The moral relevance of lived experience in complex hospital practices

How can experiences of patients and care workers in complex hospital care practices have moral relevance? After presenting a case drawn from ethnographic research, the author examines the epistemological place of experience in bioethics. Experience does not seem to have normative importance as such in bioethics. Contrary to bioethics, phenomenology is critically aware of the cognitive and normative regimes of Modernity. I consult four phenomenologists, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bégout and Schmitz, on the question how a phenomenon can appear. I use the grid resulting from that reading to show what phenomena emerge in the case and what their moral relevance is.