Levinas Dartmouth 2K9 1
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Observation 1: The Saddest Quo
Non-citizens are currently denied Medicaid funding.
HHS.gov. Department of Health and Human Services. 2005 http://www.cms.hhs.gov/medicaideligibility/02_areyoueligible_.asp
Many groups of people are covered by Medicaid. Even within these groups, though, certain requirements must be met. These may include your age, whether you are pregnant, disabled, blind, or aged; your income and resources (like bank accounts, real property, or other items that can be sold for cash); and whether you are a U.S. citizen or a lawfully admitted immigrant. The rules for counting your income and resources vary from state to state and from group to group. There are special rules for those who live in nursing homes and for disabled children living at home.
Your child may be eligible for coverage if he or she is a U.S. citizen or a lawfully admitted immigrant, even if you are not (however, there is a 5-year limit that applies to lawful permanent residents). Eligibility for children is based on the child's status, not the parent's. Also, if someone else's child lives with you, the child may be eligible even if you are not because your income and resources will not count for the child.
In general, you should apply for Medicaid if youhavelimitedincomeandresources.Youmustmatch one of the descriptions below. (Even if you are not sure whether you qualify, if you or someone in your family needs health care, you should apply for Medicaid and have a qualified caseworker in your state evaluate your situation.)
We have a moral obligation to give medical assistance to disadvantaged populations.
Trine Myhrvold Faculty of Nursing University of Oslo. 2006 The different other – towards an including ethics of care
The International Council of Nurses (ICN, 2005) states that nursing care is ‘unrestricted by considerations of age, colour, creed, culture, disability or illness, gender, nationality, politics, race or social status’. They also underline the responsibility that nurses have together with society ‘to meet the health and social needs of the public, particularly those of vulnerable populations’. Norwegian ethical guidelines (The Norwegian Nurses Association, 2001) maintain that nurses have a professional and ethical responsibility to contribute to a just distribution and administration of resources both at a national and a global level. Common challenges within education, research, and practice are to direct attention to what we are not doing and to those whose needs are not being met. Two major responses are called for. Firstly, nurses and other health professionals have a professional and moral responsibility to contribute to priorities both at a political and institutional level to the benefit of those least advantaged in society. We have to ask whether we direct enough attention towards marginalized groups – non-included, nonexperienced others – and to examine the relationship between differentness and social and political marginalization. Secondly, each and every one of us is responsible within the relation so that marginalized groups do not experience ignorance when they first meet the healthcare system as patients. This means daring to look at a person’s history, to respond to that history, and to accept the risk of making a wrong step relate to the recognition and affirmation of the different other in our interaction with patients who have had experiences that are quite different to our own; and in our encounter with differentness in the form of the loneliness that arises from suffering in connection with serious traumas, losses, and mental illness.
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Plan: The United States federal government should remove the citizenship requirement in Medicaid.
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Observation 2: Ethics
Society has a positive obligation to help people in poverty. Current recognition of poverty only motivates inaction.
Alphonso Lingis, Prof. of Philosophy at Penn State University. 2005
Addressing Levinas Ed. Eric Sean Nelson, Antje Kapust, and Kent Still. Northwestern University Press. Pgs. 98-109
In facing me, he not only shows himself to be different from me–in the midst of a different situation, envisioning a different future from the momentum of a different past–but other than me and other than the substantial space and time of the phenomenal world. In his want and need he is other. I do not see his visible and tangible face as the side and contour of his physiological substance, nor do I see it as a sign designating something conceptually grasped: his functional identity I see it as the visible and tangible mark of a lack, a need. For him to face me is to present me, in that phenomenal trace which is his visible and tangible face, with a lack, a need, an absence.
By identifying the otherness, and thus the force of contestation, in the poverty and destitution of the other, the nakedness of his face, Levinas disengages an ethical imperative from cultural and ethnic imperatives, from community imperatives. My judge is any stranger. Each one in the nakedness of his face contests me and puts demands on me. The more divested and destitute, the more the ethical imperative imposes imperiously with all its own force. But is this force the force of that poverty and destitution?
The recognition of needs and wants, of poverty and destitution, is not simply the recognition of negativities. The presentation of a void, a nothingness of itself can simply motivate our avoiding it, or retreating and recoiling from it. The observation of emptiness and weaknesses is the recognition of possibilities for us to apply our substance and insert our force. The recognition of needs and wants is the perception of beings which are in the course of evolution or achievement.
It is not only their needs, but what has been achieved in them that appeal to us and put demands on us. When they greet us and call for our attention, our attention is turned to the force of life in them, which has grown and striven-the force of an individual life. This attention is acknowledgment and concern. We see a life that enjoys living, that finds goodness in living. We find ourselves called upon to let this life be, to respect its space, to let it flourish, to care about it and care for it. We see facing us someone in whom nature has achieved something: we see hale and hearty physical heath and vigor, vibrant sensibility, beauty. We also see someone who has done something with her life, protected and nourished, built, repaired, restored, rescued. We see someone who has cared for a sick relative, maintained a farm, been a devoted teacher, is a loyal friend. We see someone who has not achieved anything materially, but who knows that he or she is a good person, steadfast, open-minded, with a good head and a good heart, has dared to break the rules and make mistakes, has a sense of his or her worth. We see facing us someone who has suffered the worst oppressions of the social system and the worst destructions of disease or nature and who has been able to endure suffering and awaits death with lucidity and courage. We see someone who has the vitality to laugh over absurdities and his own failures, has the strength to weep over the loss of a lover and over the death of a child in another land. It is then not simply need and want that imperatively contest us when someone turns to us. Is it not the particular and intrinsic goodness of the life that approaches us that gives force to his contestation of our personal concerns?
