Dialogue and trust

pp. 65-86

in: Richard Zaner, A critical examination of ethics in health care and biomedical research, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

Encountering another person who is afflicted—whether from illness, injury, or the result of some genetic or congenital disorder—one comes into or happens on the moral order. This occurs, of course, in distinct ways in different sorts of relationships: in the present context, it occurs within the clinical encounter with its characteristic asymmetric relationship of power and vulnerability. The ground of ethics, I have thus only barely suggested, is the reflexive relatedness to and with the other person—perhaps most poignantly presented when we come upon the other-as-stranger, and even more so when the stranger is ill, when in both cases a form of strangeness comes to invade the ongoing interrelationships with other people.