Moral Literacy in Technological Care Work

Ethics and Social Welfare 9 (1):50-63 (2015)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Many different professionals play a key role in maintaining welfare in a welfare society. These professionals engage in moral judgements when using (new) technologies. In doing so, they achieve that radical responsibility towards the other that Levinas describes as being at the very core of ethics. Also, professionals try to assess the possible consequences of the involvement of specific technologies and adjust their actions in order to ensure ethical responsibility. Thus, ethics is necessary in order to obtain and sustain one's professionalism. This presents care institutions with the challenge to design work processes and technology work in ways that include a sense of ‘the Other’ and make moral judgement an indispensable part of professional competence in technology. This article provides new understandings of the way ethics are involved in care institutions. Nurses’ moral judgements are sophisticated with regard to ethical perspectives. In hospitals, nurses combine Latour's notion of symmetry in human/technology relations with an ethics implying ethical priority to human beings over other beings. This combination of ethics is not only sophisticated; it is also paradoxical, as it puts together mutually contradictory ethics. Instead of causing moral confusion, this ethical paradox is employed to produce a particularly refined notion of care situations, allowing nurses’ care to include patients and technology alike.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 93,990

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2014-09-06

Downloads
24 (#646,352)

6 months
9 (#436,631)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations