Me? The invisible call of responsibility and its promise for care ethics: a phenomenological view

Abstract

Care ethics emphasizes responsibility as a key element for caring practices. Responsibilities to care are taken by certain groups of people, making caring practices into moral and political practices in which responsibilities are assigned, assumed, or implicitly expected, as well as deflected. Despite this attention for social practices of distribution and its unequal result, making certain groups of people the recipient of more caring responsibilities than others, the passive aspect of a caring responsibility has been underexposed by care ethics. By drawing upon the work of the French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, a care ethical conceptualization of responsibility can by enriched, by scrutinizing how responsibility is literally a response to something else. This paper starts with a vignette of an everyday situation of professional care. After that the current body of care ethical literature on responsibility is presented, followed by Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, using his analysis of Caravaggio’s painting The Calling of St. Matthew and resulting in his redefinition of responsibility. In the next section we present a table in which we juxtapose four distinct paradigms of responsibility, which we will describe briefly. The final section consists of an exploration of the paradigms by an analysis of the vignette and results in a conclusion concerning what Marion’s view has to offer to care ethics with regard to responsibility.

Feeling called to care: a qualitative interview study on normativity in family caregivers’ experiences in Dutch home settings in a palliative care context

“…From each of the found appearances of feeling called, it becomes clear that caring situations are, as care ethicists argue, “situations that are given to us, that we find ourselves in, as a consequence of being related” (p. 527) [ 34 ]. The families in this study often found themselves embedded in practices in which they felt called and responsible to care [ 19 ]. Our results suggest that – rather than in feeling called per se – the burden of care might lie in the seeming limitlessness to which people feel called, i.e.…”

“…Studies sometimes show average or median hours of family caregiving per week to indicate burden [ 11 ], but invested time is not the only issue nor the most relevant. Caregiving is complex, as we have shown by providing more insight into the inherent normative nature of family caregiving, and is also deeply connected to one’s social, cultural, and political context and related feelings of power [ 19 ]. Revealing this complexity to caregivers gives counterweight to dominant expectations [ 32 ], and may enable them to talk about their seemingly inappropriate experiences or feelings – whether negative or positive.…”

“…In addition, support should enable caregivers to pause and reflect on (and perhaps break) the social rules implicitly guiding their sometimes automatic responses concerning what is expected or appropriate [ 41 ]. Although we acknowledge that caring might be something families find themselves in ( “you just do that for each other ”, as an interviewee stated) and a caregiver is never a freely choosing person [ 19 ], we believe there is some degree of agency in how one provides family care. As our analysis showed a difference between feeling called and how people respond, we suggest that caregivers should be enabled to explore the feeling of being called upon – by whom, to what, and why –, to make them aware that, to some extent, they do have choices in how to respond.…”

“…Care ethical analyses, rooted in feminist studies, have argued that caring is not (only) a matter of one’s free and personal choice. Rather, a caregiver’s agency is deeply tied to the surrounding social and political practices: “caregivers appear as people finding themselves in a position in which others, they themselves, and also the socio-political context expect them to have and take responsibility, as a result of socio-political, personal, affective, contextual, and ethical factors.” (p. 277) [ 19 ] In this article, we are specifically interested in these ethical factors, which we label as ‘normative’, e.g. the normative elements that appear to be essential to the experiences of family members providing care.…”

Facilitators and barriers in using comics to support family caregivers of patients receiving palliative care at home: A qualitative study

“… 2 Partners or family members often find themselves in the role of family caregiver because they are related to the patient. 3 , 4 Many family caregivers (hereafter: caregivers), however, live in permanent uncertainty about the future, while feeling unprepared for their caring role 5 – 7 and overwhelmed by the demands of the all-consuming nature of caring. 8 Previous research showed how caregiving impacts normal daily life and social engagements, 2 , 7 , 9 causing physical, emotional, and psychosocial challenges that demand support.…”