Reflections on the Doctor-Patient Relationship in Medical Humanities from the Perspective of Care Ethics

Abstract

The medical humanities pursue the person-centered relationship as its ideal mode of doctor-patient relationship. Currently its mainstream position is the principle of patient autonomy, which aims to recognize a patient as a subject of rights to be treated fairly in the doctor-patient relationship and medical decision. However, in actual scenes of medical practice, this principle seems to weaken the professionality of medical staff on the one hand and to ignore the helplessness of patients in their painful situation on the other hand. To solve this dilemma, this article attempts to start from Nel Noddings’ criticism about Western traditional ethics of justice which regards human beings as abstract subjects and ignores their existential relationship and the fragility of human existence. According to Eva Kittay’s theory of dependency relations and Annette Baier’s moral theory of trust, both based on Noddings’ care ethics, it is clear that medical humanities without the supplement of care ethics can hardly achieve their ideal of a “person-centered” relationship in medicine. Thus, we try to explain how the doctor-patient relationship from care ethics is more suitable for the existential situations of patients and the professional medical staff, and how it can respond to the medical dilemma mentioned above.