Illness as moral occasion: restoring agency to ill people

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Abstract
While both medical sociology and clinical ethics have tended to ignore the moral dimensions of illness, some ethicists have called attention to how serious illness creates a moral imperative for the ill person to ‘rise to the occasion’. First-person narratives of illness experience delimit the ‘potential consciousness’ of illness as a moral occasion. Narratives by Tim Brookes, Anatole Broyard, Kat Duff and Terry Tempest Williams present different dimensions of the attempt to be what Brookes calls ‘successfully ill’. The conclusion considers the difficulty that biomedicine has recognizing the moral life of ill persons.

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