Ethical Narrative and Moral Choices in the Self-Reliance Literary Group (Tự Lực văn đoàn): Reconfiguring Modern Subjectivity in Vietnamese Fiction of the 1930s

A Study on the Theory of Ethical Literary Criticism

Truth and Reconciliation and Narrative Ethics, Form, and Politics Sarah Copland (bio) I am the Canadian daughter of British immigrants and a settler who now gratefully teaches and learns on land known as Treaty 6 territory, an area encompassing central parts of the present-day provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, where a treaty between “Her Majesty the Queen” and “the Plain and Wood Cree Indians and other tribes of Indians” was signed in 1876 (Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba).1 I have benefitted tangibly and intangibly in my life from colonial structures of power that privilege white, native English-speaking settlers and in my work from a colonial academia that privileges Western theories and methodologies for literary criticism and education in general. I begin with this self-positioning because this essay is about the narrative ethics, form, and politics in and of artistic works purporting to contribute to reconciliation for groups that face historical and present-day injustice. Acknowledging my situatedness is a critical first step in formally framing literary criticism about such artistic works in a way that reinforces—rather than undermines—that criticism’s politics and ethics. As I address questions that are as pressing for theorizations of narrative ethics and politics generally as they are for specific cases hitting the media, including the peoples and communities affected by these cases, I participate in a conversation led by Indigenous scholars, writers, and activists. In this conversation, which focuses on the politics and ethics of representation, I draw on my expertise in narrative theory and narrative ethics to add a complementary engagement with the [End Page 229] politics and ethics of form. In doing so, I address two hitherto unaddressed questions. First, what bearing do the ethics of an author’s conduct in writing, publishing, and promoting a work as an act of reconciliation have on the ethics of the work itself, that is, the ethics of the dramatized and narrated events and relationships in the text’s action, and the narration itself? Second, how does the interaction between what we might call text-external ethics and text-internal ethics affect the political work a text is ostensibly undertaking to support and contribute to reconciliation for groups facing ongoing inequities?2 By bringing this conversation to an international context, I also model for scholars working with artistic responses to other Truth Commissions, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, or their equivalents, one version of what form-specific ethical political criticism might look like.3 In what follows, I address these questions and model this form-specific ethical political criticism through an engagement with controversial, award-winning Canadian writer Joseph Boyden’s novella, Wenjack. Published in the fall of 2016, Wenjack was part of a multi-artist, multi-media response to two coinciding events: the fifty-year anniversary of the death of Chanie Wenjack, an Indigenous (Ojibwe) boy who died while running away from a so-called Indian residential school, and the conclusion of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, whose report on the residential school system and its legacy was published in 2015. Shortly after Wenjack was published, a controversy surrounding Boyden’s Indigenous identity claims broke in national news, beginning with Robert Jago’s tweets from the IndigenousXca Twitter account and Jorge Barrera’s online piece “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape-Shifting Indigenous Identity” in the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network News.4 By that time, Boyden had spent more than fifteen years publishing novels, short stories, and non-fiction exclusively about fictional and real-world Indigenous peoples and stories. He represented himself in text-internal and text-external venues (such as author biographies and media interviews) as Indigenous or Métis, received many literary awards (some of which targeted Indigenous writers), and served as the voice and face of Indigenous literature and of cultural commentary on Indigenous issues in the Canadian media. As the controversy unfolded through articles in a vast range of periodicals both before and after Boyden’s official published response, “My Name Is Joseph Boyden” (Maclean’s, August 2017), scholars, writers, and activists, [End Page 230] mostly Indigenous, addressed Boyden’s numerous, unsubstantiated ancestry claims from political angles, attuned to the intersecting dynamics...

Reviewed by: Narrative Ethics David Richter Adam Zachary Newton. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. xiii + 335pp. From the parables of Jesus to the meshalim of the Dubliner Maggid, preachers have constantly crafted stories as ethical exempla affirming [End Page 247] or questioning commonly held moral and spiritual truths, and for the seventeen decades between Horace and Samuel Johnson it was clear to all that the aim of writing was ethical instruction. Nevertheless, novel-reading began as a shameful and dubious activity, and Anglo-American letters has kept a deep-seated sense that telling stories is an intrinsically suspicious act. Perhaps that is why our literary criticism has not consistently made a place for ethical questions. Thirty years ago, to ask insistently about the moral impact of texts upon readers—as Wayne Booth did in The Rhetoric of Fiction—was to invite distortion into a Neanderthal ally of Mrs. Grundy or the Legion of Decency. Even in the past decade, when formalism has been on the run, we may have become unembarrassed at authors’ sexual or political self-fashionings, or at our own, but ethical questions have not really come to the fore. The subtle and revelatory argumentative positions of J. Hillis Miller’s Ethics of Reading (1987), Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep (1988), Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge (1990), and Tobin Siebert’s Morals and Stories (1992) have sparked no renaissance of literary ethics, nor has the Johns Hopkins Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory an entry under “moral criticism.” The unsubtitled handle of Adam Zachary Newton’s book betokens a field where novices need not fight for ideological lebensraum. If we betray our sympathies primarily by what we find it interesting to argue against, Newton comes off as a lapsed deconstructionist. He brushes off the formalism of Booth and Nussbaum, barely mentions Siebert, but devotes a large part of Chapter Two to an elaborate refutation of Paul de Man’s hints toward an ethics