Suffering: Harm to Bodies, Minds, and Persons

Abstract

Suffering is a basic human experience, and the concept of suffering can be defined in several ways. Typically, it is defined in terms of threats to human agency, loss or threat to an individual’s value system, or as an experienced negative feeling. There are several types of (human) suffering. Suffering has been studied as a bodily, a mental, a social, and as an existential or spiritual experience. Suffering is frequently considered to be personal and subjective, though not necessarily incomprehensible to others. Philosophy of language and phenomenology provide frameworks to understand other persons’ suffering. While there is some agreement that suffering is something bad (an evil) toward which we have moral obligations to alleviate, there is less agreement on how this should be done and how far we should go. This is because there are several conceptual and ethical challenges with suffering, such as how to define it and where to set the limits to our duties and aspirations to alleviate suffering. What kind of suffering should be alleviated and by whom. For example, should social or existential suffering be alleviated by health care? What measures are acceptable in alleviating suffering, e.g., are modifications of personality, reduction of autonomy, or killing acceptable measures to alleviate suffering? Another basic question is who can suffer, e.g., whether animals, embryos, fetuses, or severely demented humans can suffer.