I have a reoccurance of Base of Tongue cancer, and this is a dehumanizing sort of cancer in that it starts to strip away some our most basic asthetic appreciations: eating food, tasting, swallowing, speaking and sexual intimacy. It is also dreadfully painful. So - I've been having the internal question of, when is enough enough, and I think there was a classical parable of how someone would choose their death.

When is enough enough? Oh my friend, what a hard, hardquestion - a question that when being raised says a lot about life itself. Though I worry about a person being in decent fettle trying to resolve such a question --for me it would be when the pain got so relentless and all consumingthat it devoured my ability to love others – to care about anything outsidemyself – when the pain permanently nailed me to my self.

If a person is not afraid of non-existance then if he is afaid of death he is actually afraid of the possible pain involved ; does this seem reasonable?

It could also be a fear of losing everyone they love -- of the termination of something very good - no matter if there is no one there to experience the loss.

Following the recent tragic events in Japan there has been a "wave" of jokes and puns on the internet about the earthquake and tsunami. Is it morally acceptable to joke about something so serious and tragic? Should ethical people be outraged at photoshopped pictures showing Godzilla as the true source of the tsunami or at bad puns about waves?

I don't think it is morally acceptable to joke about tragedies. While I know that it is part of the orthodoxy amongst comics to try and be edgy, perhaps even to try and shock, cracking jokes about thousands of people being killed and thousands upon thousands more losing their homes certainly evinces a lack of compassion and humanity. I don't have a syllogism to proof this but I think that finding entertainment in tsunamis, or maybe next, the holocaust, makes us more indifferent to others and is bad for the soul.

We all wish that we die before a person we love a LOT (our parents is an example), because we think that we'll be very sad and cry all the time. But, isn't it more moral to wish that this beloved person dies before us, so we would support the extreme sadness and not them ?

I don't think that we have a lot of control over what our wishes are. If you are asking what is the more loving wish than I suppose it would make sense to say that you would want to spare the person you love so much the pain. But I don't think these kinds of moral calculations are useful. The important thing is what you do and perhaps what kind of person you make of yourself. Again, it sure sounds as though you want to be as loving an individual as you can be. A very admirable goal.