Abstract: Frailty has become a diagnostic category for older adults, defined as “a biologic syndrome of decreased reserve and resistance to stressors, resulting from cumulative decline across multiple physiologic systems, and causing vulnerability to adverse outcomes.” This addition to the diagnostic repertoire is a valuable one, and an important resource for care givers. At the same time, it deserves some critical reflection to think through its strengths and weaknesses, the issues it allows us to see more clearly and those it may make harder to see. The category of frailty is particularly interesting from a philosophical and ethical perspective shaped by an ethics of care.

Speaker Bio: Ruth Groenhout is a Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Calvin College. Her publications focus on a range of issues in bioethics and an ethics of care, and include Connected Lives: Human Nature and an Ethics of Care; Transforming Care: A Christian Vision of Nursing Practice; Bioethics: A Reformed Look at Life and Death Choices; and Feminism, Faith, Philosophy. She has written a variety of journal articles on issues such as the ethics of public health research, embodiment and the nurse-client encounter, virtue theory and feminism, and the international brain drain problem in medicine. Her hobbies include running, quilting, and gardening.

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