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Care is among the most important concepts in healthcare. It is not only a descriptive concept, but it also conveys a normative orientation. Approaches to the ethics of care have shown that care can indeed be understood as an overarching normative concept that integrates different normative orientations. Nonetheless, determining what constitutes good care is usually a matter of finding reasonable compromises. In healthcare settings, a typical compromise involves finding a balance between optimal care for individuals on the one hand and the institutional demands of providing care to many care receivers over long periods of time as well as the limits of what can legitimately be asked of individual care providers on the other.

In searching for reasons why German academics have ignored the ethics of care, Elisabeth Conradi considers two earlier thinkers. The first, Hermann Cohen, regarded the active support of others as a certain type of awareness transcending national and religious affiliation. The second, Martin Buber, republished Cohen’s texts in 1935 and stressed the importance of attention and warmth in human relations.

Against the theologian Gerhard Kittel’s grotesque misuse of Jewish ethics to justify National Socialist laws Conradi places neighbour love in the rabbinic interpretation, which emphasised physical assistance such as visiting and nursing the sick. In the nineteenth century, Jewish societies were formed to fulfil the duties of this biblical injunction. These societies, many of which were women’s associations, marked the transition from volunteer civil engagement to professional practice.

Care, I suspect, is initiated with an appeal. Something appeals to me which becomes a matter of concern. In accordance with this concern, I develop a volition: I want that which promotes the thriving—even to the smallest extent—of that which has appealed to us, regardless of how I may establish what that entails. Eventually I take practical action: I act according to my volition. Immediately after this has taken effect, as the case may be, I release the source of the appeal from my care.

The phenomenology of care seems to us to be of eminent importance for health care ethics. To denote professional caring, the term nursing is used. The professional care-giver purposefully exposes him/herself to an appeal, making him/herself receptive to such an appeal and reliably allowing the appeal to become a concern. A fundamental principle of nursing ethics thus appears to us to be: to make known one’s receptiveness to an appeal—in a particular situation at a particular time—and to process this appeal reliably such that it becomes a concern. This encompasses the professionalism of care at its initiation.

I believe that a precise phenomenology of care will provide a definition of the professional care that is nursing and an ethics of nursing for the care-giving professions.

Medical ethics initially dedicated itself to principlism, which promised manageability of ethical problems. Only gradually, it was realised that the principlistic approach was biased and one-sided, because many medical-ethical problems do not break down to abstract principles. Due to this new understanding, complementary methodical approaches to medical ethics evolved. One of the most prominent alternative approaches is that of ethics of care. Giovanni Maio presents in details the basic elements of ethics of care, primarily by recourse to Paul Ricoeur. In a second part, he sets out the relevance of care for an adequate handling of medical-ethical problems.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the principle of autonomy has come to be regarded as the cornerstone of medical ethics. Older principles of medical ethics, such as beneficence and non-maleficence, both of which can be subsumed under the concept of “care”, have correspondingly decreased in importance. Drawing on hermeneutic analyses of the constitutive interrelations between autonomous will-formation on the one hand, and well-being and social embeddedness on the other hand, it will be argued that a proper understanding of autonomy necessarily incorporates attention to well-being and care, and vice versa. The true ethical challenge is not to determine whether autonomy or care ought to take precedence, but to understand respecting autonomy and providing care as two aspects of one and the same ethical demand to attend to and help other individuals.

In recent decades surrogacy has become a global business that calls into question traditional concepts of family and the idea of intimacy between two people. A woman offers her body—and in some cases also her ova—to a couple with an unfulfilled wish for a child. An analysis of relationships and the way in which relationships of care can be promoted in times of globalisation and the commercialisation of private spheres of life is central to an ethics of care. Starting with this assumption about the ethics of care, two criticisms of surrogacy are indicated: (1) the potential emotional, physical and financial exploitation of the surrogate as a result of the commercialisation of reproductive labour and (2) the disintegration of private and intimate relationships by separating conception, delivery and child education. This chapter focuses on aspect (2) by explaining the importance of relationships for our moral self-understanding. The phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas is of special importance to this discussion, since his philosophy emphasises relationships and the idea of responsibility within relationships, and discusses the extent to which relationships serve as the basis for justice. Employing the insights of Levinas, I will show that the practice of surrogacy is first and foremost a caring relationship between the parents-to-be and the surrogate. As a result the practice of surrogacy must not be reduced to economic terms or international regulation. Instead it is crucial to highlight the importance of caring relationships (and their intimacy) for an ethical evaluation of surrogacy.

Legal and philosophical accounts of ‘the will’ seem insufficient when thinking about what residents of nursing homes dementia want, and how situations in which a resident wants something else than his or her care worker should be dealt with. In this chapter, I offer an alternative understanding of the will—namely as ‘done’ in sociomaterial interaction, in which it can be aligned by making it relational. Instead of dismissing ‘daily wanting’ of those living with dementia, my analysis enables thinking about it. Based on an ethnography of daily care situations in physical care provision in Dutch nursing homes for people with dementia, I propose the concept of ‘sociomaterial will-work’ to highlight how daily wanting is worked upon in the context of unfolding sociomaterial interaction. I describe ways in which care workers’ and residents’ attempt to align the other’s wanting with their own as a form of labour and as dependent on sociomaterial relations, namely by (1) sculpting moods and emotions, (2) managing attention and (3) creative negotiation involving time and materialities. I argue that we may learn something about good care from taking a closer look at these practices: in doing sociomaterial will-work care workers strive for a positive way of relating, seeking alternatives to nothing for neglecting the resident or exerting force. Indeed, sociomaterial will-work may sometimes fail, but, as is key to doing good care, even so, it keeps on trying.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Germany’s first Dementia Village, this chapter explores the rewards as well as the trials and tribulations of community creation within the confines of the modern welfare state. The paper shows how the creation of a Dementia Village—created as a communal space for its residents that is governed by societal standards of care—ties into long-standing traditions in social thought and speaks to the tension of combining sociality with rationalised bureaucratic efficiency. Through a review of conversations and ethnographic observations, the paper argues that although care in a Dementia Village at first appeared to redraw the map of dementia care, the landscape remained unaltered. Just as in other care environments, both carers and residents lived and worked in an environment that locates intimacy and compassion in one place and the biomedical and bureaucratic exigencies of modern biomedicine and care philosophies in another.

While the theoretical discussion on the (inter)dependence of care and justice is still ongoing, this contribution points to an unnoticed guest at the banquet: regulation. Via the concept of depersonalization, this contribution unveils that the current Flemish regulation on the use of seclusion cells in psychiatric hospitals might be an obstacle to care. Departing from a review of regulation on the basis of Tronto’s phases of care, this contribution maintains that regulation could and should be omnipresent in the domain of care, but that the act of caring itself may not be subject to constant regulatory concern. This involves an appeal to both regulation and care.

In this contribution, I introduce witnessing as one mode of action and interaction of midwives and women during pregnancy, birth and the postpartum stage. I understand witnessing as an embodied interrelated presence of midwives and women which takes place in specific configurations. Witnessing is contractual: midwife and woman have to fulfil their role in order to make it work. Witnessing can be an assuring external interpretation of body states. It might lead to alienation if the woman feels exposed and distanced. I show that touching can be a witnessing strategy if it is not imposed and not aimed at producing medical testimonials only. Trust is a strategy of the witnessed woman which anticipates the vulnerable intimateness which is expected from the midwife. As witnessing is embodied and situated, it might compete with the supposed higher truth of technical testimonials like those created by the CTG (cardiotocograph). If and how, where, and under which circumstances witnessing is enacted relates to midwives’ and women’s “scope of action”.