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 an "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: 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. A thought-provoking contribution to a field that has long been dominated by an ethics of principle, Medicine and the Ethics of Care will appeal to scholars and students who want to move beyond the constraints of that traditional approach.

Diana Fritz Cates, an associate professor of ethics in the School of Religion at the University of Iowa, is author of Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends.

Paul Lauritzen is a professor and the chair of the Department of Religious Studies and the director of the Program in Applied Ethics at John Carroll University. His books include Cloning and the Future of Human Embryo Research.