University Presses Medicine and the Ethics of Care

Medicine and the Ethics of Care brings insights from both religious and feminist scholarship proposing creative new approaches to the ethics of medical care. While traditional ethics emphasizes rules, justice, and fairness, the contributors to this volume embrace the ethics of engaged care, which values emotional involvement in the lives of others in order to discern what ought to be done on their behalf. The contributors reflect on the related themes of community, narrative, and emotion. They argue for the need to understand patients and caregivers alike as moral agents who are embedded in multiple communities, who seek to attain or promote healing partly through the medium of storytelling, and who do so also by cultivating good emotional habits. A thought-provoking contribution to a field that has long been dominated by the ethics of principles, Medicine and the Ethics of Care will appeal to scholars and students who want to move beyond the constraints of traditional approaches. ...