Nonhuman Animal Ethics: Outlining a Duty of Care for the Dependent

To understand how people who present on multiple occasions to the emergency department experience their health professionals' moral comportment (ethic of care and duty of care); and to understand the consequences of this for 'people who present on multiple occasions' ongoing choices in care. People (n = 34) with chronic illness who had multiple presentations were interviewed about the role that emergency departments played within their lives and health-illness journey. Unprompted, all participants shared views about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the care they received from the health professionals in the emergency departments they had attended. These responses raised the imperative for specific analysis of the data regarding the need for and experience of an ethic of care. Qualitative description of interview data (stage 3 of a multimethod study). The methods included further analysis of existing interviews, exploration of relevant literature, use of Tronto's ethic of care as a theoretical framework for analysis, thematic analysis of people who present on multiple occasions' texts and explication of health professionals' moral positions in relation to present on multiple occasions' experiences. Four moral comportment positions attributed by the people who present on multiple occasions to the health professionals in emergency department were identified: 'sustained and enmeshed ethic and duty of care', 'consistent duty of care', 'interrupted or mixed duty and ethic of care', and 'care in breach of both the ethic and duty of care'. People who present on multiple occasions are an important group of consumers who attend the emergency department. Tronto's phases/moral elements in an ethic of care are useful as a framework for coding qualitative texts. Investigation into the bases, outcomes and contextual circumstances that stimulate the different modes of moral comportment is needed. Findings carry implications for emergency department care of people who present on multiple occasions and for emergency department health professionals to increase awareness of their moral comportment in care.

The “ethics of care” is an approach to morality that focuses on the moral salience of responsibilities to particular, concrete others and the relationships and connections from which they arise. It emphasizes the importance of context in moral judgment and action and starts with a view of moral agents as inherently and necessarily vulnerable and interdependent. It is widely seen as a feminist approach to morality, although theorists now approach care ethics from a variety of perspectives. Care ethics represents a critical alternative to dominant (often seen as “masculinist”) traditions in ethics, including deontological, rights-based, and contractualist ethics. The term ethic of care is usually attributed to Carol Gilligan, who provided one of the earliest articulations of this “different voice” of morality (see Gilligan 1982, cited under Foundational Works). The idea of a global ethic of care is a more recent development in care ethics scholarship that builds on the idea of a political ethic of care. Political theorists of care have argued that care ethics reaches its full potential when understood politically. Specifically, the idea of a political ethics of care recognizes that relations of care operate within and through relations of power. Most recently, scholars have argued that care ethics has significance not only beyond personal, proximate relations, but also beyond the borders of the nation-state. Robinson 1999 (cited under Monographs) explores how care ethics can provide a compelling alternative to rationalist, rights-based, or “justice” reasoning in international ethics. Since then, work on global care ethics has revealed the transnational and global implications of both existing relations of care—and the racialized, gendered relations of power in which they are embedded—and the potential for new and transformative caring relations and responsibilities across borders. By and large, scholars engaging with global care ethics share a theoretical and/or methodological commitment to feminism. Of course, these understandings of and approaches to feminism vary substantially; that said, the recognition of care as a moral disposition and a set of practices and type of work usually involve attention to unequal gender relations. Moreover, the task of globalizing care usually requires attention to other social structures, including race, class, and geopolitical location. Since the 1990s work on global care ethics has proliferated, with scholars relating the theory and practice of care ethics to such diverse issues as political violence, human security, peace and peacebuilding, global political economy, migration, and global social policy.

This paper extends the discourse on the importance of the relationship between practitioner and young person as a defining tenet of effective youth work practice, recognising the privileged position occupied by Youth Workers in the social ecology of the young people with whom they work. Reflecting the ethical obligations inherent in this relationship, particularly its focus on enhancing young people’s agency and developmental outcomes, the paper outlines how youth work practice infused with professional love aligns with conceptualizations of an ethic of care. Reporting on interviews conducted with Youth Workers practicing in different settings across one local authority area in the UK, the paper articulates how practitioners’ ethic of care shapes their work with young people, and the extent to which love features as an element of their professional practice. Practitioners describe their motivation to express care that extends beyond legalistic interpretations of their ‘duty of care’ towards young people, using the language of care, love and nurture almost interchangeably. The paper demonstrates the importance of inclusion and reciprocity as fundamental elements of ethical practice, as well as the need to infuse practice with hope, suggesting the value of an affirmative ethic to complement a focus on love and care.

