养老的方式、责任以及家庭的角色:老人长期照顾的儒学思考

Which care? Whose Responsibility?And Why Family? A Confucian Account of Long-Term Care for the Elderly

随着全球社会经济的推动,人们对老人的长期照顾逐渐由居家照顾转向机构照顾,这不仅增加了经济成本,而且产生了深远的道德影响。本文从家庭角色这一角度探讨了这一成本和道德责任,并引发相关的反思,而这些反思提供了深刻质疑的土壤,甚至在某种程度上认为在香港和大陆关于长期照顾的道德关怀和美国所宣称的一样,当然在对待家人的方式上家族相似性确实是存在的。尽管受现代西方价值观念的影响,中国的道德观念,例如根植于儒家道德和社会环境中关于贞节和孝悌的美德,不可能被彻底推翻。作者在最后得出了儒家伦理指引现代社会医疗照顾的生命伦理和长期照顾政策的结论性评论。

Across the world,socio-economic forces are shifting the locus of long-term care from the family to institutional settings,producing significant moral,not just financial costs.This essay explores these costs and the distortions in the role of the family they involve.These reflections offer grounds for critically questioning the extent to which moral concerns regarding long-term care in Hong Kong and in China's Mainland are the same as those voiced in the United States,although family resemblances surely exist.Chinese moral values such as virtue and filial piety embedded in a Confucian moral and social context cannot be recast without distortion in terms of modern Western European notions.The essay concludes that the Confucian resources must be taken seriously in order to develop an authentic Chinese bioethics of long-term care and a defensible approach to long-term care policy for contemporary society in general and Chinese society in particular.