What About the Family? Practices of Responsibility in Care

Health and social care decisions, and how they impact a family, are often viewed from the perspective of the individual family member making them--for example, the role of the parent in surrogacy questions, the care of the elderly, or decisionis that involve fetuses or organ donations. This volume represents a concerted, collaborative effort to depart from this practice--it shows, rather, that the family unit as a whole shapes and influences the patient's decisions and very understanding of the choice at hand. The family is intrinsic and inseparable from such ethical choices. This deeper level of thinking about families and health care poses an entirely new set of difficult questions. Which family members are relevant in influencing a patient, and why is this so? What is a family, in the first place? What duties does a family have to its own members?

This volume, edited by bioethicists Hilde Lindemann, Marian Verkerk, and Janice McLaughlin, develops an ethic radically distinct from health care ethics, feminist ethics, or an ethic of care, even though authors draw on many of the resources those approaches offer. What makes an ethics of families distinctive is that it theorizes relationships characterized by ongoing intimacy and partiality among people who are not interchangeable, and remains centered on the practices of responsibility arising from these relationships.

What About the Family? represents an interdisciplinary effort, drawing, among other resources, on its authors' backgrounds in sociology, nursing, philosophy, bioethics, and the medical sciences. Contributors begin from the assumption that any ethical examination of the significance of family ties to health and social care will benefit from a dialogue with the debates about family occuring in these other disciplinary areas, and examine why families matter, how families are recognized, how families negotiate responsibilities, how families can participate in treatment decision making, and how justice operates in families.

Hilde Lindemann is Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. A Fellow of the Hastings Center and a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, her ongoing research interests are in feminist bioethics, feminist ethics, the ethics of families, and the social construction of persons and their identities. She is the former editor of The Hastings Center Report as well as of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

Marian Verkerk is Full Professor Ethics of Care at the University Medical Centre of Groningen (UMCG) and the University of Groningen. She is interested in exploring how questions of morality and ethics are embedded in relational perspectives and experiences of care. She was previously program leader of an international research consortium on Ethics of Families. Since 2017 she has served as project leader on Patient Engagement at the UMCG.

Janice McLaughlin is Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University. Her research interests focus on childhood disability and the examination of its surrounding social and institutional worlds, including family. Though a sociologist, she draws from associated disciplines such as anthropology and bioethics, with a strong emphasis on empirical qualitative research. Her most recent book (with Edmund Coleman-Fountain and Emma Clavering) is Disabled Childhoods: Monitoring Differences and Emerging Identities (Routledge, 2018).