Palliative Care and the Ethics of Hospitality

Death is inevitable. We may agree with some philosophers for whom “as soon as a human being is born, he is old enough to die right away.”[1] The Greeks understood mortality as the condition of human beings who can have the idea of immortality without having the actual experience of it. We have accepted our mortal condition as our destiny, but at the same time we want to embrace death on own terms. The contradiction presented in the binary opposition between euthanasia and palliative care confirms this. In this binary, the first adheres to the position that time prolonged for a terminal patient is useless, while the second holds that a patient waiting at the end of time, however prolonged it may be, is meaningful. The ambivalent response of “doing the best “in the face of death—which can mean both euthanasia and palliative care—makes us wonder what it means to die. Dying cannot be viewed merely as a problem of technological advancements related to the medicalization (Medicalization is the process by which human conditions and problems come to be defined and treated as medical conditions, and thus become the subject of medical study, diagnosis, prevention, or treatment) of death. If the medically defined health and well-being become the new yardstick to measure happiness, what place does the reality of death have in life? Instead of patiently awaiting death— living is learning to die—do we attempt to take recourse to medical technology to decide the hour of death under the pretext of ending life in a dignified manner? Amidst these intriguing questions, in this paper we attempt to explore if palliative care helps us to invent an ethic of radical hospitality to the patients at the end of life