Law, Morality, and Health Care Professionals: A Multilevel Framework

Socio-legal scholars have long been interested in the relationship between law and morality. This article uses a multilevel approach to understanding this relationship by focusing on health care professionals, key actors in an institution that covers broad swaths of social life and that serves as a key site of moral meaning making and practice. I demonstrate how morality and law interface differently at three levels: through daily social interaction, during which providers assess patients’ deservingness while patients attempt to present themselves as morally worthy; through organizational structures and processes that establish legalistic rules and bring diverse workers into shared space; and through field-level legal and moral infrastructures that shape frontline decision making and that change due to social movement mobilization. The article concludes by describing the benefits of a multilevel approach to examining the interplay between law, morality, and health care work and suggesting strategies for theoretically investigating these relationships more completely.