The ventilator meets the ars moriendi: a working consensus against vitalism, hospice as a shared institution with Christian roots, and the assisted-dying argument proceeding jurisdiction by jurisdiction through every tradition’s courts of conscience.
Tagged: Buddhist Catholic Jewish
Modern medicine can prolong dying as reliably as it prolongs life, and the traditions’ oldest disciplines — the ars moriendi, the deathbed confession, the vidui, the Pure Land deathbed recitation — now meet the ventilator. The agreements are substantial: no major tradition on this site requires vitalism (the indefinite prolongation of biological function); Catholic teaching since Pius XII distinguishes ordinary from disproportionate means; Jewish law, which guards life fiercely, contains its own debated permissions to stop tending the swiftly dying; hospice, a movement with explicitly Christian roots in Cicely Saunders’s work, is now the shared institution.
The disagreements are equally substantial and concentrate on assisted dying, legalized in a growing list of jurisdictions: refused by Catholic and Orthodox authorities, refused by the fiqh academies, divided in Jewish and mainline Protestant ethics, reframed in Buddhist discussion by intention and compassion — the flashpoint where ‘medicine’s limits’ becomes law fastest, and the page most often revised in this section.
References
- Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Samaritanus bonus (2020)
- Daniel P. Sulmasy, The Rebirth of the Clinic (2006)
Related Across the Site
- Artificial intelligence and human dignity Flashpoint — Learning systems that counsel, accompany, and target: the live question is not machine consciousness but what may never be delegated — and every tradition on this site answers that accountability stays with persons.
- Gene editing and the germline Flashpoint — Easy technique, unconsenting subject, speculative benefit: the 2018 edited babies drew one condemnation in many vocabularies, and the line between somatic therapy and germline design is now the field’s governing border.
- Transhumanism and the body Flashpoint — Mortality as an engineering backlog: lifespan, cognition, and the body as a draft to be revised — and the counter-question, asked in every dialect on this site, whether a self indefinitely revisable remains a self.
- Artificial intelligence Technology — The newest entry and already the most argued: Rome’s algorethics, halakhah’s golem, Buddhism’s attention diagnosis, and a secular governance regime — all converging on one refusal, that accountability may not be delegated to the machine.
- Evolution by natural selection Technology — The mechanism that reorganized biology: embraced, adapted, and fought over — usually inside traditions rather than between them, from Asa Gray’s theistic evolution to today’s divided evangelical house.
- Germline gene editing Technology — The technology every framework was waiting for: Rome refuses it, the responsa and the fiqh academies condition it, Hindu and Buddhist evaluations run on intention — and the academies of science govern it while disagreeing about whether it should ever be used.
- Organ transplantation Technology — A near-consensus on the gift and commerce refused — and a live, published disagreement about the definition of death that transplantation forced every tradition to state.
- Surgical and medical abortion Technology — The register’s most documented case: refused absolutely by Rome and by the evangelical mainstream, governed by ensoulment in the classical fiqh, divided in the responsa by stage and by the mother’s priority, grave in Buddhist and Hindu ethics — each in its own premises, left standing.