The Care Dialog: the “ethics of care” approach and its importance for clinical ethics consultation

Abstract

Ethics consultation in institutions of the healthcare system has been given a standard form based on three pillars: education, the development of guidelines and concrete ethics consultation in case conferences. The spread of ethics committees, which perform these tasks on an organizational level, is a remarkable historic achievement. At the same time it cannot be denied that modern ethics consultation neglects relevant aspects of care ethics approaches. In our essay we present an “ethics of care” approach as well as an empirical pilot project—“Ethics from the bottom up”—which organizes ethics consultation based on this focus. Findings and philosophy of the project will be discussed as far as relevant for ethics consultation in the healthcare system.