Promoting True Freedom at Life’s End
April 25th, 2009 by Br. James Brent, O.P.
Fr. Chris Saliga, O.P. is the Catholic Chaplain and a Lecturer in Mdical Ethics at Walsh University in North Canton, OH. He also writes for the Catholic Bioethics Channel at Catholic exchange (an archive of his many articles is available). He has written a longer paper that promotes the Catholic understanding of a controversial life issue. The paper is entitled “Autonomy, Freedom, and Rational Suicide: Human Flourishing within End of Life Contexts: A Catholic Perspective.”
The paper is co-authored with three Walsh University students — Jeffery Hover, Jeremiah Curtis, and Ellyn Mayher. Together they will present their paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Spirituality and Theology and Health to be held at Duke University (June 3-5, 2009).
The abstract of the paper goes as follows:
Some who argue in favor of assisted suicide (AKA aid in dying) presuppose a narrow understanding of human freedom while some who argue against it presuppose a more extensive understanding of freedom. Within this presentation, a distinction between “freedom of indifference” and “freedom for excellence” explicated by the late Fr. Servais Pinckaers, OP is applied to two end-of-life cases. In the end, this distinction helps one see that formal cooperation with rational/voluntary suicide in the name of “free choice” contravenes “freedom for excellence” unto problematic practical and moral outcomes. From a Catholic perspective, helping folks voluntarily commit suicide is seen to violate human flourishing insofar as doing so violates “freedom for excellence.”
