Chambers T
Northwestern Unversity.
Am J Bioeth. 2001 Winter;1(1):40-3. doi: 10.1162/152651601750079050.
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.
最近，生物伦理学开始关注与叙事的结合，但在这种结合中，叙事通常仅被视为哲学的辅助工具。在其著作《生物伦理学的虚构》的前言中，托德·钱伯斯认为，叙事理论不应仅仅是医学伦理学的有益补充，而应被视为与道德理论本身对该学科同样至关重要。我们需要重新思考医学伦理学与叙事之间关系的原因在于，伦理学家通过将其观点应用于案例来检验这些观点，而案例是一种叙事体裁。认识到案例对于医学伦理学家进行伦理学研究方式的重要性，对于将该领域视为应用哲学的一种形式至关重要。与其他表现形式一样，叙事具有独特的、决定性的特征，伦理学家为了理解其领域的数据，必须学会识别和区分这些特征。伦理学家需要关注关于叙事话语的决策如何影响被判定与之相关的道德理论类型。作者简要考察了叙事话语的六个特征，这些特征从修辞角度制约着我们理解医学伦理学案例的方式：过滤、可报道性、结局、人物、时空体和性别。
