Chapitre 4 FIN DE VIE ET PENSÉE RELIGIEUSE

Abstract

While biomedical science has created a whole set of terms to refer to the techniques and/or the behaviour that doctors should use or adopt in relation to incurably ill people, ethics has remained fossilised, hesitant and sometimes obliged to develop a new vocabulary which is not initially its own, but adapted gradually with the development of bioethical theories. Passive and active euthanasia, medically assisted suicide, life-sustaining treatment, intensive care, care of the terminally ill, coma, brain death, pain, clinical death, accompanying the dying… are some of the terms and expressions that jostle with each other and come together to indicate finally the same moment: The last truth (Nietzsche), that is, the end of life.