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KMID : 1142820210050010025
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Bio, Ethics and Policy
2021 Volume.5 No. 1 p.25 ~ p.48
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Public Health Ethics in COVID-19 Pandemic Response: Focusing on Relational Autonomy, Solidarity, and Care Ethics
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Choi Jae-Phil
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Abstract
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In this article, the feministic relational autonomy, solidarity, and care ethics were reviewed as a likely alternative that is an applicable ethical principle during the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic in clinical public health settings. Reconstructing the COVID-19 situation in the Republic of Korea revealed the phenomena of the failure to provide care everywhere and a huge burden of care for healthcare workers, which could be undervalued. A quarantined citizen who contracted the infectious disease is an agent who is also embedded in a social and historical context as well as a patient who has a reduced responsibility in the web of infectious diseases in the ecological relationships with others from the viewpoint of relational autonomy and the patient as a victim and vector. The citizen is entitled to ask for due protection and support. During the pandemic, health care personnel in the public health system needed to extend their solidarity in treating patients and responding to the pandemic. However, solidarity based on interdependence and vulnerability hardly solves the exclusion of the voiceless and require us to reconsider the value of care ethics. Everyone experiences universally inevitable dependencies, and so human dependency is the default value. Health care personnel build care relationships with patients in response to their vulnerability in contracting infectious diseases. Public support for the patient’s well-being and restoration is to be provided. However, I argue that support for public health personnel should be considered, so that they are not thrown into the vulnerable status, by applying the principle of Doulia.
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KEYWORD
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COVID-19, public health ethics, relational autonomy, solidarity and care ethics
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