As the Hatton-WYNG Junior Research Fellow in Law, Medicine, and Life Sciences, Ira’s research project will focus on the ‘ethics of care’. The ethics of care – a moral theory with feminist origins that emerged in the early 1980s – emphasizes that caring actions are morally valuable. Given that actions carried out within the medical context are primarily caring actions, performed by healthcare professionals to meet the needs of patients, the ethics of care has emerged as a highly pertinent ethical framework for medical law and bioethics. Despite its evident relevance, however, certain theoretical gaps persist in the philosophical literature on care, posing challenges to the meaningful application of this framework in addressing legal questions. Not all caring actions are good: they may involve neglect, manipulation, or oppression. What about care, then, makes it morally valuable? How do we tell apart good care from bad care, or better care from worse care?Ira is interested in addressing these philosophical issues in her project, aiming to facilitate a meaningful dialogue between the ethics of care and doctrinal questions in medical law. Drawing from analytic moral philosophy and the ethics of care, Ira’s project seeks to provide a conceptual account of caring actions and a care-evaluation framework. Ira will then explore the relevance of these philosophical findings for doctrinal debates in medical law (such as the debate around end-of-life care) and in public health policy (on competing priorities of treatment and prevention in public health).
LML wishes a warm welcome to Ira.