PHILOSOPHICAL AND BIOETHICAL ASPECTS OF DEATH AND DYING

Abstract

Reflections on death and dying have always troubled humanity. Their comprehension carries a culture-forming significance and invariably intensifies during periods of war, epidemics, and catastrophes. Compassion towards the dying is an important aspect of humanity. In science, the notion of the dominance of two cultures regarding death and dying has become established – soteriological and hedonistic. The European tradition of philosophical contemplation of the problem of dying and death was established in antique times. From the 17th century, death and dying have become subjects of scientific knowledge. Thanks to advances in medicine and pharmacology throughout the 20th century, death and dying have become medicalized. The issue of dying comes to the forefront. Since the early 1970s, the achievements of biomedicine and biotechnology have technologized, administered, and, to some extent, commercialized dying and death. Bioethics, including biomedical ethics, becomes the main platform for contemplating the possibilities, significance, and consequences of applying the achievements of biomedicine and biotechnology for individuals and humanity as a whole. Their development and application, including at the stage of completing human life, creating ethically charged situations between doctor and patient, medicine, and society, determined the formation of bioethics as a new ethical system. The search for new criteria for death takes into account the need for legal provision of posthumous transplantation. Death, to some extent, becomes a technological epiphenomenon. Thanks to the development of modern medicine and healthcare, the zone of dying as a state of uncertainty changes qualitatively, and its temporal dimension expands and varies from decades to several minutes of clinical death.