Maria Kulp

Ethics education has emphasized abstract principles and the centrality of prospective reasoning without adequately addressing the embodied, emotional dimensions of moral decision-making or moral psychology’s changing understanding of how moral decisions are made. These limitations may leave nurses less prepared for the ethical complexity and moral pain involved in clinical practice. This article describes a “Moral Phenomenology” assignment meant to address these inadequacies by integrating insights from Merleau-Pontian phenomenology in ethics education. The assignment guides students through offering a deep description of an ethical dilemma they have faced, applying phenomenological concepts to deepen their understanding of moral perception, and finally, analyzing the dilemma using classical ethical tools and Lisa Tessman’s concept of moral failure. By engaging in sustained phenomenological and ethical reflection on personal dilemmas, students undergo ethical formation rather than mere information acquisition, developing into practitioners whose moral intuitions, perceptual sensitivities, and reflective capacities enable them to navigate moral distress with courage and perceive ethical dimensions of care that might otherwise remain invisible.

This paper applies a relational and familial ethic to address concerns relating to nursing home deaths and advance care planning during Covid‐19 and beyond. The deaths of our elderly in nursing homes during this pandemic have been made more complicated by the restriction of visitors even at the end of life, a time when families would normally be present. While we must be vigilant about preventing unnecessary deaths caused by coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes, some deaths of our elders are inevitable. Thus, it is essential that advanced care planning occurs in a way that upholds the familial and relational aspects of elders’ lives that often matter to them the most. We invoke concepts from feminist ethicists like Hilde Lindemann and Eva Kittay and introduce Avery Weisman and Thomas Hackett’s concept of “appropriate death” to suggest better ways of planning for those deaths of our elderly that cannot be avoided. Our hope is to allow for deaths that are as meaningful as possible for both the elderly and the family members who survive them.

Our 2021 article, "Dying Well in Nursing Homes During COVID-19 and Beyond: The Need for a Relational and Familial Ethic," addresses the response to the COVID-19 pandemic within nursing homes and the impact it had on the lives of residents, care providers, and families. We acknowledge that, at the height of the pandemic, when infection and death rates were soaring in these facilities, extreme "lockdown" measures may have been justified; but these measures resulted in significant relational costs. The collateral damage caused by these lockdown measures included extreme isolation, loss of community, and experiences of confusion, depression, and mental decline for the elderly residents that...

What is a philosophy class like? What roles do teachers and students play? Questions like these have been answered time and again by philosophers using images and metaphors. As philosophers continue to develop pedagogical approaches in a more conscious way, it is worth evaluating traditional metaphors used to understand and structure philosophy classes. In this article, we examine two common metaphors—the sage on the stage, and philosophy as combat—and show why they fail pedagogically. Then we propose five metaphors—teaching philosophy as world-traveling, wondering, conducting an orchestra, storytelling, and coaching—that can better respond to the needs of increasingly diverse student bodies. Further, these metaphors find their ground in long-standing beliefs about what philosophy is, how it is done, and what it can do for those willing to engage in it. While no single one of them is comprehensive, we think that these models can help us enliven our own thinking about our teaching and the roles we and our students play in our classrooms.

The literature on rational suicide (RS) holds that if a rational person wishes to suicide under circumstances deemed rational, there is no moral reason to prohibit a person from suiciding. There are forty years of literature dedicated to establishing what rational suicide is and demonstrating its moral permissibility. What is shocking is that in this literature, almost no attempts are made to include the perspectives of mental health users. Drawing from the work of Hilde Lindemann, I argue that ignoring of the perspectives of mental health users constitutes a form of erasure and oppression that must be rectified.