Trust Science and Inspire Hope: Our Duty of Care

The ethical theories considered in this commentary include Anthropocentrism, Dominionism, Utilitarianism, Reverence for Life, Animal Rights, Biocentrism, Ecocentrism and Care Ethics. It is apparent that Utilitarianism provides a motivating rationale for devising legal instruments to manage animal welfare in many countries. The emphasis of different laws spanning many decades paralleled the trajectory of changing attitudes to animals. Initial laws focussed on serious abuse, and were enacted to deal with relative indifference to animal suffering. Anticruelty laws followed; they dealt with a wider range of noxious acts that also cause suffering. Animal Protection laws accommodated a growing acceptance that much less severe, yet still very unpleasant experiences, are of significant welfare concern. These laws and their amendments, plus the associated instruments (e.g., Codes of Welfare/Practice), were increasingly couched using animal welfare terminology. Finally, contemporary laws that focus directly to animal welfare, increasingly refer to a 'duty of care' towards animals, entailing responsibilities to minimise negative experiences and to promote positive ones. Outlined here is an example of an ethically-based legal structure for providing guidance and outlining requirements for animal welfare management nationally. It has four interacting levels: Level 1-Law; Level 2-Codes of Welfare/Practice; Level 3-Regulations; and Level 4-Cooperation at a National Level. It is noted that although the framing of this legal structure is based on ethical principles, the expression of those principles is more implicit than explicit. However, expression of the ethical principles can be made much more explicit when putting into effect legal requirements to assess the acceptability of different practices in animal welfare terms. There are four interacting steps in this process: Step 1-the Primary Assumption: Animals have intrinsic value and an interest in having good lives. Step 2-Distribution of Responsibility: Humans usually control human-animal interactions and have an overarching responsibility to operate two principles: (1) If in doubt err on the side of the animal; (2) If there are justified concerns, a lack of evidence can never in itself justify a practice. Step 3-Assessment of Impact on the Animals: Use a structured framework to assess the impact of human-initiated activities. The Five Domains Model is suggested as a suitable device for this. Step 4-Rigorous Evaluation: the aim, to choose the least noxious intervention as required by the Principle of Proportionality which, once chosen, supports a justification to proceed. This commentary provides examples of how ethical reasoning, and its operational consequences, can be made visible at every stage of developing, introducing and operating infrastructures for managing animal welfare nationally.

Which questions could be useful for social workers facing moral choices in daily practice? The article presents a concrete case and some questions rooted in various ethical perspectives in social work. The classical approaches, which include teleological, deontological and rights-based approaches, are referred to as universal and general principles. On the other hand, ‘situated’ positions are linked to specific and unique situations in professional practice, such as ethics of care, narrative approaches and face-to-face ethics. Linking different points of view to a specific situation can help social workers understand its ethical features and decide how to act.

