – voluntary, where the patient has the capacity to choose between life and death and makes an informed decision to die and the other is non-voluntary, where the patient do not have the capacity to understand the choice between continued existence and non-existence and therefore lack the ability to consent to death. (Singer, 1993) Singer maintains that a patient takes the informed decision after careful exercising of one’s reason and then consents for death in the case of voluntary euthanasia. This description of the careful exercising of one’s reason in making an ethical decision goes in line with Singer’s conception of what constitutes an ethical decision. But, the bigger question is how can one be sure that the decision taken by that person is really a rational decision? Can it be possible for a mentally and physically distressed person to take a rational decision on euthanasia particularly in voluntary euthanasia? In this paper, we try to explore the nature of the decision taken by patient, which stands as the ultimate ground for justifying voluntary euthanasia according to Singer.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Pain, Pain Management, and the Desire for Hastened Death in Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing
Wouter Schrover
Modern Dutch Literature, Faculty of Arts, VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands
In Anna Quindlen’s novel One True Thing (1994) forty-six year old housewife Kate Gulden is suffering from cancer. Her daughter, the ambitious journalist Ellen, leaves her job at a New York magazine to care for her. As Kate’s illness progresses and becomes terminal, her pain gets worse. Despite the pain treatment she receives from her oncologist Dr Cohn and hospice nurse Teresa, Kate’s pain eventually becomes uncontrollable. When Kate can no longer bear the pain, she begs Ellen to kill her. After Kate has died, Ellen is charged for murder, while in fact Kate killed herself by taking an overdose of morphine. In its representation of pain and pain management, One True Thing reflects on the relation between pain and the desire for hastened death. In this way, Quindlen’s novel participates in an ongoing American debate on the role of (insufficient) pain treatment regarding end-of-life decisions. Some critics of assisted suicide and euthanasia argue that adequate palliative care would eliminate patients’ requests for hastened death. However, others doubt that pain management can always adequately comfort patients. In the proposed paper, it will be studied which stance One True Thing takes on this controversial issue. A narratological analysis will reveal which role pain plays in Kate’s desire for hastened death, how pain is related to other causes of suffering and how it affects Kate’s sense of dignity and autonomy. Arguing from the text, it will be shown how One True Thing is situated in a network of texts of diverse kinds (scholarly, journalistic, fictional) on the subjects of pain management, palliative care and end-of-life decision making.
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