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Practicing Patience: How Christians Should Be Sick
... For them, this would reflect both a rejection of God's creation, and a problematic pride. This early Christian approach to patience is echoed in later Christian thought (see, e.g., Kierkegaard 1990;Hauerwas and Pinches 1996). ...
Is patience a moral virtue or merely prudential? Is it even really a virtue at all? For the Stoics, patience is a fundamental virtue, arising from, yet also sustaining, the reasoned detachment crucial to Stoic ethics. Through patient study we gain an understanding of the world and come to see there is only one genuine good: virtue. This knowledge allows us to calmly accept burdens and delays that would frustrate most people because we realize that wealth, pleasure, and other commonly pursued objects are only indifferents, and not in fact real goods. A proper understanding of the world enables us to avoid the passions that undermine our virtue and self-control. Early writers in the Christian tradition also treat patience as a central moral virtue. For them, patience involves turning ourselves over to God's will, and accepting our own weakness. In enduring burdens calmly and demonstrating forbearance with others, we accept God's will, and imitate God's own patience and forbearance with us. These writers would reject a Stoic understanding of patience, with its emphasis on detachment from the external world and self-mastery. For them, this would reflect both a rejection of God's creation, and a problematic pride.
While patience is widely recognized as a virtue, this entry considers several historical and contemporary accounts of its scope and nature. Objections to the status of patience as a virtue are addressed, and a case is made that patience is a moral, and not merely prudential virtue. The entry concludes with brief suggestions for further questions to be explored with respect to patience, particularly in considering its relationship to other virtues.
“Obrave new world! That has such people in it,”1 where many believe the challenges facing humanity at present may be solved by the technological fix.2 That is, the panoply of challenges facing humanity in the field of medicine, in pursuit of complete physical, mental, and social well-being ,3 is to be remedied by the continuing advance of human intelligence, ingenuity, and industry. With an aim toward maximal mechanical efficiency, those engaged in biomedical science and practice attempt to manage not only the physical and the psychical but also the role of medicine in and for the body politic as the institution of medicine promises health and well-being.
Four theoretical ethical perspectives on professional-patient relationships-autonomy, justice, virtue ethics, and the ethic of care-are surveyed, and some of their implications for the informed consent requirement in health care are sketched out. The practical issues of competence to consent, adequate information, and voluntariness are reviewed, and examples are given of the ways in which the theoretical perspectives outlined earlier might inform practice in areas such as these. Finally, the situation of patients not competent to consent is considered in the light of the same theoretical perspectives.
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