The Sea Inside, 2004

May, 2023 | NATALIA ALVAREZ 

Mar Adentro is directed by Alejandro Amenábar and it is the real story of Ramon Sampedro’s assisted suicide. This movie talks about the topic of euthanasia. There are many different types of euthanasia, and there are different rules in some countries on which types are legal. The types are passive euthanasia is where the patient dies because they are refusing treatment or withdrawing from artificial life-support, and active where the painless death of the patient suffering from a terminal illness or in a vegetative state. Assisted suicide is when someone, not a medical professional, helps a patient die, and lastly physician-assisted suicide is when a medical professional prescribes a drug that is lethal and gives it the patient to be self-administered. It is only legal in seven countries, and passive is legal in all 50 states of North America, and assisted is legal in 10 of those states. 

Ramón was a paralyzed man in Spain, he became paralyzed from the neck down in 1968 after he dove in shallow water and hit his head. His brother's family took care of him as he was bedridden due to his paralysis, his brother's wife was the one who mostly took care of Ramón as she helped him get clean and change and do the everyday things we all take for granted. After 25 years of being bedridden relying on other people to take of him, Ramón decided he wanted ‘die with dignity’. He applied through Spain’s lower courts, higher courts and the European Commission on Human Rights to legally end his life. He wanted the court to know that it was fully decided to want to end his life and that he was fully competent to make this choice. He hired lawyers who were to help him in his fight. After 7 years and even Ramón going to the court to try to testify his motions were rejected, he was not even allowed to speak when he went to the court one day. After the rejection Ramón decided he was going to still go through with it. On January 12 1998, Ramón drank potassium cyanide provided by his close friend Ramona Manerio. He filmed his death, he gave a speech about how it was fully his choice to drink the cyanide and then died on film, it was sent to Spanish news stations to hopefully be aired. 

Care Ethics is also known as the ethics of care. It means that “that there is moral significance in the fundamental elements of relationships and dependencies in human life.” The theory helps us understand that the relationship we have with our caretakers like parents or guardians is how we learn to have our social relationships. This theory shows how there are more vulnerable and “soft” people that we as a society feel  we need to care for them more or look out for them. It is our nature to want to care for people we are around. This theory is best related to mothers or motherhood, in society we the mom or wife is the caretaker of the household; cooking, cleaning, getting the kids ready, teaching the children and caring for the “hardworking husband” before and after work. This of course changes with time and how the idea of a perfect housewife is realized to be degrading and sexist. There are still people out there that want to care for their partners or children like that and chose to be a stay-at-home parent but it’s more recognized that being a mother and women are not the same or have to be together. Besides the modern development of motherhood, care ethics is one that more explains possibly the women's side. 

Before Care Ethics, most major theories were written by men explaining men as the main and respected society. With other theories women have also been seen as “deviant or different in their development.” In Gilligan's writing, Freud is brought up; he is who developed the idea of the Id, ego, and superego. Freud looked into the relationship between women and men, seeing the differences between each. Here is a quote from Freud's writing on women's and men's differences “[women] superego is never is inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men…[women] show less sense of justice then men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that they are more often influences in their judgments by feeling of affection or hostility – all these would be amply accounted for the modification in the formation of their super-ego.” Freud says that even the way they develop is not only how women or men look at their relationship, but their brains and personalities develop differently. In society, we always want to see women as the care-taker and gentle goodness in society. They are the ones who both care for us and teach us. Not only as mothers but as teachers, nurses, healthcare workers, and therapists. Women are seen as more understanding and caring than men, therefore taking jobs about care and learning. 

Society is always changing and may not be the same every day, but this is what we have experienced for many years. In the case of Ramón how care ethics can be applied is that after his incident, he became completely dependent on other people. The main caretaker he had during his life was his brother's wife or sister-in-law. She did everything for Ramón and never complained, her son also helped out and helped him with his writing and putting them into a computer. Although Ramón needed them to be able to do things, it still showed the vulnerability we have when we find people who care for us. When he left to die in peace his nephew and sister-in-law were devastated but loved him so much that they didn’t fight him on this. They knew that this is what he has been fighting for and wanting for years. Although it made them sad and heartbroken they knew to not be selfish and try to see everything in Ramón’s perspective. 

Virtue Ethics is an approach to normative ethics. This is a branch that is about theorizing our moral judgments and provides some base for ethical thinking. According to Hursthouse, Virtue ethics “emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism).”  With this theory, it is believed that humans have virtue and vices as fundamental parts of our moral compass. Plato and Aristotle are the “founding fathers,” but Aristotle was the one who mainly wrote about Virtue ethics. Aristotle used the Greek word eudaimonia to capture this feeling of achieving a good life. To him, this is where all should want to be. We should all want to achieve a good life as our end goal. For this goal, he also said we must live in moderation and not excess; he believed living in moderation was what allowed us to have eudaimonia. The meaning of eudaimonia is debated as there is no direct translation, but it is said that Aristotle believed that humans don’t have to be happy or that what is our good life isn’t what we think of as happiness. This way of living is more about what is good for us, not what makes us the happiest, What our destiny is, but not what our happiness is. 

I would say that Ramón had eudaimonia in his eyes. He really did believe that he had lived his life well and long enough and that when he decided that he had a good enough life that it was okay if it ended. Many many believe that suicide or euthanasia is against the moral compass, this is rooted mostly in religion but also we are taught wanting to end our lives is sinful and wrong. In the case of a paralyzed man feeling like a burden is mentally exhausting and takes a toll on Ramón, even though his family is happy to help him he can’t help but feel like a burden. Ramón was happy and even was able to write poetry, although it seemed dark as the book was named Letters of Hell, they are still poems Ramón wrote while being bedridden with the help of his nephew. It seems like the choice h made goes against the universal moral compass but he really did seem to reach his version of eudaimonia. As different as these two theories can be, most ethical theories have some similarities. The big one is what is right or wrong and how we live our lives morally correctly. 

In Care Ethics, what is morally correct is to be caring; the body and emotions work together. This theory also focuses on women, as all other theories are centered around men, made by men, and only explained for men. The other theory was Virtue Ethics, where eudaimonia is the ultimate goal. To achieve a good life in the end, even if it isn’t our exact happiness, also to live in moderation. This theory is about what is good for us, not what we believe is good for us. It is about a way of living society should follow. Neither theory is right nor wrong, as all theories are more of an opinion and not fact, but both help us think of what we should strive for in our lives.