of fictions, and cites Hillis Miller so often that his book titles are given special abbreviations. But Newton’s positive influences are more interesting, these days, than those he has shaken off: Stanley Cavell, who taught Newton at Harvard; the French philosopher and Talmudic scholar Emmanuel Levinas; and the early Mikhail Bakhtin. Newton wishes to “braid” these three sets of ideas into a performative ethics of narrative, which will involve “recursive, contingent, and interactive dramas of encounter and recognition . . . which . . . prose fiction both crystallizes and recirculates in acts of interpretive engagement.” None of these philosophers is precisely common property, however (Newton’s Bakhtin, for example, is the philosopher of The Architectonics of Answerability rather than the literary theorist of The Dialogic Imagination), and I suspect that the book [End Page 248] might have gained in lucidity if Newton had attempted to expound some of their ideas coherently rather than quoting them in fragments. Newton’s triad of philosophers is matched by a triad of aspects of narrative ethics. There is, first of all, an “narrational ethics” involved with presuming to tell a story to another individual (like the Ancient Mariner, who “stoppeth one of three”); there is a “representational ethics” involved with fictionalizing individuals, shifting their ontological status from persons to characters within a story; and there is, finally, a “hermeneutic ethics” involved with the responsibilities of the listener toward the story she or he is told, to respond to and engage with the text. These three aspects of ethics might be thought of as primarily belonging to author, narrator, and reader, except that characters within texts can perform all three of these roles (the way Conrad’s Jim buttonholes Marlow in the Malabar Hotel to tell his story; the way Marlow creates “Jim” as a character for agents within his text as well as for us; the way Stein and Bryerly and the French lieutenant “read” and evaluate Jim as a text that applies to them). With three philosophical bases of appeal not entirely consistent with each other, and three modes of ethical praxis within narrative, Newton’s thought-provoking analyses of a dozen exemplary texts from Benito Cereno and Bleak House to Flaubert’s Parrot and The Remains of the...

Uses of Metaphor:Richard Rorty's Literary Criticism and the Poetics of World-Making Günter Leypoldt (bio) The so-called revival of pragmatism since the 1980s gained much of its cultural momentum in literature departments that welcomed Richard Rorty's philosophical antitraditionalism as a refreshing contribution to contemporary theory. And yet, Rorty's authority as a literary scholar has remained ambiguous. While literary critics tend to appreciate his turn to narrative—as an alternative to abstract theorizing—they often find it harder to accept his narrative ethics. As a result (and in contrast to the most prominent pragmatists in the literary field),1 Rorty has been accused of a backward-looking approach to literary artwork: a program of "literature as ethical reflection," according to Lawrence Buell, that "looks suspiciously like old-fashioned value thematics," a "pre-modern" approach that renders "aesthetic sensibility ultimately subservient to the goal of moral improvement."2 But why would a declared postmetaphysical pragmatist revert to premodern reading practices? Critics have invoked the specter of neoconservatism,3 and pondered personal deficiencies in Rorty's literary sensibility: such as a "puritan" distrust of aesthetic pleasure,4 inattentiveness to the intricate "sound and rhythm of poetic language,"5 or a habit of "philosophizing" literary texts by reducing them to propositional statements.6 It seems that such implausible explanations result from translating Rorty's pragmatist approach into literary studies without taking into account his view of literature as world-making.7 The concept of world-making as metaphoric redescription (in Rorty's terms) is arguably at odds with the conceptual coordinates of Kantian aesthetics that continue to shape contemporary views of the literary. We tend to feel so much at home with these coordinates (and a critical repertoire that questions them) that it is easy to misunderstand Rorty's revision, and to place him where he does not belong: in a quasi-formalist literary ethics that emerged in contemporary literary departments, often in response to the pioneering work of Martha Nussbaum. [End Page 145] I. Literary Ethics and the "Neglect of Form" The family resemblances between Rorty and Nussbaum are well known. Trained philosophers disillusioned with their field, both have expressed an aversion to philosophical inquiry based on the idea of a moral reason independent of human emotion and circumstance. They also share the conviction that the novel's thick description of human particularities offers richer explorations of ethical complexities than the theoretical treatise. But apart from disagreements on epistemology, they have markedly different concepts of the literary imagination. Nussbaum views her program of literature as ethical reflection as a stand against formalist traditions. Any explanation of "how literary theory lost [its] practical dimension," she says, should "include the influence of Kant's aesthetics; of early twentieth-century formalism; of the New Criticism." Nussbaum's critique of the disinterested artwork dovetails with a broad consensus, in the 1980s, against midcentury notions of literariness (as the inner form of autonomous aesthetic objects). But in contrast to more thoroughly antiformalist theoretical trends, Nussbaum tends to choose a middle way in her revisionist readings of canonical authors. She cautions her readers that what gives "ethical writing about literature a bad name" is partly the "neglect of literary form" by some of its practitioners.8 She holds that a successful ethical turn in literary theory needs to pay attention to how "form and content shape one another."9 This dialectical view characterizes some of Nussbaum's best work, especially her readings of Henry James, probably her most persuasive case for a turn to ethics in literary studies. They have helped to encourage a literary ethics that considers literariness and ethico-moral insight as two sides of the same coin, implying, for instance, that somehow Henry James's superior narrative skills contribute to the moral depth of his vision, which depth makes him all the more literary. In Nussbaum's terms, the ethical imagination in The Golden Bowl is "finely tuned" precisely because it emerges from "a fine work of art" whose stylistic sophistication defies paraphrase into the "flat" language of moral philosophy.10 Moral intelligence is thus understood as a heightened perception of complexity, and ethical progress becomes a question of improving...

