The relevance and limits of Emmanuel Levinas’s thoughts on medical ethics

Since the 1970’s, the basic account of biomedical ethics has been an attempt to pull a general theory of ethics off the shell and apply it to clinical medicine. Many authors proposed to start by looking what moral obligations flow from an understanding of medical praxis. I propose to explore this issue in the light of Levinas’ understanding of responsibility. By drawing on this aspect of his thought, also on its limits, I intend to approximate the ethical core of an ethics of clinical care.