Abstract

After 41 years from the approval of the first living will law in 1976 in California, on December 22nd 2017 the bill on “Rules on in- formed consent and advance directives” has been approved in Italy. The applicability of the law highlights a lack of a univocal methodol- ogy regarding the recovery process of the patient’s subjective dimension under a testamentary will; so, it seemed useful to highlight the passages that occur between the drafting and the use of an advance directive in an existential phenomenological prospective. Is the individual who freely drafts an A.D., choosing to decide now for the future, the same per- son for which the provisions were outlined? The goal of this paper is to offer an ethical reading of the ontological issue that illness can raises.