Responsibility and otherness: ethics in healthcare in Jonas and Lévinas

Abstract

Abstract Healthcare practice faces challenges that go beyond the clinical and biomedical sphere. Despite technoscientific advances, resource scarcity, barriers to access, asymmetric power relations, and lack of humanized care persist, creating tensions in ethical practice. Overcoming such dilemmas requires not only investments, but also ethical, reflective, and socially sensitive professional training. In this context, this study analyzes how Hans Jonas’s ethics of responsibility and Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics of otherness provide ethical knowledge to guide healthcare practices. First, their philosophical conceptions are presented; then, these frameworks are applied as ethical knowledge in care practices. It is concluded that both proposals broaden the understanding of professional responsibility, fostering more humanized, committed, and attentive practices toward the recognition of the other, transforming not only actions, but also the very way healthcare professionals relate to life.