Symposium Medical Ethics, moral residue, phenomenology, sentimentalism, empirical literary reading

We delve into the power of literary fiction in medical ethics education, focusing on moral residue (MR) experienced by healthcare practitioners (and other moral agents) when they perceive their own failure to meet moral requirements despite other people’s tendency not to blame them. Four inter-reliant papers describe ongoing research in an ERC Advanced Grant project (see Acknowledgement below), aimed at revolutionizing training of professionals by utilizing literary texts: these papers conceptualize and create a typology of MR, devise a measure for MR awareness, pinpoint text and context factors that may enhance awareness of MR, and implement an intervention using literary, fictional scenarios to facilitate moral learning in medical ethics.