In this editors’ reply to Nigel Rapport’s Afterword to the articles collected in the special issue ‘Moralities of care in later life’, we wonder: does the social ethics of care come with unacknowledged limits? We join with Rapport’s call to maintain the individual’s ‘personal preserve’ but observe—critically—that his “so far as possible, for as long as possible” makes for an uncomfortable caveat. To do so, we return ethnographically to the former mining town of Ashington, Northern England, and illustratively to a disease typically associated with the progressive loss of personhood: dementia. In contrast to both prevailing biomedical and person-centred views of dementia, we adopt a radically relational approach, which in practice calls for attentiveness and opening oneself up on the part of the carer to the individual life-world of another. Or, as it was for Ashington residents Eric and Elizabeth, a care-full inter-relationship re-found in ‘going with the flow’.

中文翻译：

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痴呆症的“顺其自然”：对奈杰尔·拉波特关于护理社会伦理的回复

在这篇编辑对 Nigel Rapport 对特刊“晚年护理道德”中收集的文章的后记的回复中，我们想知道：护理的社会伦理是否有未被承认的限制？我们同意 Rapport 呼吁维护个人的“个人保护”，但批判性地观察到，他的“尽可能，尽可能长”是一个令人不舒服的警告。为此，我们从人种学角度回到英格兰北部的前采矿小镇阿辛顿，并举例说明了一种通常与人格逐渐丧失相关的疾病：痴呆症。与流行的生物医学和以人为本的痴呆症观点相反，我们采用了一种根本性的关系方法，这在实践中要求照顾者注意并敞开心扉接受另一个人的个人生活世界。或者，