I’ve been thinking about the obligations that attend taking responsibility for others’ health care, and how they dovetail with the moral obligations we all bear to one another.

Hurricane Katrina has brought that issue sadly to the fore in stories of the abandonment of patients to their deaths by nursing home administrators who failed to take action to evacuate, of terminal sedation/euthanasia of doomed patients – possibly at risk to their careers or liberty – by caregivers who had no other options; and, more heartwarmingly, of intense devotion to others, beyond duty, in the face of crisis. These stories are not necessarily better or worse than others we hear from that disaster zone, but that they feature the acts of healthcare workers who had accepted – or in some cases voluntarily took on, during the disaster – responsibility for others, and either met or failed the obligations they thereby entailed, makes these stories particularly salient for our concerns.

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