Parental overuse of portable technology poses a bonafide threat to the welfare and development of children. In the past decade, researchers have documented this phenomenon whereby parents pay far more attention to handheld electronic devices than to their children's safety and developmental needs. What most studies have failed to examine is the extent to which workers in privately owned and operated daycares also exhibit technology-induced distracted behavior. This article aims to identify the moral harm of caregivers' distracted behaviour in a (...) private daycare setting or, more simply, the welfare effects of distracted daycare. First, with the assistance of recent research, the phenomenon of distracted caregiving is defined. Then, the documented harms of distracted caregiving in a daycare setting are catalogued. Next, an ethical analysis of the phenomenon of distracted daycare working is undertaken from four normative ethical perspectives: (i) ethical egoism, (ii) utilitarianism, (iii) principlism and (iv) care ethics. Five recommendations for reforming distracted daycares, each based upon one or more of the four ethical perspectives, inform the article's conclusions. (shrink)

Learning to work as a relational caring professional in healthcare and social welfare, is foremost a process of transformative learning, of Building, of professional subjectification. In this article we contribute to the design of such a process of formation by presenting a structured map of five domains of formational goals. It is mainly informed by many years of care-ethical research and training of professionals in healthcare and social work. The five formational domains are:Relational Caring Approach,Perception,Knowledge,Interpretation, andPractical Wisdom. The formation process, (...) described as the recurring detour of a continuing practice, requires ‘exposure’, in-depth learning and learning communities. Relational caring—care consequently resulting from and structured by relational thinking, exploring, and steering—requires ‘inquiry’ as a continuous learning process in practice. The process is ultimately aimed at fostering mature, competent, and practically wise professional caregivers who are able to relationally connect with and attune to care receivers, and adequately navigate existential, moral, and political-institutional tensions in relational caring in complex organizations in Late-Modern society. (shrink)

This article aims to initiate a discussion on the demarcation of the ethics of care. This discussion is necessary because the ethics of care evolves by making use of insights from varying disciplines. As this involves the risk of contamination of the care ethical discipline, the challenge for care ethical scholars is to ensure to retain a distinct care ethical perspective. This may be supported by an open and critical debate on the criteria and boundaries of the ethics of care. (...) As a contribution, this article proposes a tentative outline of the care ethical discipline. What is characteristic of this outline is the emphasis on relational programming, situation-specific and context-bound judgments, a political–ethical perspective, and empirical groundedness. It is argued that the ethics of care is best developed further by means of an intradisciplinary approach. Two intradisciplinary examples show how within the frame of one discipline, other disciplines are absorbed, both with their body of knowledge and their research methodology. (shrink)

This article discusses the challenging context that health care professionals are confronted with, and the impact of this context on their emotional experiences. Care ethics considers emotions as a valuable source of knowledge for good care. Thinking with care ethical theory and looking through a care ethical lens at a practical case example, the authors discern reflective questions that shed light on a care ethical approach toward the role of emotions in care practices, and may be used by practitioners and (...) facilitators for care ethical reflection on similar cases, in the particular and concrete context where issues around emotional experiences arise. The authors emphasize the importance of allowing emotions to exist, to acknowledge them and to not repress them, so that they can serve as a vehicle for ethical behavior in care practices. They stress the difference between acknowledging emotions and expressing them limitlessly. Formational practices and transformational research practices are being proposed to create moral space in care institutions and to support health care professionals to approach the emotionally turbulent practices they encounter in a way that contributes to good care for all those involved. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic is a tragedy for those who have been hard hit worldwide. At the same time, it is also a test of concepts and practices of what good care is and requires, and how quality of care can be accounted for. In this paper, we present our Care-Ethical Model of Quality Enquiry and apply it to the case of residential care for older people in the Netherlands during the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of thinking about care in healthcare and (...) social welfare as a set of separate care acts, we think about care as a complex practice of relational caring, crossed by other practices. Instead of thinking about professional caregivers as functionaries obeying external rules, we think about them as practically wise professionals. Instead of thinking about developing external quality criteria and systems, we think about cultivating reflective quality awareness. Instead of abstracting from societal forces that make care possible but also limit it, we acknowledge them and find ways to deal with them. Based on these critical insights, the CEMQUE model can be helpful to describe, interrogate, evaluate, and improve existing care practices. It has four entries: the care receiver considered from their humanness, the caregiver considered from their solicitude, the care facility considered from its habitability and the societal, institutional and scholarly context considered from the perspective of the good life, justice and decency. The crux is enabling all these different entries with all their different aspects to be taken into account. In Corona times this turns out to be more crucial than ever. (shrink)

