Moral habitus: An approach to understanding embedded disrespectful practices

The moral habitus shows how morally oriented clinical interactions through everyday social evaluations generate and sustain disrespectful attitudes and behaviours that disregard patients and family members. These attitudes and behaviours often result from the habitual nature of interaction styles and embodied bodily dispositions within particular hospital settings. By utilising the data of a qualitative study in two hospitals in the south Indian city of Chennai, I illustrate the role of moral habitus in understanding these disrespectful attitudes and behaviours. I show how the stereotyping and embodied bodily dispositions by healthcare professionals raise moral and ethical questions, such as those related to ethical value of respect for persons. I conclude that studying the moral habitus of hospital settings is significant for proposing ways to respect patients and family members of patients in practice and uphold ethical values, and to have meaningful healthcare interactions. Furthermore, the concept of moral habitus offers theoretical grounds for understanding these attitudes and behaviours in hospital settings, while engaging in ethics and patient-centred care debates, to bridge the gap between theory and practice of respect.