The article substantiates the need for a new methodological turn in the study of non-verbal communication means, in particular, considering them as a tool for popularization and dissemination of ethical concepts and moral dominants of behavior in the modern Internet space. The purpose of the article: substantiation of memetics as a perspective direction of development of the methodology of non-verbal communication; identifying the potential of memetos as a tool for popularizing and spreading ethical concepts and moral dominants of behavior in the modern communicative space. Memetic approach to the study of non-verbal communicative influence on the content of social discourse content is revealed and the perspectives are proven. Memes that represent moral and ethical meanings in the modern communication space, and at the same time act as inspirers of moral feeling, are proposed to be called “memetoses”, and their characteristic features are also determined. The opinion that memetoses have a significant potential for the formation of ethical and moral education discourse is justified. The purpose of scientific research is the substantiation of memetics as a perspective direction for the non-verbal communication methodology; the identification of memetoses’ potential as a tool for the popularization and dissemination of ethical concepts and moral dominants of behavior in the modern communicative space. The generalizations presented in the article allowed the author to conclude about the possibility of considering the memetic approach as a promising direction of communication post-neopositivism, which, among other things, aims to study the issues of adaptation, transmission, diffusion of ethical and philosophical knowledge of a humanistic direction by such means of non-verbal communication as memetoses. The results of the conducted research allow deepening the theoretical views on the possibility of using the specified means to fill the modern education space with humanistic content. The memetic approach, in addition to the direct increase in ethical and philosophical knowledge, also creates opportunities for practical construction and management of social and ethical discourse, which opens up new horizons for further research in this direction.

Reviewed by: Stories and Their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics Ann Folwell Stanford Hilde Lindemann Nelson, ed. Stories and Their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics. New York: Routledge, 1997. xx + 284 pp. Clothbound, $75. Paperback, $18.99. As Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s lively and dynamic collection, Stories and Their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics, demonstrates, scholars in the still evolving field of narrative ethics have made strides in defining and placing their work within the overall context of ethics and medicine. It has not always been an easy or particularly collegial process. In June 1996, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy published a thematic issue on “Literature and Medical Ethics.” Co-edited by K. Danner Clouser and Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, the issue considers the question of literature’s contribution to medical ethics and, more specifically, the emerging area known as narrative ethics. The essays present an engaging constellation of ideas and approaches, “examples of how textual analysis, literary theory, and the reading and writing of literature can contribute to an understanding of ethical issues in medicine.” 1 Unfortunately, Clouser’s essay in response, “Let the Engagement Begin,” treats the earlier writers and their pieces more like adversaries in a legal trial than colleagues in exploration. He brings the gavel down resoundingly against the “literature folks” and their claim that narrative ethics might be more than window dressing for principle-based bioethics. “‘Facts’ for philosophy and history have the same relevant connotations that ‘story’ does for literature. So, unless there is more packed into ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ than has been seen in these articles, these terms may be helpful to some, but they certainly are not necessary” (p. 339). Despite Hawkins’s adroit rejoinder to Clouser’s essay, the volume left me with the sense that the issue’s authors had been patronized (possibly set up) and, as misguided children, put in their rightful place at the margins of philosophical discourse. Stories and Their Limits is a welcome corrective. In this volume, ethicists and literary scholars come together, neither to be cheerleaders for nor to bash narrative ethics. Instead, the collection represents divergent and thoughtful considerations of the characteristics, shortcomings, and possibilities of this still-evolving field. Although there is some repetition among the essays, the collection is a wide-ranging, rich, and, at times, quirky conversation, thereby modeling the very tenets it explores. The seventeen essays included in Stories and Their Limits emerged from the 1996 spring meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values hosted by the University of Tennessee’s Center for Applied and [End Page 309] Professional Ethics, which Nelson directs. The authors (five of whom appeared in the Clouser and Hawkins issue) are, in the main, ethicists, physicians, philosophers, and/or literary scholars. In her opening essay, Nelson traces the evolution of the “personal turn” in moral theory and the challenges such a turn offered to claims of objectivity and epistemic certainty. Essays are loosely clustered around telling, reading, analyzing, and invoking stories, and all examine the usefulness of narrative approaches to ethics: “Even among those who find them very useful indeed, there are perplexities about which bits of the moral life are most fruitfully examined when approached through narratives, and just how far such an approach can take us” (p. xiv). Section 1, “Telling the Patient’s Story,” includes work that examines the meaning, uses, methods, and benefits of narrative ethics. Thomas H. Murray, for example, in wondering what we mean by “narrative ethics,” offers tapestry and web as useful metaphors for how meaning is made. He claims that the images of a tapestry “are like excerpts from narratives: they vibrantly capture centrally important scenes from human lives” and are “crucial raw materials for making and justifying moral judgments” (p. 17). Howard Brody, reading Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller, charts directions for bioethics, or to be more accurate, “reforms.” Brody calls for bioethics to consider “how all of us, as a community of humans and hence of fellow sufferers, can live with each other in our suffering and participate fully and responsibly in reciprocal systems of healing” (p. 30). Arthur Frank’s essay looks at the disturbing possibility of patients becoming totalized...

