From the Ethicist's Point of View: The Literary Nature of Ethical Inquiry

Abstract

Contra those bioethicists who think that their cases based on events and thus not motivated any particular ethical theory, Chambers explores how case narratives constructed and thus the extent which they driven particular theories. Why do those of us who write about often feel it necessary reassure our readers that the cases which presented or Tom Beauchamp and Laurence McCullough, in the preface Medical Ethics The Moral Responsibilities of Physicians, state that each of the cases they discuss is based on actual events.[1] In Cases in Bioethics, Carol Levine and Robert Veatch note in their introduction that the cases presented are based on events.[2] And in the acknowledgments Mortal Choices, Ruth Macklin mentions that all material taken from actual cases.[3] These declarations of authenticity, I suspect, merely reflect a general distrust in the discipline of the or fictional case. If there any strongly held article of faith within the discipline, it that bioethicists deal with the Aristotelian messy real world and that academic philosophers spend their time in a Platonic domain of unclouded abstraction. Bioethicists confront actual cases; academic philosophers contemplate imagined ones. This distinction has been explicitly considered and justified scholars who analyze how cases should be used in the discipline. Dena Davis, for instance, acknowledges that fiction can provide a useful source for studying ethical problems, but she maintains that the daily bread of bioethics the case.[4] Furthermore she insists that these cases keep the bioethicist honest, for by describing experiences ethicists can make points and draw conclusions while inviting their readers make their own independent judgments (p. 13). Similarly John Arras, in his discussion of the pedagogical value of casuistry, counsels against using fabricated cases because hypothetical cases, so beloved of academic philosophers, tend be theory-driven; that is, they usually designed advance some explicitly theoretical point. Real cases, on the other hand, more likely display the sort of moral complexity and untidiness that demand the (non-deductive) weighing and balancing of competing moral considerations and the casuistical virtues of discernment and practical judgment (phronesis).[5] William Donnelly also cautions against using the hypothetical case, for, Such histories usually constructed illustrate the application of theory concrete situations. The plot and characters begotten of theory, not life, and exist demonstrate and confirm theory.[6] For these ethicists, hypothetical cases biased, theory driven, and constructed, and cases implication impartial, theory-free, and guileless. The danger of made up cases, they suggest, resides in the teller's intentions illustrate a prior theory; cases because of their origin in actual events can question rather than support a philosopher's moral analysis. Real cases from this perspective something akin to what Charles Taylor calls brute data,[7] that is, they objective and empirical. Yet for the ethicist present the data received from life situations, he or she must present those events in a narrative; a story must be constructed. Every telling of a story--real or imagined--encompasses a series of choices about what will be revealed, what will be privileged, and what will be concealed; there no artless narrations. All stories shaped a particular teller for a particular purpose, for narratives infected their situatedness. Consequently the ethics case, even though it may be based on a life event, mediated and thereby interpreted through narrative discourse. In presenting a case, situations must be plotted, people characterized, a narrative persona assumed, and a point of view adopted. …