For Levinas, someone who faces me shows me what I have to say and do, because to face me is to appeal to me, to expose wants and needs, to expose the spasms, wrinkles, scars, wounds, of his or her skin. When I turn to someone who faces me, I am immediately afflicted with these wounds, these wants, this suffering. For Levinas the fundamental imperative, the sole imperative, is to respond to the needs and wants and suffering of someone of my species with all the resources of the environment.
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This recognition of violence creates an infinite responsibility for us to push for justice regardless of the consequences.
Dr. Michael Smith, Depts of Religion and Philosophy at Berry College, “Emmanuel Levinas's Ethics of Responsibility," Mike Ryan Lecture Series, Kennesaw State College, October 7, 2003 (http://www.kennesaw.edu/clubs/psa/pdfs/Smith_2003_PSA.pdf) (GENDER MODIFIED)
One of the most surprising aspects of Levinas’s ethics—perhaps “meta-ethics,” orbetter yet “proto-ethics,” would be a preferable term, since Levinas’s philosophical workis really a revamping of philosophy that replaces ontology by ethics: his “ethics” is notsimply layered onto thinking-as-usual—one of the most surprising aspects of this protoethics,then, is that there is no parity between my situation and yours from an ethicalstandpoint. You are always better than me. I am responsible, not only for mytransgressions, but for yours as well!There are two aspects or stages of Levinas’s ethical thought: my relation to you(as if you were the only other person in the world) and my relation to you seen in relationto the other of you, my other. Your other may have conflicting claims, so that I am put inthe position of comparing incomparables, to the extent that each person is a world. Fromthe relation of me to my other, you, love is enough. To realize the intention of love in abroader sociality, justice is necessary. Justice, the harsh name of love, must realize love’sintentions, and in doing so may lose sight of its original intent, become alienated into aself-serving institution. This risk, in Levinas’s view, is one that must be taken.8Here Levinas seldom develops his thought along the lines of strict reasoning. Onesenses that the stays of being are relaxed and we would have no possible means ofdirecting our thought beyond this point without a certain “inspiration.” Knowledge is nolonger sought after: it is inescapable. We are the “hostage” of the other.No discussion, even as brief a one as this, can be complete without some mentionof the face. This is a term that Levinas elevates to status of a philosopheme, a termendowed with a specific philosophical role. The face does not refer to the plasticity of avisual form in Levinas, nor is it just the look of the other, since the face speaks inLevinas. It is perhaps the phenomenal basis, or as Levinas sometimes says, the “mise-enscène”or theatrical “production” of the appearance of the person, and it is the way inwhich we may become aware of God. I quote: “The face puts into question thesufficiency of my identity as an I, it compels me to an infinite responsibility.”4 It is bysubstitution for the other, or by taking on the fate of the other, that I embrace aresponsibility for which I never signed up. Here Levinas diverges from the usual notionof responsibility, since the ethical meaning of responsibility is bound up with the notionof freedom. We are not to imagine that Levinas is involved in some sort of Skinnerian“beyond freedom,” but Levinas does enter a realm that is distinct from the dialectic ofpromise and promise-keeping and freedom such as we find in the thinking of Jean-PaulSartre, for example. This taking up of responsibility is not a virtue (virtue in the sense ofstrength), nor is it a weakness (as suggested by the late Michel de Certeau), but preciselythe carrying out of the mitzvah, or commandment of God. We should not expectgratitude, for this would entangle us in an endless dialectic of quid pro quos. (It isinteresting to note in passing that Levinas praises the institution of money, despite itspossible abuses, because if frees us from having to have a personal relation with eachperson with whom we deal in life. We can carry on without this burden.) If we shouldexpect anything, it is rather ingratitude. There is an impersonal—transpersonal?—sensein which action, good conduct, is nothing more nor less than a going beyond the bog ofbeing. What is ethical behavior? It is (I quote) “the original goodness of [hu]man toward theother in which, in an ethical dis-inter-estedness—word of God—the inter-ested effort ofbrute being persevering in its being is interrupted.”5This “ethics of ethics,” as it has been termed (by Jacques Derrida in his criticalessay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics” in 1964), is not only so called because itdoes not prescribe any specific acts, but also because Levinas’s ethics of responsibilitycannot, as the philosopher himself states, be preached. Is it because humility (which isnot listed among the virtues by Aristotle) permeates Levinas’s manner? No doubt, but itis also the case for what could be called a technical reason. We noted that the I-Thourelation in Levinas is not symmetrical. The other is always greater than I, and myresponsibility cannot be transferred to anyone else. This responsibility extends to andincludes responsibility for the evil perpetrated against me!In commenting on Philippe Nemo’s book Job and the Excess of Evil, Levinasventures a surprising interpretation of a well-known biblical verse of the book of Job (Job38: 4). “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” The usualinterpretation is that God is reprimanding the creature for questioning His ways, andperhaps also implying that if man knew the whole story a theodicy would bepossible—and this would be seen as being the best of all possible worlds after all.Levinas:Can one not hear in this “Where were you?” a statement ofdeficiency (constat de carence) that cannot have meaningunless the humanity of man is fraternally bound up withcreation, that is, responsible for that which has been neitherhis I (son moi) nor his work? Might this solidarity and thisresponsibility for any and all—which cannot be without pain—be spirit itself?6 A remarkable interpretation indeed, worthy of the Talmudic spirit of interpretationLevinas studied and admired so ardently. I liken the observation to the followingextraordinary remark made by a child to his mother, spontaneously metaphysical:“Mother, when did we have me?” This retrogressive movement of being is very close tothe sense of retrogressive and all-encompassing responsibility Levinas finds in thispassage from Job. Neither his “I” nor his work. “I” in the sense of his ego, that limited“moi” that must, in Levinas’s view, be transcended by the ethical self towardresponsibility for the other.