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Autonomy and Dignity: a discussion on contingency and dominance
Tijdschriftbijdrage - Tijdschriftartikel
With dying increasingly becoming a medicalised experience in old age,
we are witnessing a shift from concern over death itself to an interest in dying
'well'. Fierce discussions about end-of-life decision making and the permissibility
of medical intervention in dying, discursively structured around the notion of a
'good' death, are evidence of this shift. This article focuses on 'autonomy' and
'dignity' as key signifiers in these discussions. Rather than being fully fixed and
stable, both signifiers are contingent and carry a variety of meanings within different
discursive projects. The article aims to distinguish the varieties of these signifiers by
elaborating existing theoretical perspectives on autonomy and dignity, and also,
starting from a perspective on mass media as sites of meaning production and
contestation, to study the contingency of autonomy and dignity in Belgian newspaper
coverage of four prominent euthanasia cases. By means of a discourse-theoretical
textual analysis, this study exposes a dominant--yet contested--articulation
of rational-personal autonomy and of dignity in external terms as something that can
be obtained, retained or lost, rather than in terms of intrinsic human integrity. These
logics of representation reflect a more general late modern dominance of liberal
autonomy and of dignity as being closely connected to self-identity, but at the same
time result in limited visibility of alternative ways of experiencing an autonomous
and dignified death.
Tijdschrift: Health Care Analysis
ISSN: 1573-3394
Issue: 2
Volume: 22
Pagina's: 174-191
Jaar van publicatie:2014
Trefwoorden:autonomy, digntiy, contingency, end-of, discourse-theoretical analysis
CSS-citation score:1