[Treatment and responsibility ethics in dealing with severely ill and dying patients--discussion stimulation]

As we are approaching the end of this century, the implicit axiom which addresses the question of responsibility within the new territory of collaborative medical practising that was entered with high-tech medicine, has still to be put into new places. As for ethical theories, there is no such thing as a no mans land. All reflections will reach sooner or later the limits of language, and so will reflections on the ethics of action and the ethics of responsibility. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein we call running up against the limits of language ethics. In clinical psychosomatic medicine interacting with those who are severely ill and those who are dying everything is enmeshed: religion and philosophy, medicine, technology and language. For the ethics of action this is represented e.g. by a collective search for a consensus in clinical-psychosomatic case conferences. By the reassurance through others we can relate when being active to two imperatives by H.Y. Förster (1984): firstly, if you wish to understand, learn to act! Secondly, act always in a fashion that will open up new possibilities. In ethics of responsibility we can relate to the inheritance of monotheistic religions, upon the God of Israel and to tolerance.