MORAL DIMENSIONS OF THE ONCOLOGICAL DISEASE EXPERIENCE. CASE STUDY

Although, at the level of laic thinking, the contemporary Romanian society is dominated by the biomedical model, whose claims of objectivity and rationality seem to exclude moral evaluations, illness constitutes a major event in human life whose meaning are always imbued with moral implications. Our study focuses on identifying those moral issues associated to cancer. Based on the narratives of cancer patients, collected in a quantitative study, the research aims to analyze how the moral values associated with cancer are negotiated at the crossroads between personal life experience and dominant discourses regarding this disease. The first part of the study focuses on the negative moral dimensions of the disease. In this context we will bring up the contemporary rhetoric about responsibility than an individual has when bring up the illness, both in terms of preventive behavior, and the necessary attitudes to adopt in order to cure or to best manage this illness. The second part of the study highlights some positive moral dimensions of the disease. Sometimes seen as a "blidungs" test at the end of which a new identity will be redefined, the meaning of this can turn, in some cases, into an instrument of self-development in later life.