Background: Ethical care in maternity is fundamental to providing care that both prevents harm and does good, and yet, there is growing acknowledgement that disrespect and abuse routinely occur in this context, which indicates that current ethical frameworks are not adequate. Care ethics offers an alternative to the traditional biomedical ethical principles. Research aim: The aim of the study was to determine whether a correlation exists between midwifery-led care and care ethics as an important first step in an action research (...) project. Research design: Template analysis was chosen for this part of the action research. Template analysis is a design that tests theory against empirical data, which requires pre-set codes. Participants and context: A priori codes that represent midwifery-led care were generated by a stakeholder consultative group of nine childbearing women using nominal group technique, collected in Perth, Western Australia. The a priori codes were applied to a predesigned template with four domains of care ethics. Ethical considerations: Ethics approval was granted by the Edith Cowan University research ethics committee REMS no. 2019-00296-Buchanan. Findings: The participants generated eight a priori codes representing ethical midwifery care, such as: 1.1 Relationship with Midwife; 1.2 Woman-centred care; 2.1 Trust women’s bodies and abilities; 2.2. Protect normal physiological birth; 3.1. Information provision; 3.2. Respect autonomy; 4.1. Birth culture of fear and 4.2. Recognition of rite of passage. The a priori codes were mapped to the care ethics template. The template analysis found that midwifery-led care does indeed demonstrate care ethics. Discussion: Care ethics takes into consideration what principle-based bioethics have previously overlooked: relationship, context and power. Conclusion: Midwifery-led care has been determined in this study to demonstrate care ethics, which suggest that further research is defensible with the view that it could be incorporated into the ethical codes and conduct for the midwifery profession. (shrink)

This article is about caregivers being attentive to patients in healthcare. From earlier work on the understanding of the other, we know that it is impossible to completely understand the experiences of others. By the sharing of subjectivity—intersubjectivity—we may try to ‘grasp’ the other’s point of view. However, we can never assume that the same experience produces the same experience. Now, if it is principally impossible to understand the experience of one another, and if paying attention always implies an understanding (...) of what to pay attention to, then how is it possible to be attentive to the experiences of those who are entirely at the mercy of our care? How can caregivers perceive the impossibility of understanding the experiences of patients as an appeal to be attentive to their experiences? This is discussed in this article. It departs from the authors being confronted with inexplicabilities in the empirical study of attentiveness in healthcare. It presents two examples and discusses the meaning of these emergent properties. This leads to a discussion of the existent literature on the indefiniteness and openness of attentiveness. It becomes clear why, although we can understand and predict much of it, attentiveness will always be characterized by a certain uncontrollability as well. (shrink)

Bruno Latour is one of the founding figures in social network theory and a broadly influential systems thinker. Although his work has always been relational, little scholarship has engaged the relational morality, ontology, and epistemology of feminist care ethics with Latour’s actor–network theory. This article is intended as a translation and a prompt to spur further interactions. Latour’s recent publications, in particular, have focused on the new climate regime of the Anthropocene. Care theorists are just beginning to address posthuman approaches (...) to care. The argument here is that Latourian analysis is helpful for such explorations, given that caring for the earth and its inhabitants is the dire moral challenge of our time. The aim here is not to characterize Latour as a care theorist but rather as a provocative scholar who has much to say that is significant to care thinking. We begin with a brief introduction to Latour’s scholarship and lexicon, followed by a discussion of care theorist Puig de la Bellacasa’s work on Latour. We then explore recent work on care and the environment consistent with a Latourian approach. The conclusion reinforces the notion that valuing relationality across humans and non-human matter is essential to confronting the Anthropocene. (shrink)