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.墮胎是當代最具爭議性的道德問題之一。但問題的焦點是否是婦女選擇墮胎的權利與胎兒生存權利的取捨？究竟以權利立論為婦女爭取墮胎的自由是否適切？以權利立論是否沒有限制？婦女在考慮墮胎時，是否以從權利的角度出發作決定呢？如果婦女考慮墮胎時，是從關懷的角度出發作決定，則此進路由是否沒有問題呢？當然，如果論辨的雙方能夠彼此了解及對話，能否為解決此爭拗帶來甚幫助呢？本文將會介紹湯森（Judith Jarvis Thomson）及沃倫（Mary Anne Warren）以權利立論為婦女爭取墮胎權的立場，趙凌姬（Carol Gilligan）關懷倫理及徐姿（Laurie Shrage）詮釋及多元的道德進路，並嘗試了解不同進路的限制，目的並不是要解決道德問題，卻是要深化我們對這問題的複雜性的體認。Abortion is one of the most controversial moral problems in contemporary world. People believe that the heart of the problem is the conflict between the fetuses' right to life and the women's rights to abortion. However, do women take their rights seriously when they decided to go for an abortion? Or one should look at the issue from the interpretive and pluralist approach? This essay is an attempt to introduce our readers to the problem by looking at three feminist approaches.Judith Jarvis Thomson and May Anne Warren represent those feminists defending the rights of women to choose abortion. Thomson argues that abortion is justified, even if the fetus has a right to life. For a woman should have the right to refuse the use of her body to a dependent fetus. It is not the obligation of the woman to afford the fetus that use. However, is it morally justifiable for a woman, who willingly accepted the pregnancy, yet suddenly use her right to abortion after hosting the fetus for several months?What Warren argues is that a fetus does not have those traits characterize "personhood". Since the fetus is not a person, its right to life should not override the right of a woman to choose abortion. However, it is dangerous to use the concept of personhood as a criterion of exclusion. To question someone's personhood is the first step to mistreatment and killing.While feminists are trying to defend their right to abortion, there are some women abusing their rights. There are women who choose to abort for what they carry are female fetuses. There are also some risked abortions for they do not want to postpone or diminish their partners' sexual pleasure. Moreover, while feminists are defending their rights, are they at the same time oppressing the vulnerable fetuses? Therefore, recently, more and more theorists dissatisfied with rights-based approaches to abortion.Moreover, according to Carol Gilligan, when women consider for abortion, they do not take the male ethics of duty or obligation. That means they do not approach the decision by rights-based arguments. Usually what women take is an ethics of responsibility or care. Women are more inclined to reflect on how their decisions on abortion might affect the quality of their relationships. Women are making moral decisions in terms of their understanding of the relative importance of their interests versus the interests of others close to them. Although women forgo the right-based approach, the ethics of care is not without its problem. For when similar responsibilities are in conflict, the ethics of care could not provide any means to give a resolution.What Laurie Shrage advocates is an interpretive, pluralist approach to abortion. She sees the struggle over the women right to abortion as an indicative of deep cultural conflicts over a range of issue including not only the personhood of fetus, but also the meaning of life itself and how it should be lived by women and others. People involved in the debate have different cultural understandings of person hood as well as motherhood. What they need to do is to understand one another and dialogue with a view lo reaching a compromise. Although what Shrage proposed is promising, however, abortion is a life and death issue fueled with emotion. Even the two sides could try to grasp an in-depth understand the other's position, they might not be able to reach an agreement. The abortion issue is not a problem easy to reach a resolution.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 214 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

Are there nonhuman animals who behave morally? In this paper I answer this question in the affirmative by applying the framework of care ethics to the animal morality debate. According to care ethics, empathic care is the wellspring of morality in humans. While there have been several suggestive analyses of nonhuman animals as empathic, much of the literature within the animal morality debate has marginalized analyses from the perspective of care ethics. In this paper I examine care ethics to extract its core commitments to what is required for moral care: emotional motivation that enables the intentional meeting of another’s needs, and forward-looking responsibility in particular relationships. What is not required, I argue, are metarepresentational capacities or the ability to scrutinize one’s reasons for action, and thus being retrospectively accountable. This minimal account of moral care is illustrated by moral practices of parental care seen in many nonhuman animal species. In response to the worry that parental care in nonhuman animals lacks all evaluation and is therefore nonmoral I point to cultural differences in human parenting and to normativity in nonhuman animals.

With the deepening of China’s reform and opening up and the continuous development of the market economy, interest-driven makes moral individuals present a phenomenon of moral indifference. The moral indifference separates the moral participants into independent individuals, ignores the interpersonal interaction and assembly, and leads to the alienation of human relations and the mistrust between people, which affects the harmony and development of society and has become the bottleneck of restricting China’s moral development. How to resolve moral indifference is a social issue that is urgently needed to be solved in China. This paper tries to propose a theoretical possible solution of resolving contemporary moral indifference, that is, Care ethics. The concept of “Care Ethics” was first put forward by professor Nel. Noddings of American Stanford University in 1980, which highlights the perceptual level of care and emphasizes the intrinsic relational care. The basic idea of care ethical solution to resolve moral indifference performs in four aspects: highlighting the displacement of caregiver’s moral motivation based on moral emotion; emphasizing the construction of the ethical relationship between self and others based on the relation; meeting the real psychological needs of the cared person in a targeted manner; consolidating care behavior based on contextual factors. This paper finally finds that these possible paths will help to liberate the human nature that is currently suppressed, get out of the moral indifference, establish a good social and moral relationship, and achieve harmonious social development.

