Abstract: It's hardly startling that the store of bioethical essays concerned with the question, Who has the right to demand what from whom? dwarfs the supply of those that consider how people might use their rights admirably. Imagine someone agonizing over whether foregoing a prolonged and nasty last chance therapy would be an act of love for her beleaguered children or an expression of resentment at their half-reluctant doing of what she would eagerly do for them. It would be hard to talk to an intimate friend about such a matter. What can be said about it in a bioethicist's analysis--in the kind of thing that shows up in an intellectual journal? Isn't that analysis likely to be, at best, too blunt? In this issue of the Report, Martin Gunderson takes on just this sort of challenge. He powerfully reminds us that there's more to the moral life than acting within our rights, and that out love for those who may find themselves caring for us in our severe illnesses is double-edged: it provides a reason both to encumber them with care's burdens and to shield them. I think these are thoughtful and important insights. Yet they prompt a couple questions: Why is it that we need these reminders? Many of us spend much of our lives seeking out occasions to love and be loved--courting strangers, tending friendships, having children. In doing so, we take on simply enormous burdens, and while there are great rewards too, people are not, I hazard, generally inclined to think that the burdens are simply the heart's externalities, the down side of our personal utility calculation, a price worth paying, but to be dispensed with insofar as possible. If we need a scholar come from the stacks to tell us that in sharing our lives with others, we look to become a part of the bitter as well as the sweet, I suspect it's because there's something about health care practices, or their authoritative normative depictions, or both, that tends to distract us from what we know. What are we to do with these reminders now that we have them? Jenny and Steve know that their love gives them reason to spare each other from crushing demands, and also to expect significant sacrifices; they've been living out that knowledge for thirty years. But now that Jenny is very ill, does their relationship give her more reason to burden or to protect Steve? Gunderson recommends phronesis, practical judgment more attuned to subtle particularities than to general principles. He wants to make sure, however, that phronesis understands some tolerably general matters as it does so: the significance of such ideas as reciprocity, dependency; and autonomy; of love, self-respect, and commitment, their connections to our willingness to burden those we love. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-11-24
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['pubmed']
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