This essay examines the discursive emergence of ethical literary criticism—a new wave of theory and practice of literary criticism that has developed in the West even as it has also historically thrived in China. It begins with the revival of ethical criticism in the West when American ethical criticism blossomed and advanced new conceptions of reading. The paper then turns “eastward” to China and discusses the historical context in which ethical literary criticism emerged in the country. It surveys the history of importation of Western theories and the resulting inundation of the “theoretical complex” since China’s opening up to the outside world. Finally, the essay focuses on the theoretical elaboration of Nie Zhenzhao to whom is owed the current emergence of ethical literary criticism in China as well as the attention of literary critics and scholars in the West. The paper argues that ethical literary criticism which has grown into a critical movement in China follows this trajectory: from its origins in Ancient Greece, it develops into a trend in the West, and finally gives shape to Nie Zhenzhao’s critical theory, China’s most prominent contribution to the scholarship in the field of ethical literary criticism.

Reviewed by: Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels by Jean Wyatt Milo Obourn (bio) Jean Wyatt. Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels. U of Georgia P, 2017. xii+, 248 pp. ISBN: 978-08-20-35060-8 (HB); ISBN: 978-08-20-35059-2 (epub). $74.95 "In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change." Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" (53) Although not referenced directly, I could not help thinking of Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic" while reading Jean Wyatt's Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, a book of insightful literary criticism that reads Toni Morrison's narrative choices as a set of ethics in relation to the concept of love–or, as Lorde might put it, a politics of the erotic. Wyatt's book interweaves close readings of Morrison's narrative style with arguments about race, gender, power, narrative form, psychoanalysis, authorial ethics, contemporary modes of accessing the traumas of US slavery, reader responsibility, and Morrison's personal growth as a widely influential writer and thinker. Following Wyatt's lead, we might come to understand one of Morrison's central creative projects as examining the ways in which our world can be truly different by reclaiming and reinventing a love that has been taken from African American people through a traumatic history of slavery and its systemic repercussions. As Lorde states, the "word erotic comes from the Greek eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony" (55). When Wyatt puts love at the center of her reading of Morrison's narrative ethics, she highlights that in order to love well, to love ethically, to love without recreating the cycle of trauma, one must love creatively and without a fixed idea of what love is. Wyatt shows how Morrison draws the reader into this understanding of love through experimental stylistic techniques that engage "reader[s] in a [End Page 132] dialogue between [their] ethical convictions and the structures of the text that call them into question" (16). Wyatt provides us with a timeline that contextualizes her focus on Morrison's later novels, claiming that, "Beloved represents a radical shift to more experimental narrative forms" (7). These forms are not experimental simply for the sake of newness; rather, they carry an ethical weight. Wyatt defines her use of "ethical" here as a way to "evoke the narrative techniques through which these later texts implicate the reader, often by drawing out a reader's preconceptions about love, race, and gender—and then inducing their reader to rethink and reevaluate those ideas" (2). This ethics creates not only a certain kind of reader response but what I would call a reader responsibility, in which readers are co-creators in the meaning of the narrative and thus their belief systems are implicated in constructing the text and also challenged by the texts' multiple perspectives and challenges to any one way of knowing. Love appears, in Wyatt's readings of Morrison, as the thematic glue that connects Morrison's treatment of race and gender across her work. In its most radical form, it becomes a kind of ethics that keeps one in a constant mode of creativity, forever rethinking dominant narratives and reinventing places for oneself in which one can not only survive historical and personal traumas, but also discover rich interpersonal and communal ways of thriving. Wyatt posits that love in Morrison can reflect the cycle of trauma—that is, one can love unethically or violently. However, she also suggests that love in Morrison can take on the role of challenging the cultural effects of shared traumas to African American bodyminds and can offer ways to play outside of or in creative relation to the dissonance created by the shared traumas that have stunted understandings of love and reproduced violent power dynamics. Wyatt deftly employs a psychoanalytic lens to draw connections between love and narrative form. Psychoanalysis is an appropriate tool given its concerns with...

