The bioethical debate between Laicism and Catholicism on the self-determination of death and dying. Gathering of logical substratum over and above opposites

The study considers two corpora that confront the themes of the end of life: the first is constituted by 12 contributions of a book edited by the Fondazione Umberto Veronesi (2006) and the second by 13 contributions of an International Congress organized by the Pontificia Accademia Pro Vita (2008). To underline similarities and differences of the lexical profiles the two groups of opposite contributions have been compared and contrasted using qualitative and quantitative perspectives. The research identifies and describes the pivot concepts that justify the contraposition. This work is really important because it shows a methodological way to demonstrate the procedure useful for a critical analysis of the contents that are involved in the bioethical debate. In fact it is a very rare experiment in this field, and so it opens a new view on the possibility to render methodologically more evident the comparison on which the political and social choices depend.