Abstract

There is an ongoing debate in bioethics regarding the nature of suffering. This conversation revolves around the following question: What kind of thing, exactly, is suffering? Specifically, is suffering a subjective phenomenon—intrinsically linked to personhood, personal values, feelings, and lived experience—or an objective affair, amenable to impersonal criteria and existing as an independent feature of the natural world? Notably, the implications of this determination are politically and ethically significant. This essay attempts to bring clarity to the subjective versus objective debate in suffering scholarship by examining the history of the concept of “objectivity,” and putting that history in conversation with physician Eric Cassell’s famous theory of suffering. It concludes with a novel, albeit tentative, definition of suffering: suffering is the experience of a gap between how things are and how things ought to be.