Responsibility and alterity: ethics in healthcare in Jonas and Lévinas

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 alterity 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.