THE CONCEPT OF CARE ETHICS IN BIOMEDICINE The Case of Disability

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to offer an oblique approach to the question of biomedicine and the limits of human existence by discussing the role of a care-based ethic in contemporary discussions of disability. Contemporary discussions of disability have resisted the notion that disability is essentially a matter of biology and medicine – that biomedicine has any exclusive right to define, or even to redress, the adverse living conditions that physiological impairments can impose on individuals. In this paper I endorse this critique, but at the same time want to urge caution in a concomitant rejection, which is also found in the disability literature, of the conception of care. Care addresses the limits and limitations of human existence, and disability is a condition in which humans at once encounter and challenge those limits. In this respect, disability shares with many issues of biomedicine questions of vulnerability and dependency. An ethics based on care offers distinct resources for discussions of biomedicine, but I will confine my remarks to exploring the importance of these for disability.