Medicine and the Ethics of Care

In these essays, a diverse group of ethicists draw insights from both religious and feminist scholarship in order to propose 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 care, which regards emotional engagement in the lives of others as basic to discerning what we ought to do on their behalf.The essays reflect on the three 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 by cultivating good emotional habits.

Medicine and the Ethics of Care will appeal to scholars and students who want to move beyond the constraints of traditional ethics of principles.