Respect and Shame in Healthcare and Bioethics Workshop:

Thomas Gutmann, University of Munster – “The Legal Protection of Respect in Healthcare.”

+ECR presentation from Vanessa De Luca, University of Nantes – “Investigating Responsibility and Reactive Responses Towards Addiction.”

This workshop is part of the Respect and Shame in Healthcare Bioethics Workshop Series, and is organised at the University of Exeter by the Wellcome Trust funded Shame and Medicine Project, and Supriya Subramani, Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Zurich.

The Legal Protection of Respect in Healthcare (Thomas Gutmann).

The talk will focus on the possibilities and limits of ensuring respect for patients by legal means. Taking German law as an example, there are quite a number of principles and doctrines aiming to guarantee not only patient autonomy, but respect, recognition and epistemic justice within the patient-physician-relationship and to protect patients from being disrespected, humiliated or treated as a mere means for the end of their own health interests or the interests of others. There are, however, phenomena indicating a lack of recognition for patients the law cannot adequately deal with. This points to the question of the cultural environment of legal norms and to the limits of juridification.

Thomas Gutmann is a philosopher and lawyer and currently Professor of Civil Law, Philosophy of Law, and Medical Law and Director of the Research Institute for Philosophy of Law at the University of Muenster (Germany). Since 2009 he has been Director of the DFG Research College 1209 “Centre for Advanced Study in Bioethics”. His main fields of interest are legal theory, practical philosophy, theory of society, private law, and medical law and ethics.

Investigating Responsibility and Reactive Responses Towards Addiction (Vanessa de Luca).

Increasing attention is being given in experimental research to the roles of ordinary beliefs on matters of scientific, epistemological and philosophical relevance, including addiction theorizing. Such approaches use beliefs as a way of gaining information about general concepts, which can then be used as an heuristic instrument: 1) to formulate new scientific explanations; 2) to stimulate philosophical/epistemological theorizing; 3) to inspire innovative experimental protocols hypotheses.

Following this approach, we suggest that in depth-investigation of ordinary beliefs and conceptualizations about addiction can be particularly relevant for improving addiction research, clinical practice and drug policy making. The symptoms of this condition, its course and the possibilities of recovery are strongly modulated by the sphere of moral meanings and values: by the moral beliefs of the subject who suffers from it, by the people with whom he/she interacts in his/her daily life and in the clinical setting, by the way in which these normative elements are reflected in the system of rules and sanctions through which we assess and react, both as individuals and as a society, to addicted subjects.

In this presentation, we critically analyze current public discourse about addiction dominated by the biomedical model of addiction, and question the positive and destigmatizing ethical and social effects promised by its proponents. Particularly, we plan to investigate how key information in ordinary beliefs and conceptualizations of addiction (e.g. neuroscientific information) affects people’s responsibility-attribution and eventually mediate ethical responses towards addicted individuals.

Overall, the ambition is to provide a framework for revising the negative backward-looking reactive practices towards addicted people, and highlight possible drivers of change so as to engage, support and ultimately restore addicts’ agency - assisting their rehabilitation, recovery and reintegration into the social landscape.

Vanessa De Luca is a Postdoctoral Fellow in philosophy at the Université de Rennes. She is also an associate investigator at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste. Her research interests lie at the intersection of moral psychology, normative ethics, cognitive science and clinical practices. From a methodological perspective, her work confronts directly with some of the challenges rising from the attempt of hybridizing theoretical-humanistic methods of analysis with data-driven methods. From a practical-ethical perspective, her work aims at promoting a naturalistic approach to addiction that challenges the perceived discontinuity between “normal” and “abnormal” agency, prevalent both in our society and in current clinical practices towards addiction. Her research also aims at tackling stigmatizing attitudes towards addicted people in clinical settings. She holds a PhD in philosophy from the Université Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne and Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan.

Schedule

• 1:00- 1:40 PM GMT: The Legal Protection of Respect in Healthcare (Thomas Gutmann)
• 1:40- 2:00 PM GMT: Open discussion
• Break (2:00- 2:10 PM GMT)
• 2:10- 3:00 PM GMT: Investigating Responsibility and Reactive Responses Towards Addiction (Vanessa de Luca)
• 3:00- 3:20 PM GMT: Feedback from Thomas Gutmann
• 3:20- 3:50 PM GMT: Open discussion

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