Carter, M. orcid.org/0000-0003-0683-3874 (Cover date: March 2023) The imperative of professional dementia care. Bioethics, 37 (3). pp. 292-302. ISSN: 0269-9702
Abstract
Despite negative effects on their health and social lives, many informal carers of people living with dementia claim to be acting in accordance with a moral obligation. Indeed, feelings of failure and shame are commonly reported by those who later give up their caring responsibilities, suggesting a widespread belief that professional dementia care, whether delivered in the person's own home or in an institutional setting, ought always to be a last resort. In this paper, however, I suggest that this common intuition gets things the wrong way around. Adopting a relational egalitarian framework, I argue that the most serious injustices engendered by present-day dementia care services are contingent on broader societal structures—they can thus be ameliorated relatively easily (if resource intensively) by changing those structures. Informal dementia care, on the other hand, carries similar risks of injustice and is much more resistant to structural reform. While there may be moral obligations to provide informal dementia care in present-day societies, then, they arise because of the deficiencies of professional care, not the virtues of its informal counterpart. Though we may be far from achieving just care arrangements in most of our societies, we must never lose sight of the fact that, when we engage in morally permitted informal dementia care, we are exercising our last resort.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. Bioethics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. |
Keywords: | dementia; equality |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 28 Aug 2025 14:38 |
Last Modified: | 28 Aug 2025 14:38 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/bioe.13095 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:230724 |
Download
Filename: Bioethics - 2022 - Carter - The imperative of professional dementia care.pdf
Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0