The authors highlight the role of love and care as the ‘lifeblood of being-well’ for teachers in England. The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed unprecedented stressors on teachers. However, the article problematises and goes beyond the dominant narrative of ‘sudden crisis’ on the grounds that this may obscure the complex realities of a profession suffering mental health challenges well before the pandemic. The authors highlight their concerns about the predominant discourse surrounding teachers’ wellbeing, the inefficacy of tokenistic interventions, and offer a more holistic, context-sensitive conceptualisation of ‘being-well’, rooted in love and compassion for oneself and each other. From the lens of positive sociology, the authors call for structurally contextualised wellbeing provision that recognises teachers’ pre-existing pressures and stressors and sustains cultures of care beyond the temporal boundaries of the pandemic. Drawing on the ethic of care, they advocare a shift from ‘the duty of care’ to ‘a duty to care’. Wellbeing and struggling are conceptualised here as interrelated and co-dependent phenomena influenced by theories of compassion, including Buddhist notions of Love Mode and Power Mode. The authors see love as connectedness and emphasise the importance of relationality in teachers’ sense of being-well as individuals who interconnect in a complex education system.

Socio-cultural research on athlete maltreatment is well documented, with much work focused on examining the spectrum of mistreatment and programmatic/policy responses. While some sport governing bodies have implemented a ‘duty of care’ approach, more definitional analyses of care and caring in competitive youth sport remain absent. This gap served as point of departure for an institutional ethnographic study designed to examine practices of care and caring within the context of youth competitive volleyball through a socio-philosophical lens. Informed by the philosophical frameworks espoused in the Ethics of Care and the Ethics of Need, this paper utilises textual and interview data from the larger study to examine how athletes, coaches, and parents interpret and practice care in relationship to notions of care established in the sport organisation’s governing policies. The results showed how, at the institutional level, notions of care expressed in the sport organisation’s governing documents focused more so on identifying and preventing uncaring practices rather than illuminating what constitutes care and caring, while participants negotiated and interpreted their lived experiences of care as the prioritisation of the needs of athletes over the performance imperative. This was particularly true for coaches who were dually tasked with the care-taking of youth athletes on their teams, whilst also ensuring performance success on the playing field. Thus, coaches are responsible for practices of care in situ that are not fulsomely addressed in governing policies, which presents challenges for coaches when balancing athletes’ needs while also adhering to the aims of competitive sport.

BackgroundSocial cognition impairments have been extensively described in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Moral emotions have recently emerged as a potentially sensitive domain to characterize and discriminate bvFTD patients from other types of dementia. Here, we examined the usefulness of moral emotions measures to characterize and discriminate bvFTD from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients, and their structural brain correlates in both groups.MethodIn this multicenter (Chile‐Colombia) study, 31 bvFTD, 30 AD patients, and 37 healthy controls –matched by age, sex, and educational level– completed an adapted version of the Moral Sentiments Association Task (MSAT) consisting of 29 text‐based scenarios evoking moral (guilt, pity, embarrassment, and indignation) and basic (fear and disgust) emotions. After reading each scenario, participants selected the emotion they would feel in that situation and rated their elicited intensity and disturbance levels. General cognitive (MoCA/ACE‐III) and executive (IFS) measures were also included. Additionally, we performed VBM analysis in a subsample (15 bvFTD, 20 AD, 17 controls) to study the association between grey matter volumes and moral emotions processingResultAfter controlling for cognitive and executive skills, bvFTD patients exhibited lower accuracy on identifying moral emotions –pity, embarrassment, and indignation– than AD patients, despite null differences in basic emotions. Subsequent discriminant analysis revealed that this differential pattern classified patient groups more accurately (74%: 65% bvFTD and 83% AD) than individual cognitive (59%) and executive (51%) measures. Crucially, between‐group classification substantially improved when combining the three measures mentioned above (79%: 68% bvFTD, 90% AD). In both groups, pity, embarrassment, and indignation identification correlated with reduced grey matter volumes in regions subserving social cognition and emotion processing, including the Rolandic operculum, the inferior and middle temporal gyri, and the postcentral gyrus (exclusive to bvFTD).ConclusionThese results suggest that bvFTD patients exhibit moral emotion impairments as compared with AD patients. Particularly, pity, embarrassment, and indignation emerged as useful measures to patients' classification. Such findings contribute to a better understanding of the structural correlates of moral emotional deficits in bvFTD patients while highlighting the potential benefits of integrating this domain into the standard cognitive and executive assessment for a more accurate differential diagnosis.

