Changing Attitudes Towards Death and Suffering: A Cultural Perspective on The Euthanasia Debate

Why does the popular culture respond to euthanasia? We rarely find the question and never find the answer in bioethics. Dilemma ethics or quandary ethics, at the heart of the field, fail to address the root causes of the moral anarchy of our times. Despite calls from bioethicists, such as Daniel Callahan, for a communitarian bioethics1 dealing with the moral life in its societal dimension, it is still lacking. This is disappointing considering the fact that cultural biases and attitudes almost single-handedly determine the shape and direction of society. The prevailing attitudes in a culture do not merely influence the debate; they determine the issues. A revolution in attitudes towards death and suffering has taken place in our present age. It is not technology itself that has given us the euthanasia debate, but the attitudes towards death and suffering which it helped to shape. Moral debate doesn’t occur in a cultural vacuum. The key issues are best understood within the context of the cultural background from which they emerged