Feminist ethics and medical ethics are critical of contemporary moral theory in several similar respects. There is a shared sense of frustration with the level of abstraction and generality that characterizes traditional philosophic work in ethics and a common commitment to including contextual details and allowing room for the personal aspects of relationships in ethical analysis. This paper explores the ways in which context is appealed to in feminist and medical ethics, the sort of details that should be included in (...) the recommended narrative approaches to ethical problems, and the difference it makes to our ethical deliberations if we add an explicitly feminist political analysis to our discussion of context. It is claimed that an analysis of gender is needed for feminist medical ethics and that this requires a certain degree of generality, i.e. a political understanding of context. (shrink)

‘Doing good medical ethics’ involves attending to both the biomedical and existential aspects of illness. For this, we need to bring in a phenomenological perspective to the clinical encounter, adopt a virtue-based ethic and resolve to re-evaluate the goals of medicine, in particular the alleviation of suffering and the role of compassion in everyday ethics.

The attitudes and behaviours that constitute caring affect both the quality of the patient's experience and the outcomes of medical care. They can be identified and can be nurtured or discouraged by the structures of organisation and financing within which health care is provided. They have costs, so their viability is threatened as pressures increase to make health care more economically efficient. Yet the value of caring behaviour may justify what is necessary to sustain it. This issue deserves prompt and (...) extensive debate as health care systems undergo revision throughout the world. (shrink)

This paper firstly distinguishes between principles of “global justice” that apply the same anywhere and everywhere – Tännsjö’s utilitarianism, egalitarianism, prioritarianism and such like – and principles of “local justice” that apply within the specific sphere of health-care. Sometimes the latter might just be a special case of the former – but not always. Secondly, it discusses reasons, many psychological in nature, why physicians might devote excessive resources to prolonging life pointlessly, showing once again that those reasons might themselves be (...) morally significant. (shrink)