[The concept of natural death today, between futility and ethical necessity. A concept for the 21st century].

Abstract

The concept of natural death has been present in philosophical, medical and social reflection for centuries, fulfilling a double function: understanding human finitude and hoping for a desirable way to reach the end of our days. Today, those goals have been blurred by the sense of control over death that comes from the high technology of medicine, the dreams of immortality nurtured by the media, and the confusing line drawn between autonomy and dignity. This article studies the concept of natural death that in the past 20th century was the subject of debate between health workers and bioethicists and that at the beginning of this 21st century has already begun to be questioned. The ″naturalness″ of death was intended to be a kind of ethical frontier in the face of any form of violence, injustice, excessive technicalization or interference with the human will. Today, many of these aspects are blurred in a context as unnatural as he hospital one. In addition, the forensic field has also encountered serious difficulties in excluding any human, voluntary or involuntary intervention, in a large part of the deaths, since there is little natural in what we breathe, eat or drink. Based on all this, a redefinition proposal is offered that responds to a double need: the social need to integrate the inevitable mortality and the shared personal need to reach the end after a humanizing process that excludes all human responsibility. It is anthropologically possible and ethically desirable natural death.