Approaching the Patient as Teacher: Cultural Value Disputes and the Virtue of Studiositas
Thursday, October 12, 2023
9:45 AM – 11:00 AM ET
Location: Heron (Fourth Floor)
The ASBH Core Competencies includes a list of ‘attitudes, attributes, and behaviors,’ of a good clinical ethics consultant—among them are virtues such as compassion, courage, and prudence. In this paper, I propose another virtue that is proper to the ethics consultant, especially in her solicitation of stakeholder values: the scholastic virtue of studiositas. Deriving from the Latin studium, it refers not only to ‘study’ as we understand it in English, but rather broadly to the application of the mind to an object of knowledge (i.e., concentration, attention). According to St. Thomas Aquinas, studiositas is a sub-virtue of temperance that moderates and perfects the natural appetite for knowledge; in other words, it teaches us the proper attitude with which we ought to learn things. It makes four claims on the epistemic agent regarding the object of attention, the source of knowledge, the relation of knowledge to its origin and end, and the relation of knowledge to the agent’s capacity for understanding. To demonstrate the usefulness of considerations of studiositas to the clinical ethicist, I will deduce practical guidelines for eliciting cultural values within the context of a ‘cultural humility’ approach. Then, I argue that it avoids the potentially harmful generalizations of cultural humility alone. Finally, I will present a case in which studiositas is invoked to decide whether consulting a religious leader is a licit recourse in resolving conflicts emerging from the perceived misunderstanding of a cultural value.