REVIEWS 339 What Deification in Russian Religious Thought ultimately points to, therefore, is not just the deification spectrum and narrative of late imperial Russia. It also gestures toward a decentred, open-ended contest over what is and what is not Russian Orthodox, an interpretative contest which captures historical actors, theologians, and scholars of Russian Orthodoxy, including the book’s author and this reviewer, in a hermeneutic circle to which we all belong and from which we cannot escape. Department of Religious Studies Patrick Lally Michelson Indiana University Spektor, Alexander. Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2020. xii + 243 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00: $39.95. Nabokov’s dislike of Dostoevskii is well-known. And yet, Nabokov’s and Dostoevskii’s ethics and metaphysics have much in common. In Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov, Alexander Spektor makes a persuasive case that the deepest link that connects Nabokov to Dostoevskii is a shared commitment to personal freedom and moral responsibility, and that this first principle of their philosophy becomes visible when viewed through the lens of narrative ethics. But how to represent personal freedom and nurture moral responsibility in a domain where characters have no freedom (Nabokov called them ‘galley slaves’) and readers have so much of it that authors cannot count on them to respond predictably to moral guidance? If we begin at the point where Spektor’s book ends, we might conclude that freedom is illusory and moral responsibility a mirage. Inspired by the ‘dark’ materialsinBakhtin’swartimenotebooks,Spektorseesnarrativerepresentation as an instrument of power that always tilts towards violence. Though the rest of Spektor’s book is significantly less dispiriting, the compact between narrative and violence remains a theoretical given. The main trajectory of Spektor’s book shows how Dostoevskii’s and Nabokov’s aesthetics (understood as the formal inventiveness of their fictions) enacts an ethics (understood as the distribution of power). Readers’ moral sense is said to become activated when they become aware of the violence that narrative enacts upon the self and others. According to Spektor, Dostoevskii’s and Nabokov’s formal innovations are designed to overcome the tyranny and violence intrinsic to linguistic representation. Spektor’s main claim is that Bakhtin’s influential work on Dostoevskii that preceded his ‘dark’ writings from the 1940s provides us with SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 340 the conceptual scaffolding for staging a non-coercive yet ethically charged encounter among the various stakeholders of fiction, which include characters, narrators, authors and — most significantly since Bakhtin did not concern himself with them — readers. The figure of the reader as ‘accomplice’ in the narrative allocation of power is the most original and important element of the book. To bring it off, Spektor offers a bracing reassessment of Bakhtin’s understanding of polyphony. Bakhtin used the term to describe what he saw as Dostoevskii’s resistance of the absolute power vested in the authorial voice. In Spektor’s reformulation of this Bakhtinian concept, Dostoevskii’s ‘dialogic imagination’ asserts itself most powerfully not in the author’s tolerance for his characters’ competing ideological positions, but in the struggle between speech and silence that he dramatizes in his fictions. Unlike discourse, which is always on the lookout to appropriate more power, silence becomes emblematic of the will’s freedom to perform moral actions. For Spektor, such self-sacrificing and compassionate acts are an integral part of Dostoevskii’s Christian faith and serve as a moral compass for his characters and readers in his post-Siberian work. By becoming aware of the coercive nature of discourse, Dostoevskii’s readers are incited to close off dialogue with the text and become moral actors in ‘real’ life (p. 42). As Spektor frequently reminds us, the analytical apparatus he establishes in his readings of ‘The Meek One’, The Idiot, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister can be fruitfully applied to other works by Dostoevskii and Nabokov. Still, it is surprising that Spektor does not apply it himself to the two texts that make complicity a central moral problematic and dramatize the perils of ‘bad’ reading with such compelling force...

Sometimes reactive attitudes target groups rather than individuals. 1 This suggests that groups are sometimes morally responsible. A growing number of moral philosophers agree with this, yet fail to recognize just how diverse the set of morally responsible groups is. Dominant approaches to group responsibility thus suggest that only one type of group is morally responsible, namely, those groups that have emergent capacities that mirror the agential capacities of rational and normatively competent individuals. Let us call these fully-formed groups. However, some of our reactive attitudes target not only fully-formed groups but also what I will call aberrant groups, namely, groups that lack one or more of the capacities possessed by fully-formed groups. The full repertoire of reactive attitudes might not be suitable for aberrant groups, but it nonetheless seems justified that we disdain a Neo-Nazi rally, feel gratitude toward the group of strangers who spontaneously cooperate to save a child, or disapprove of a greedy corporation. These reactive attitudes are appropriate even if the Neo-Nazi rally lacks the structure that would make it capable of entering a moral conversation, if the spontaneously cooperating group of strangers is unable to form grouplevel judgments and decisions, and if the corporation is normatively For helpful comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Benjamin Christensen and two associate editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs. This research is generously supported by the Carlsberg Foundation (Grant IDs: CF19-0312 and CF21-0217). 1. Gunnar Björnsson and Kendy Hess, "Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents,"

This paper examines how contemporary Indian English fiction constructs the body as a contested site where power, precarity, and resistance converge. Drawing on theories of corporeality and biopolitics, particularly the works of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben, the study argues that the novels under consideration reimagine the body not merely as a passive recipient of violence but as an active locus of ethical and political meaning. Situating the analysis within the socio-political contexts of migration, gendered labour, carceral systems, and medicalized control, the paper explores how narrative voice, temporal structure, and focalization shape readers’ ethical engagement with suffering and survival. Through close textual analysis, the study demonstrates that gendered bodies experience precarity differently, yet both women’s and men’s narratives reveal strategies of everyday and symbolic resistance. Fragmented timelines, confessional modes, testimonial realism, and interior monologue function as formal mechanisms that transform private pain into collective critique. The paper further argues that narrative form itself becomes a political act: by controlling perspective and temporality, these texts compel readers to confront vulnerability as a shared human condition rather than a marginal exception. Ultimately, this study proposes that contemporary Indian English fiction participates in an ethics of witnessing, where storytelling becomes a mode of reclaiming agency from structures of domination. By linking corporeal politics to narrative ethics, the paper offers a framework for understanding how literary form mediates resistance in contexts of gendered precarity and institutional power.

