Deconstructing Dignity

A Critique of the Right-to-Die Debate

Scott Cutler Shershow

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English

University of Chicago Press
10 January 2014

Ethics & moral philosophy; Ethical issues & debates

The right-to-die debate has gone on for centuries, playing out most recently as a spectacle of protest surrounding figures such as Terry Schiavo. In Deconstructing Dignity, Scott Cutler Shershow offers a powerful new way of thinking about it philosophically. Focusing on the concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life, he employs Derridean deconstruction to uncover self-contradictory and damaging assumptions that underlie both sides of the debate.

Shershow examines texts from Cicero’s De Officiis to Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to court decisions and religious declarations. Through them he reveals how arguments both supporting and denying the right to die undermine their own unconditional concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life with a hidden conditional logic, one often tied to practical economic concerns and the scarcity or unequal distribution of medical resources. He goes on to examine the exceptional case of self-sacrifice, closing with a vision of a society—one whose conditions we are far from meeting—in which the debate can finally be resolved. A sophisticated analysis of a heated topic, Deconstructing Dignity is also a masterful example of deconstructionist methods at work.

By: Scott Cutler Shershow
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 24mm, Width: 16mm, Spine: 2mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780226088129
ISBN 10: 022608812X
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 10 January 2014
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Further / Higher Education , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

"Scott Cutler Shershow is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Puppets and ""Popular"" Culture and The Work and the Gift, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press, and is also coeditor of Marxist Shakespeares."

Reviews for Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right-to-Die Debate

Deconstructing Dignity is an excellent book. It is well conceived and wonderfully executed. It not only intervenes in this particular debate on the right to die but takes up important and long-standing concepts and problems in the history of philosophy and culture; it dismantles vapid truisms and opens onto the possibility of a thought of life--and death--that is not always already lost within life's supposed dignity and sanctity. --David E. Johnson, University at Buffalo, SUNY