In today’s post, Lydia Tsiakiri, Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore, explores whether judgments of wrongful discrimination are sensitive to personal responsibility, drawing on her research into responsibility, discrimination, healthcare, and public policy. Lydia Tsiakiri Imagine two patients who both need a lung transplant. One developed severe lung disease after decades of smoking. The other has the same condition because of a rare genetic mutation. If the hospital gives priority to the second patient, is that an instance of wrongful discrimination? Most of us agree that wrongful discrimination is morally objectionable. Yet cases like this raise a more difficult question. Does it matter whether the characteristic on which people are treated differently is something they are responsible for? If two individuals are treated differently because one is responsible for the relevant characteristic and the other is not, are we less likely to ...
In today’s post, Hielke Bosma explores the role of inner strength in rehabilitation care. Hielke is a spiritual care professional and academic researcher affiliated with the Amsterdam Rehabilitation Research Center and the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands, whose research focuses on spiritual exercises and chronic pain. Hielke Bosma The idea for my research on inner strength began in a rehabilitation centre. I remember two young men of roughly the same age. One was a student; the other worked in construction. Both had sustained a spinal cord injury in an accident and faced the prospect of never walking again. Their responses could hardly have been more different. The construction worker felt that his life was over. He believed he could no longer do anything. The student responded: “I was studying before the accident, and now I am studying again. I don’t see the problem.” Neither wanted to join a discussion group. For one, talking seemed pointless: it ...