INTRODUCTION. The application of the method of “text-nature” analysis is discussed, based on the concept of “umwelt”, which is of decisive importance for ethical literary criticism. The purpose of the study is to characterize the method of “text-nature” analysis and the term “brain text”, to emphasize that the literary work of a critic should respect the natural process of creating works and encourage readers to freely interpret texts to achieve ethical and moral values in understanding life.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The book-essay “In Memory of Memory” by M.M. Stepanova and the novel “Anna Karenina” by L.N. Tolstoy were used. A textual analysis was conducted through interpretation, a descriptive method was used, which facilitates the development of further scientific procedures in the field of using the Umwelt for literary studies purposes, a method of analyzing the “nature-text” was introduced, designed to return literary texts to the ecological sphere, to the Umwelt.RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. The analysis of the “nature-text” in ethical literary criticism is substantiated, opening up a new perspective for literary criticism. The use of the Umwelt concept, refracted through the prism of literary criticism, allows us to consider that when reading and criticizing a literary work, their relationship with the ecological environment should be taken into account. Literary reading and criticism should be based on their involvement in the surrounding world and the extraction of meanings.CONCLUSION. A new paradigm of literary criticism is developing, the essence of which is to pay attention to the natural process of creating literary works and the reader’s experience, since both the reader and the critic have their own umwelt.

IntroductionReflection on ethical behavior is undoubtedly one of the most important competencies required throughout a medical career, due to the series of dilemmas and difficult decisions that health professionals have to make when providing care to patients or communities, teaching other professionals, or conducting biomedical research. Given the complexity of the challenge, it is surprising that there is little literature about effective pedagogical strategies that enhance ethical reflection in medical students. The aim of this study is to evaluate new strategies for promoting ethical thinking and reflection, in a medical pharmacology course, using technologies that can be easily implemented in other courses and programs.MethodsTo promote ethical reflection, we developed a role‐playing game that was initially conducted face‐to‐face, but was quickly adapted to a digital environment, due to the changes in classroom interaction brought about by the COVID‐19 pandemic.The academic exercise was conducted in several steps:1) The course was divided into groups that were assigned an ethical dilemma or controversial situation in pharmacology. Examples of ethical dilemmas are equal access to expensive therapies, health disasters caused by drugs or toxic substances, research in humans without review by ethics committees, academic fraud in clinical or basic research studies.2) Each group had to generate a 10‐minute newscast, in which they presented the dilemma in the form of a report, showing the point of view of the various actors involved (through the performance of the group members).3) The newscast was shared through social networks with classmates, who reviewed the material asynchronously.4) each expository group prepared an integration activity using, in a free way, digital tools (virtual boards, surveys and interactive quizzes, electronic forums, museum applications displayed on the Internet, etc) to seek to generate a deeper discussion about the assigned topic, in the classmates of the course.5) the course mates and the teacher evaluated the quality of the elements of the activity by means of the mentimeter6) at the end of the semester, an electronic survey with Likert‐type questions was applied to evaluate the students' perception of the effectiveness of the activity and their learning in 24 ethical competencies relevant to the course.ResultsDuring the two years of the innovation, the majority of students reported that the feedback provided by the professor (96%), group discussions (89%), role‐playing (79%), and opportunities for personal reflection (71%) were the activities that contributed most to their learning of ethics in pharmacology. Most students (96%) reported that the activities were helpful to them in achieving the competencies of ethical reasoning and reflection. Assessment of each competency, described in table 1, demonstrated gains in all domains.ConclusionsThe use of interaction and discussion tools, individually or in teams, in the framework of a role‐playing strategy, is an effective method to promote students' analysis of an ethical dilemma in medicine. Opening spaces for ethical discussion, in the midst of traditionally technical courses, helps students reflect more on the importance of course content and curricula, and how their learning will be useful for making better decisions as professionals.

When lifesaving medical resources such as organs or medical technologies are scarce, how should they be distributed? Among the patients needing such resources, who should be selected, and how? James F. Childress addresses these questions in his landmark article, “Who Shall Live When Not All Can Live?,” providing a careful analysis of the ethical dimensions of rationing lifesaving medical resources and defending a method of randomized patient selection. Childress's argument is not only a model of practical reasoning in bioethics, it also influenced the design of public policy regarding rationing, now institutionalized by the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), a nonprofit organization under contract with the federal government to oversee the allocation of scarce organs and tissues.This is not to say that Childress's argument is uncontroversial or that it is not subject to strong challenges and the need for revision or amendment. In this article I want to identify one challenge to Childress's argument and show how it opens up an alternative pathway for bioethical public policy that Childress would do well to note and that he might want to avoid. To that end, I will unpack that challenge, indicate the stakes involved, identify its practical implications, and defend a way to deflect it. Before doing that, however, I need to describe Childress's constructive position.First published in 1970, Childress's argument conceives of rationing lifesaving medical resources as occurring in two stages. At the first stage, prospective patients are to be screened according to the criterion of medical utility to identify a class of people deemed “medically acceptable” for treatment. The aim would not be to identify precise prospects of success at the individual level but to determine a class of potential recipients who meet medical criteria for a reasonable prospect of successful response to treatment (Childress 1997d, 172–73). Medical criteria, applied in this way, would exclude some persons in order to create a pool of prospective patients, but those criteria would not allow physicians to then select specific patients who seem to have relatively better prospects than others. At the second and final stage, patients who are to receive scarce resources would