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Engaged Ethics in the Time of COVID: Caring for All or Excluding Some from the Lifeboat?

If good ethics is the process of ongoing dialogical deliberation on basic normative questions for the purpose of instituting principles for action, then the COVID crisis, or any crisis, is not a good time for developing ethical precepts on the run. Given dominant ethical trends, such reactive ethics...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: James, Paul
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Singapore 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7651790/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33169269
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10063-2
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author_facet James, Paul
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description If good ethics is the process of ongoing dialogical deliberation on basic normative questions for the purpose of instituting principles for action, then the COVID crisis, or any crisis, is not a good time for developing ethical precepts on the run. Given dominant ethical trends, such reactive ethics tends to lead to either individualized struggles over the right way to act or hasty sets of guidelines that leave out contextualizing questions concerning regimes of care. Good people will find themselves suggesting strange things, from setting up lifeboat scenarios to supporting structural racism. This essay argues against both these paths—crisis-ridden agonism or algorithmic resource-allocation—and turns instead to a form of ethics of care which takes its departure from older forms of ethics, while recognizing that modern and postmodern challenges no longer allow their grounding in animated relations, natural rights, or cosmological truths.
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spelling pubmed-76517902020-11-10 Engaged Ethics in the Time of COVID: Caring for All or Excluding Some from the Lifeboat? James, Paul J Bioeth Inq Symposium: COVID-19 If good ethics is the process of ongoing dialogical deliberation on basic normative questions for the purpose of instituting principles for action, then the COVID crisis, or any crisis, is not a good time for developing ethical precepts on the run. Given dominant ethical trends, such reactive ethics tends to lead to either individualized struggles over the right way to act or hasty sets of guidelines that leave out contextualizing questions concerning regimes of care. Good people will find themselves suggesting strange things, from setting up lifeboat scenarios to supporting structural racism. This essay argues against both these paths—crisis-ridden agonism or algorithmic resource-allocation—and turns instead to a form of ethics of care which takes its departure from older forms of ethics, while recognizing that modern and postmodern challenges no longer allow their grounding in animated relations, natural rights, or cosmological truths. Springer Singapore 2020-11-09 2020 /pmc/articles/PMC7651790/ /pubmed/33169269 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10063-2 Text en © Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Pty Ltd. 2020 This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.
spellingShingle Symposium: COVID-19
James, Paul
Engaged Ethics in the Time of COVID: Caring for All or Excluding Some from the Lifeboat?
title Engaged Ethics in the Time of COVID: Caring for All or Excluding Some from the Lifeboat?
title_full Engaged Ethics in the Time of COVID: Caring for All or Excluding Some from the Lifeboat?
title_fullStr Engaged Ethics in the Time of COVID: Caring for All or Excluding Some from the Lifeboat?
title_full_unstemmed Engaged Ethics in the Time of COVID: Caring for All or Excluding Some from the Lifeboat?
title_short Engaged Ethics in the Time of COVID: Caring for All or Excluding Some from the Lifeboat?
title_sort engaged ethics in the time of covid: caring for all or excluding some from the lifeboat?
topic Symposium: COVID-19
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7651790/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33169269
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10063-2
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