The violence of last words: philosophy on the margins of health ethics

Health ethics is struggling with an internal philosophical battle that is being fought on its margins. This 'family quarrel' concerns its status and is known as the discussion between 'narrow' and 'broad' morality: a conflict about the rightness of universality and particularity, rationality and practical wisdom, technique and hermeneutics, pragmatics and philosophical insight, legal and virtue ethics, individual and community. Anyone who has anything to do with health ethics today inevitably takes a position in or against this debate.

The Violence of Last Words describes both positions and elucidates them on the basis of the debate in the Netherlands between Theo van Willigenburg and Paul van Tongeren. The book itself adopts a position that evades the aforementioned contradictions. It does not choose either position and does not reconcile them either, but wants to show that they complement each other and operate from the same ground. What characterizes both is their treatment of the political and of plurality (Arendt). Both positions neglect the value and function of the public sphere and ignore the violence of last words that is already at work in their mutual discussion. These last words (Rorty) not only point to the verbal violence with which discussions are conducted or broken off, they also conceal and protect an inaudible silence, an inaccessible 'deafness' that inhabits and singularizes each of us (Lacan). It enables us to appreciate something (morally), but also sets limits to it. In this sense, the author examines the relationship between philosophy, technology, ethics and politics.