Is Just Caring Possible? Challenge to Bioethics in the New Century

Abstract

This paper begins by reviewing some main concerns about the inadequacies of dominant theoretical approaches to bioethics in the last century. These concerns have led to increasing pressure to search for alternative frameworks and new paradigms to guide heath care and biomedical decision making which do not cast caring and justice as two oppositional and irreconciliable moral requirements. The paper examines three alternative frameworks: feminist care ethics, agent-based virtue ethics, and Chinese Confucian ethics and analyses how they can provide a different orientation for framing and developing alternative systems of bioethics. It concludes that these three ethical perspectives can provide foundations for a new bioethics which is more sensitive and more responsive to the moral ideal of ‘just caring’ than current mainstream impartialist or principle-based approaches. The paper argues for the importance for bioethical discourse to engage seriously with these three ethical perspectives in order to move away from the dualism and reductionism of the current American dominant paradigm of bioethics, which cannot be the global bioethics for the new century.