The philosophy of palliative care

The adjective “palliative” has in ordinary language a rather negative flavour, expressing the idea of something that is only superficially or apparently useful to repair a certain damage but leaves it actually unaffected. This is probably the reason for its only recent circulation in medicine. The increasing interest for the “palliative care”, however, is a good indication of the more serious consideration it deserves, for reasons that we could briefly outline as follows. Two principles are often presented as the most fundamental in the debates of medical ethics: One is that of the “sanctity of life” (allegedly the supreme principle of traditional medical ethics), which we can express in more “secularized” words as the principle of the “absolute respect for life”. The other is that of the “quality of life” (considered as the supreme principle of modern medical ethics). Since there cannot be two “supreme” principles, it follows that one must be considered as subordinate to the other in those decisions where they come to a conflict. The different schools in bioethics often distinguish themselves for giving the supremacy to one of these two principles over the other, and this difference implicitly reflects the way of considering what is the fundamental goal of medicine. According to a certain view, this fundamental goal is the fight against death, that has pushed the progress of discovery of medicaments, treatments and surgeries capable