Location: Waterfront Activities Center, Great Room Why Families Matter Hilde Lindemann
Professor Emerita
Michigan State University In this talk, I offer some theoretical underpinnings for the idea that familial considerations must be taken into account in medical decision making, and that sometimes these considerations have a greater claim on health care professionals than do the best interests of the pediatric patient. I begin by identifying morally valuable functions that families perform for their own. I then consider what is of intrinsic value in families. And finally I argue that a family’s ability to provide these goods, and indeed its very existence, can be put at risk when too many demands or the wrong kind of demands are made on it. Hilde Lindemann is Emerita Professor of Philosophy and Associate in the Center for Ethics Humanities in the Life Sciences at Michigan State University. A Fellow of the Hastings Center and a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, her ongoing research interests are in feminist bioethics, feminist ethics, the ethics of families, and the social construction of persons and their identities. Her most recent book is Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities. Earlier books include An Invitation to Feminist Ethics and Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair. With James Lindemann Nelson, she also wrote The Patient in the Family: An Ethics of Medicine and Families. She is the former editor of The Hastings Center Report as well as of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She was the coeditor of Rowman & Littlefield’s Feminist Constructions series and the general coeditor (with James Lindemann Nelson) of the Reflective Bioethics series at Routledge. |