Euthanasia

between dignity and autonomy

Abstract

Objective: paradoxical as it may seem, few realities, like death, make us think so much about the meaning of life. Few realities like death also lead us to reflect on the adoption of an immanent or transcendent conception of vital reality itself. On the other hand, personal autonomy, rooted in human dignity, usually accompanies our vital action as an inseparable ingredient in the exercise of our most decisive freedoms. However, wouldn't a person who finds himself faced with the prospect of euthanasia, usually entangled in the midst of extreme anguish, even leaving the bills paid, exercise a “right” to decide how to live and leave freely? Can we say that the free choice of death with a set day and time would not be a decision endowed with legality? Apparently, someone who desires their own death through euthanasia would act based on an eloquent exercise of their personal autonomy, as an effect of their own dignity, until the moment in which, in this reflection, some natural normative demands come into play that raise serious doubts about the limits of that autonomy, at the same time as they reinforce the idea that the aforementioned dignity would be based on an ontological value preceding the autonomy itself, that is, it would be a knowable reality that precedes any legal normativity and, as an effect, is binding on action, because it consists of a truth derived from the way of being human.

Methodology: the study of the proposed theme challenges the use of the realistic-phenomenological-hermeneutic methodology, in an effort to understand the natural human juridicity – which is not a creation of society or power, but derives from the very condition of being human – and, thus, to shed clearer and deeper light on the analysis of the phenomenon of euthanasia.

Results: we hope to produce, select and systematize basic bibliographical references, indicate analytical and interpretative potentialities to researchers of the theme of desire-rights who are concerned with an academic training focused on concrete justice, in order to expand, through this research, the theoretical collection that configures the frontiers of this important area of ​​studies in the field of right, based on solid, critical, classical and updated theoretical foundations.

Contributions: based on a legal-philosophical investigation into the notions of human being, freedom, will, right and law, as well as their expressions and identities, our research aims to recover the state of the art of real human juridicity, a reality resulting from the nomophoric quality of man, and, as an effect, seek to demonstrate that merging juridicity with voluntaristic legality, main postulate of euthanasia, causes a series of tensions and disruptions in respect for the principle of human dignity.