The aim of the study was to explore children’s conceptions of morality, specifically the meanings children assigned to situations of morality. The participants were eight to eleven-year-old children (n = 8; female = 5, male = 3) who attended a primary school in KwaZulu-Natal. The children completed vignettes depicting moral dilemmas involving the following hypothetical scenarios: scenario 1 = seeking revenge; scenario 2 = breach of a contract. Thematic analysis of the data uncovered three themes: (i) sense of right or wrong; (ii) ethics of care; and (iii) ideas about fairness. Findings reveal that the young children had advanced conceptions of morality and understandings of justice, ethics of care, and notions of fairness. It emerged that their moral reasoning, moral judgements, moral attributions, and moral emotions are intersecting in nature and are underpinned by the African values of Ubuntu.

The article reports the perspectives of senior care staff as part of a study exploring personalisation in care homes. Behind the conceptual sword and shield of ‘choice and control’ associated with personalisation in the United Kingdom (UK) lie irreconcilable flaws, thrown into sharp relief in this context. Personalisation, which originated in community-based social services, has recently been extended into UK care homes. This service development has been stimulated by a desire to promote a humane response to caring for an ageing population, whilst containing costs. Seemingly promoting a relational approach, personalisation also entails consumerist underpinnings, with consequent tensions resulting in weakened policy mechanisms. Discussing findings pertaining to ‘food and eating’, the article illustrates the complex interplay between supporting resident capabilities with poor staff ratios; when choice is not really choice at all; balancing choice, risk and the duty of care; and responding to diverse perspectives about what matters. This complexity reflects the highly skilled nature of care work as promoted by care ethicists. The tensions permeated care home life and found parallels in the wider system of care. Honesty about the limitations of choice and control is essential to achieve ethical care in care homes. The care home constitutes fertile ground for exposing and exploring the shortcomings of the ‘logic of choice’ and for advancing a more relational, inclusive and sustainable conceptualisation of personalisation.

This chapter concerns the contemporary debate on the intersectionality of Confucianism with feminism in general and its compatibility with care ethics in particular. My intent here is to propose a hybrid feminist care ethics that is grounded in Confucianism by, on the one hand, integrating specifically the concepts of xiao 孝 and ren 仁 into existing care ethics so as to strengthen and broaden its theoretical horizon and, on the other, revising Confucian gender requirements in light of feminist demands for gender equity. It is my take that Confucian xiao 孝, as the root of ren 仁, is a moral vision that sees human inter-dependency as a strength in, and not a distraction from, human flourishing. In the same way, care ethics also starts with meeting the caring needs of one’s intimate loved ones, and caring relations in the personal realm for care ethicists have an ontological primacy. Morality for Confucius as well as for care ethicists, unlike the Kantian, liberal model that emphasizes detachment and personal autonomy, simply cannot bypass one’s affective ties in the familial realm. In the following, I will provide a hybrid account of care ethics and Confucianism – Confucian care – in which caring for the socially dependent and vulnerable starting with one’s loved ones is viewed as constitutive of the substance of one’s sense of the self; it forms part of one’s life’s journey to self-realization, not only in the realm of morality, but also in the realm of feminism as well.