Shall I Become a Zombie? Stories of Illness, Ethical Dilemmas and Visions of Society
Authors
Paolo Cattorini
State University of Insubria, Varese
National Committee for Bioethics (Rome) and National Commission for the Fight Against Aids (Rome), I
Three controversial ethical issues, among others, stir the debate in health care institutions, in medical associations, and in the whole society: the care of patients in persistent vegetative state, the regulation of artificial procreation, some individual requests for reshaping an healthy body. Dealing with these dilemmas, typical of advanced medical science and technological practice, implies not only balancing carefully the burdens and benefits for suffering persons, families, equipes, hospitals, cultural and religious communities, but also imaging and realizing new visions of a just society, of a beneficent (without paternalism) medicine and generally of a good life, where each moral agent could write in front of all and in worthy, convincing ways, the next chapter of the book of his/her own life.
