Historical Considerations on the Ethics of Aging: Examples from the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

The history of the ethics of aging is a complex and still neglected topic. From a scientific standpoint, we first need a definition: What does ethics mean today? (For instance, should we use a normative, consequentialist, or deontological ethics?) And what would an ethics of aging, specifically, be? Does such a specialized ethics exist, or should any ethics apply more generally to every period of life? Supposing we grant the existence of a special ethics for the elderly, should we distinguish between an ethics for the “young old” and another for the “very old”? What are the topics of this specialized “ethics” at present? Perhaps it is only once we have solved these problems that it will make sense to look backwards, asking how the ethics of aging was approached in the past. Yet we could also proceed in the opposite direction. Instead of looking back, history could help us to look ahead. In this article, we use examples from the sixteenth century to observe what kind of moral questions were discussed in a gerontological context, and explore how these discussions were influenced by historical circumstance and the participants’ professional backgrounds. (By focusing on moral questions, we avoid the term “ethics,” which is anachronistic in premodern medicine, and even, to a certain degree, in early modern philosophy.) Secondly, we compare these findings with present ethical debates on old age (although necessarily relying on only a limited number of examples). This approach not only enables us to perceive similarities and differences, but to identify some necessary premises for a special ethics of aging.