instead be selected randomly—without regard to race, gender, economic background, nationality, creed, or social value. Childress specifies the process of random selection in terms of queuing (first come, first served) or in terms of using a lottery (175). The central rationale, about which I will say more below, turns on the principle of human dignity and equality of opportunity, as opposed to social value or utilitarian considerations. Randomness, Childress argues, is the best means for rationing resources that honors the equal dignity of all persons.Childress refined his ideas in subsequent writings and in the postscript written for the 1997 republication of “Who Shall Live When Not All Can Live?” by distinguishing medical utility from social utility (1997d, 184; see 1997a, 220). One reason for the refinement was the need to think not only about how to ration dialysis machines—the question behind his first foray into rationing—but also about the ethics of allocating scarce organs. Henceforth he allows considerations of medical utility to inform decisions after the first stage of screening, noting that considerations of medical benefit are independent of a patient's social worth and are in accord with his main principle for rationing, namely, respect for equal dignity. On this revised account, utilitarian considerations may intrude on, and modify, the randomness of the second phase of the selection process for reasons that prescind from considerations of the recipient's social worth. This last stage is constrained by the need to responsibly steward scarce resources, such as organs, that cannot be reused. An eligible patient waiting for an organ might undergo health problems that render him or her medically unacceptable after having been initially included in the pool but before an organ becomes available to him or her. Considerations of medical utility require physicians to consider the urgency of patient need and the procedure's probability of success. A physician may thus reallocate a randomly assigned organ away from a recipient with no reasonable prospect for success to another patient who can palpably benefit from it. Childress refined his views after 1970 in light of these ideas, adding that it was impossible to provide an a priori lexical ranking of medical need and hope for success (Childress 1997a). Childress's final position still has two stages, but each stage is constrained by considerations of medical utility: (1) establishing a pool of potential recipients according to the criterion of medical acceptability; (2) randomly selecting recipients from the pool of medically acceptable patients and modifying that process when necessary according to updated judgments regarding a rationed resource's prospect for success.1Of these stages, the second is arguably the more controversial, and it is about this stage that I will discuss the ideas of justice, reason, and luck as they factor into Childress's proposal for using random selection for rationing lifesaving medical resources. I will simplify matters by referring to random selection as a lottery. Random selection can be institutionalized in different ways: choosing straws, queuing, or entering into a drawing, for example. What these examples have in common, and what is captured by the term lottery, is the fact that the outcome is a matter of chance rather than effort or, for that matter, anything specific about the applicant's background or profile (Childress 1997d, 173–75). My use of the term lottery is meant to accentuate the role of chance in Childress's proposal and aims to highlight the fact that, on his line of argument, those who receive and those who are denied scarce lifesaving medical resources are the subjects of good and bad luck, respectively.Using a lottery ignores features about the eligible candidate except for the barest essential fact, namely, membership in the human race. Random selection thereby implies some metaphysical claims insofar as it presupposes the distinction between essential and accidental dimensions of human personhood. That distinction enables us to make sense of the fact that the lottery ignores certain features of medically acceptable applicants—features such as inherited wealth, proven talent, social position, or potential social value—as irrelevant when determining how medical resources should be rationed.I want to explore metaphysical presuppositions associated with using a lottery to ration lifesaving medical resources and what those presuppositions imply about justice, luck, and personhood as those ideas bear upon matters of equitable rationing and patient selection. At stake in ethical debates about “who shall live when not all can live” is the relationship between justice and chance in ethics and metaphysics. Childress's argument advances the counterintuitive idea that the use of chance can be a fair way to allocate scarce lifesaving medical resources. On his line of argument, those who are saved when not all can be saved are winners in a lottery, the beneficiaries of good luck, and those who are not saved are losers in a lottery, victims of bad luck. Although I believe that Childress is correct in the substance of his proposal, I think that the reasons he offers in its defense need to be strengthened.Allowing for a marriage of justice and luck in rationing poses difficult questions for proponents of a lottery who wish to discount putative accidental features of personhood when determining a fair method for allocating scarce lifesaving medical resources. Accepting the results of luck while bracketing other effects of fortune in the same overall account of fairness seems incongruous. Consider a line of thought that would seek to avoid such incongruity by refusing to discount or bracket putative accidental features of personhood. Theorists who believe that the distinction between essential and accidental properties is otiose when thinking about personhood, or that it ought to have no bearing on determining the requirements of justice, might consider specific features of an individual's profile—what might otherwise be classified as contingent aspects of a person—when determining how to ration lifesaving medical resources. That is to say, those who reject the distinction between essential and contingent features of personhood might have reasons to consider certain aspects of luck—family background, potential value, or political or financial power, for example—when establishing what is appropriate in matters of resource rationing.We can sharpen some of these initial concerns about justice and luck from the vantage point of liberal political and moral theory. One version of that theory would drive a wedge, as John Rawls does, between justice-as-fairness, on the one hand, and accepting the results of what Rawls calls the natural and social lottery, on the other, when theorizing about justice. For Rawls, the results of the natural or social lottery are “arbitrary from a moral point of view” (1971, 72). They distribute advantages or disadvantages to persons for reasons entirely beyond their control. Allocating resources without taking measures to correct for the lottery's effects will only replicate distributions and advantages that are already in place. Those allocations would be fair, then, only if the original distribution is fair. From a Rawlsian perspective, finding a marriage between fairness and luck seems contrary to justice or, more precisely, seems