Ethical Reflection On The Issue Of Chinese Institution For The Aged

As a relief measure initially, institutional pension for the aged was no longer a kind of charity but became a kind of shared “welfare” instead. Institutional pension is an elderly-care mode that based on a variety of pension agency, relied on state funding, relatives or the elderly themselves to provide the aged with services. This paper demonstrated the advantages of institutional pension by indicating its definition, nature and character and comparing with community pension and home-based care. Meanwhile, it also recognized clearly that elderly institutional support has some problems, such as the demand of agency exceeds supply, low rate of resource utilization and the lack of ability of self-development and function.Under the perspective of ethnics, this paper stated changes of institutional pension during several decades: its nature turned relief measure into social welfare; its content changed from material support to humanistic concern. In fact, behind these changes is value shifting, that is from dependent pension to independent pension. The author believed that institutional pension has important ethnical values include reflecting humanitarian spirit, ensuring happiness of the aged and giving more psychological care to elderly. Especially, in traditional Chinese culture, institutional pension do not abandon the culture of filial piety but inherit it, therefore it difficult to ignore the positive impacts of filial piety on agency’s pension services.To conclusion, for the existing problems of institutional pension people should establish new pension values; governments and society should work together to improve the mechanism of institutional pension and elderly support organization should its services and functions.