Abstract

I am honoured and grateful to the commentators for their thoughtful responses to my article, ‘African Life Force and the Permissibility of Euthanasia’.1 In the article, I attempted to show that any argument for the permissibility of euthanasia based on life force or vitalism is bound to fail because any ethic based on that worldview is required to preserve life above all else. Three key themes emerged in their responses and in what follows I address each of them in turn. The first theme that emerges from the commentaries has to do with dignity. In the article, I did not suggest a grounds for dignity based on a life force ethic. Instead, I focused on describing the appropriate teleological aim of anyone who endorses such an ethic since that was the most relevant to the argument. However, in different ways, many of the commentaries raise questions about the relevant account of dignity (or lack thereof) implied by life force.i Mariana Dittborn, Daniela Rojas and Sofia Salas worry that being the object of a communal relationship violates Kant’s (true) universal moral principle of respect for persons.2 For example, it could justify keeping a terminally ill patient alive as a mere means to the end of increasing the life force of caregivers. Xiang Yu and Daniel Kim suggest that the life force ethic ‘implies that a person who is the object of very few relationships has a much weaker duty to stay alive than a person who is well-loved and the …