Tod Chambers suggests that literary theory is a crucial component in the complete understanding of bioethics. _The Fiction of Bioethics_ explores the medical case study and distills the idea that bioethicists study real-life cases, while philosophers contemplate fictional accounts.

Recently, bioethics has become interested in engaging with narrative, but in this engagement, narrative is usually viewed as a mere helpmate to philosophy. In this precis to his book The Fiction of Bioethics, Tod Chambers argues that narrative theory should not be simply a helpful addition to medical ethics but instead should be thought of as being as vital and important to the discipline as moral theory itself. The reason we need to rethink the relationship of medical ethics to narrative (...) is that ethicists test their ideas by applying them to cases, and cases are a narrative genre. Recognizing the importance that cases have for the way medical ethicists do ethics is essential in order to appreciate the field as a form of applied philosophy. Like other forms of representation, narrative has distinct and defining features, which ethicists, in order to understand the data of their field, must learn to recognize and differentiate. Ethicists need to attend to the way decisions about the discourse of a narrative influences the kind of moral theories judged relevant to it. The author briefly examines six features of narrative discourse that rhetorically condition the way we understand medical ethics cases: filter, reportability, closure, characters, chronotope, and gender. (shrink)

On reading “Algorithms for Ethical Decision-Making in the Clinical: A Proof of Concept,” I imagined that for some the fundamental problem with the authors' approach is the very...

Contra those bioethicists who think that their cases are based on “real” events and thus not motivated by any particular ethical theory, Chambers explores how case narratives are constructed and thus the extent to which they are driven by particular theories.

Linguistic capital is what is at issue when we ask who can speak for a religion. But asking who has the linguistic capital to speak for a religious community in public policy forums is different from asking who has linguistic capital within the religious community. The first question forces us to examine the acquisition of linguistic capital in three separate — yet overlapping — fields of social discourse: academia, religion, and government. Each of these requires distinctive ways of earning the (...) necessary social capital to be authorized to speak. The issue of who has the status to speak for a religion in a political forum is essentially a question of what types of linguistic capital gained in one field are deemed legal tender within another field. (shrink)

Professors of philosophy do from time to time seek to wear the clothes of relevanceAlasdair MacIntyre (1984, 36)I recall one of the first bioethics conferences I ever attended. During the question–...

It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. Bioethics has been particularly attentive to the role of metaphors in the discourse on moral issues in medicine. In The Physician’s Covenant, William May discusses how the various metaphors of the physician influence the manner in which we analyze problems in clinical ethics. Meaghan O’Keefe and colleagues have argued that particular metaphors dominate and in turn mediate the representation of genetic modification to the (...) public’. Craig Klugman has analyzed the power of various metaphors used in the discussion of... (shrink)

This article argues for the importance of theoreticalreflections that originate from patients' experiences.Traditionally academic philosophers have linked their ability totheorize about the moral basis of medical practice to their roleas outside observer. The author contends that recently a new typeof reflection has come from within particular patientpopulations. Drawing upon a distinction created by AntonioGramsci, it is argued that one can distinguish the theorygenerated by traditional bioethicists, who are academicallytrained, from that of ``organic'' bioethicists, who identifythemselves with a particular patient community. (...) Thecharacteristics of this new type of bioethicist that are exploredin this article include a close association of memoir andphilosophy, an interrelationship of theory and praxis, and anintimate connection between the individual and a particularpatient community. (shrink)

This narrative symposium examines the relationship of bioethics practice to personal experiences of illness. A call for stories was developed by Tod Chambers, the symposium editor, and editorial staff and was sent to several commonly used bioethics listservs and posted on the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics website. The call asked authors to relate a personal story of being ill or caring for a person who is ill, and to describe how this affected how they think about bioethical questions and the (...) practice of medicine. Eighteen individuals were invited to submit full stories based on review of their proposals. Twelve stories are published in this symposium, and six supplemental stories are published online only through Project MUSE. Authors explore themes of vulnerability, suffering, communication, voluntariness, cultural barriers, and flaws in local healthcare systems through stories about their own illnesses or about caring for children, partners, parents and grandparents. Commentary articles by Arthur Frank, Bradley Lewis, and Carol Taylor follow the collection of personal narratives. (shrink)

As many in the United States feel a need to take a side in the ongoing culture wars, the people who make up the field of bioethics have an obligation to directly engage with those who hold different political views. If bioethics is an academic field, it must also affirm the overall values of the academy to continually challenge central assumptions. If the field wishes to be a part of the development of public policy, it must be able to construct (...) such policies that in some fundamental manner honor the values of the opposition. (shrink)