With assisted suicide now legally sanctioned, health care professionals in Oregon face the challenge of implementing Oregon's Death with Dignity Act. Physicians, hospice professionals, pharmacists, and other caregivers may find their relationships with patients, families, and fellow professionals changing in unanticipated ways as all learn what it means to make aid in dying openly and compassionately available to patients at the end of life.
This paper raises the question of whether there is anything foundational to hopefulness when considering it as a virtue, and uses the Aristotelian distinction between virtue in the "natural sense" and virtue in the "strict sense" to make the claim that hopefulness has a primacy to it. While that primacy rests on the existence of care and responsiveness of community, those caretakers must themselves be possessed of hopefulness, which, at its best will be virtuous.
Perhaps not wholly unrelatedly to the message of the first Obama presidential campaign, the concept of hope has been receiving increased philosophical attention in recent years. A good bit has been written on honing a definition of hope, and investigating the morally relevant territory. After a brief summary of that literature, I situate myself amongst those who advocate for hope-at its best-as a virtue, and I then suggest that hope seems to have a unique status amongst the virtues insofar as it appears to be foundational for moral progress. I want to suggest that virtue generally can be seen as having an infectious quality, and that along with hope's foundational status, this infectiousness is particularly crucial as regards the development of hope for working on solutions to structural injustice. According to both ancient and contemporary sources (e.g., Rosenberg & Hovland), cognitive states have three main elements: affective, conative and cognitive. As a cognitive state, hope has an affective side requiring the presence of the desire for something, a conative aspect as hope is always a desire for something (even if we're talking about generalized hope for some vague positive future), and a cognitive aspect insofar as hope is always about estimating probabilities (Day, 61). Hope then can be distinguished from belief by the addition of desire and a lack of certainty, and from desire by the addition of belief in possibility, however remote. Additionally, hope as a cognitive state can be oriented toward positive outcomes (benefits to self and/or others) or towards negative outcomes (harms of various kinds, e.g., financial loss for a neighbor or physical violence at a hockey game). Hope can be future-oriented or relevant
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