Ethics of Care and Wellness

Medical ethics is most often taught as a set of clinical guidelines applied to cases. Ethics of Care and Wellness works in the other direction. It treats the clinical questions as downstream of philosophical ones, and so begins with the human person, with moral agency and conscience, with logic and critical thinking, with personhood, and with the systems of ethics that frame any judgment in care. Only then does the book turn to the obligations of the professional, the parameters of consent, the questions of privacy and competency, and the applications that follow in reproductive medicine, maternal and fetal care, end-of-life decisions, and the ethics of testing and research.

The book’s audience is wider than the standard textbook. It is written for medical professionals, for caregivers, and for patients together. Its premise is that those three groups share a single relational endeavor rather than occupy three sides of a transaction. The professional is a person treating persons. The caregiver is a person attending persons. The patient is a person seeking care. The ethical questions of health care are therefore not three separate inquiries but one shared inquiry, and the book is structured to be read in that spirit.

The rhetorical method is the method of the classroom lecture and dialectic. A topic is framed, the customary understanding is examined and unseated where it cannot stand, and the corrected understanding is introduced and held. Case studies appear throughout. A single narrative thread, Anna’s story, follows one patient’s journey through an infant leukemia diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and uncertain cure, and anchors the abstractions in a life.

The closing chapters press toward emergent bioethics, mental health, allocation, transhumanism, and the cult of health, arguing that an ethics adequate to the medical future will be the ethics that has first formed the practitioner in critical thinking, in knowing how to question, and in knowing what questions to ask.