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Despite the hospice patienťs protestations, May insisted. Slowly, she helped him up to sit with her in the kitchen while she heated up the food that Meals on Wheels had sent for him.
The union meeting at the nursing home had grown more and more angry. In the end, the nurses' aides agreed to strike if more staff were not hired. In their letter to management, they wrote, "We simply do not have enough time to take care of the patients."
The agency head despaired. She had received an angry phone call from a woman whose mother received home-help assistance from her agency. The daughter reported that a five-dollar bill that she had left on her mother's dresser had disappeared after the aide visitedyesterday. The administration could fire the aide, but this was the fourth aide she had sent to the household in the past year.
Such vignettes are familiar in caregiving and raise a number of significant questions. But are the questions they raise ethical questions? Often in our culture, ethical and moral seem to refer to conformity' to set principles and precepts: stealing is wrong, do not lie. "Ethics" and "morality" seem to evoke big questions, impossible dilemmas, or conformity to predetermined codes of behavior. By this account, there is no obvious moral issue in insisting that a dying patient continue to be engaged in life, or in staffing levels in a nursing home. This essay describes a way of thinking about caring that expands our notions of the "ethical" to include many of the everyday judgments involved in activities of caring for ourselves and others. The paper draws upon a body of recent work in the feminist ethics of care (Benner and Wrubel, 1989; Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Ruddick, 1990; Manning, 1992; Held, 1993; Tronto, 1993; Bubeck, 1995; Held, 1995; Jaggar, 1995; Sevenhuijsen, 1998) to present a more complicated account of ethics, one that tries to restore to the word ethics its original meaning-knowledge about how to live a good life. This perspective requires not only a broader interpretation of the nature of ethics, but a more complete account of the nature of care. In making daily and thoughtful judgments about caring, people every' day engage in a high moral calling....