Kantian Ethics and Ethics of Care in Feminist Moral Reasoning

Kantian Ethics and Ethics of Care in Feminism Moral Reasoning

I would choose to use a feeding tube on Rosemary if I am her doctor since her Do Not Attempt Resuscitation (DNAR) order is not really applicable in her current situation. Usually people sign DNAR to deny intensive life-extending medical treatments and to avoid suffering from unnecessary pain at the end of his/her own life, however Rosemary is not dying but “listless and non-communicative” in this case and the feeding tube here cannot considered to be intensive, but more likely an ordinary medical treatment to ensure daily nutrition supplies; removing the feeding tube would result in her death from starvation. In this paper, my argument would based on the ethics of care, as it appears to be the most compatible moral theory with the case. The core of ethics of care puts the vital interest of the patients as the priority. When argument takes place, people who are mostly related to the patients would actually plan and think for the patients for their own good. Eva Kittay, a feminist philosopher, refers “dependency relations/workers” rather than “maternal relations”, that a close relative, friend or paid worker who assumes daily responsibility for a dependent's survival and is obligated to the dependent because she is best suited to meet the dependent's needs. 1 Derived and developed from feminist ethics, the ethics of care include “virtues of kindness, generosity, helpfulness, and sympathy”.2The first ones who raised their concern about the decision not to insert the feeding tube on Rosemary were the nurses, the fellows who take care of her most and know her real situation most, and they felt it was apparent that Rosemary was undergoing something really painful that contradicted her own will, probably hunger. She did not want to be resuscitated but she also did not want to experience pain, which a lack of feeding tube would result in. What Rosemary’s physicians did was follow the