Beyond Marginalization: Rethinking Dignity, Disability, And Care In Bioethics - JAROSŁAW MIKUCZEWSKI (Autor) (2026)
This article explores the phenomenon of dual marginalization affecting both disabled individuals and their caregivers within contemporary bioethics and healthcare practice. It argues that clinical and ethical discourse often reduces disability to diagnostic and functional categories, overlooking the richness of lived, embodied experience and the complex moral labour of family caregivers. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, the article highlights illness as a disruption of the lived world and emphasizes the ethical significance of attention, empathy, and intersubjective encounter. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body complements this perspective by grounding human dignity in embodiment and communion, presenting the body as a visible sign of the person and as a site where vulnerability and relationality reveal deeper moral truths. Through examples from pediatric hospice care, the article shows how practices of presence, touch, and vigil embody an ethics of recognition that cannot be captured by outcome-based metrics. Hope is interpreted not as naïve optimism but as a virtue sustaining the will to care in the face of suffering and uncertainty. The article concludes by proposing a relational, embodied, and hope-filled bioethics that recognizes caregivers as moral agents, calls for the cultivation of phenomenological skills in medical education, and redefines ethical success in terms of trust, connection, and fidelity rather than cure and efficiency.
10.5604/01.3001.0055.7823
https://studiabobolanum.pl/article/557823/en
Oryginalny artykuł naukowy
Keywords: filozofia