HEAL's Third Annual Jonathan Montgomery Lecture in Health, Ethics and Law Event

This lecture proposes that health care and public health would benefit from ethical discourse critically focused on relational practices. Such an ethical discourse arises out of recent moral and political philosophy in areas such as critical theory, care theory, feminism, and hermeneutics. The concept of a “practice” can be used to counter the undue individualism of much work in health ethics by prompting the examination the formation of patterns of agency over time rather than limiting itself to particular decisions and choices evaluated at a given moment. Looking at practices diachronically rather than at decisions synchronically permits an understanding of structured injustice and institutionalized power that often eludes theories of ethical choice or decision focusing on the rights and obligations of individual agents. The lecture goes on to argue that central to an ethics of relational practices are the just recognition of membership in communities of equal dignity and liberty and the just mutuality in societies of interdependence and respect. Just recognition of membership and just relationships of mutuality are moral values and modes of agency that are manifested in social practices such as solidarity, belonging, and care. This sheds light on the importance of these concepts and practices in the domain of health policy and public health.