to migrate in the direction of libertarian accounts of justice, in which matters of luck are not considered morally arbitrary or necessarily contrary to justice. I will elaborate on these ideas below. For now, note the following: insofar as Childress's argument weds justice and chance, his view may fail to close the door to being co-opted by libertarians and turned in an entirely different direction that would allow for the rationing of lifesaving medical resources on the basis of financial assets.2Rawls's claim that a theory of justice should aim to correct for the morally arbitrary results of the natural or social lottery would seem to prevent Childress from getting his argument off the ground. A libertarian view, on the other hand, would reject Rawls's wedge between justice and fortune and would accept the results of the natural and social lottery as part of the background assumptions for a theory of justice. Libertarian Robert Nozick asks why matters that are classified as “accidental” to human personhood—including natural or economic endowments—should be ignored when thinking about fairness in various forms of commercial and other exchanges (1974, 226). Nozick writes, “Why we, thick with particular traits, should be cheered that (only) the thus purified men within us are not regarded as means [in Kantian theories such as Rawls's] is … unclear” (228). Although Childress draws a metaphysical distinction between essential and contingent aspects of personhood that Nozick would question, his proposal for rationing lifesaving medical resources is nonetheless congenial with accepting lottery results. Consider, then, these questions: If we may accept the results of a randomizing lottery after a pool of medically acceptable recipients has been established, what should prevent us from accepting other aspects of the natural or social lottery as soon as the pool of eligible patients has been determined? Why put up a firewall between essential and accidental features of personhood after potential patients have been identified, but before rationing occurs? Why ignore other effects of a lottery and accept only a randomized version to distribute scarce lifesaving medical resources? Childress argues against a utilitarian approach to rationing lifesaving medical resources, but there is nothing particularly utilitarian about allocating them on the financial market. Childress's anti-utilitarian argument, in other words, rules out too little. As a result, his view is less secure against being marshaled to endorse an alternative, libertarian method for rationing scarce resources, one based on financial assets rather than on individuals' incomparable worth—quite a different procedure from what his interlocutors might have imagined when he first engaged the issue.Below I will address this problem—what I will call the libertarian problem—in Childress's argument and indicate how it might be deflected. Childress seems to agree with libertarian thinking that luck is an acceptable consideration when rationing and seems to disagree only about when luck can be introduced in the rationing process. This idea suggests—but does not substantiate—that Childress has overlooked a feature of libertarian philosophy, namely, the refusal to distinguish between chance and fairness. This feature would allow eligible patients who have secured the necessary economic resources to purchase scarce resources such as organs rather than risk being denied in a randomizing lottery.All this is to say that ideas that resonate with libertarian philosophy seem present in Childress's argument about rationing and patient selection, but their deeper aspects are not given full voice in his 1970 article and subsequent writings on the topic.3 In what follows, I will draw out those ideas, focusing on issues of justice, luck, and ethics. I aim to clarify different ways of distinguishing between justice and chance and then indicate how Childress can defend the idea that random selection is morally preferable to various alternatives for rationing lifesaving medical resources, including those of a libertarian stripe.Arriving at that point will require several steps and distinctions. First, I will sort out how Childress arranges his reasons in defense of using a lottery, making plain his core principle and the reasons that support it. Second, I will turn to the two alternatives to random selection that Childress argues against: letting everyone die, and rationing resources on the basis of social worth. There I will indicate how Childress's argument seeks to avoid nihilism and reductionism—more general orientations of thinking that shadow the alternatives he seeks to rebut. Third, I will turn to matters of metaphysics and ethics, focusing in particular on luck and justice. I will direct our attention to recent discussions of morality and luck to illuminate the seeming oddity of Childress's position and to sort out different versions of luck to indicate how they bear upon morality. To those versions I will add an account of instrumental and corrective luck to show how Childress may endorse a procedure that relies on chance while maintaining an account of the human person that is largely Kantian in spirit, presupposing a distinction between essential and accidental features of personhood. With those arguments in place, I will conclude by showing how Childress's argument can offer us an ethics of luck without a philosophical anthropology of luck and simultaneously avoid the charge of incongruity and deflect efforts to co-opt his position toward permitting money to play a role in the distribution of scarce lifesaving medical resources.Childress's argument in defense of using a lottery appeals to several moral and nonmoral values. These values are all coordinated to defend the idea that using a lottery is morally sound, practically feasible, and preferable to the alternatives that he invites us to consider, namely, allowing everyone to die or selecting patients on the basis of their social worth.Childress's principal justification of random selection defends it “because it preserves a significant degree of personal dignity by providing equality of opportunity” (1997d, 176; emphasis in the original). More precisely, he writes, “the individual's personal and transcendent dignity … can be protected and witnessed to by a recognition of his equal right to be saved. Such a right is best preserved by procedures that establish the equality of opportunity” (176).Childress then appeals to reasons that are not central to his principal claim but that lend auxiliary support to it. Foremost among them is the idea that trust between patients and doctors is better preserved when patients are viewed as ends in themselves rather than as instruments of medical progress or in terms of social usefulness (178–79). Here we see in explicit terms the Kantian undercurrents of Childress's thinking. Moreover, he notes, there are practical advantages to his proposal in that implementing a process of random selection does not require a committee to make the selections. There exist psychological and emotional benefits to using the lottery as well. The stress and strain of being rejected would be exacerbated by the feeling of being judged as relatively unworthy by persons of authority applying social values (178). The experience of rejection can be more easily accepted by an unsuccessful applicant in a situation of equality of opportunity, fairness, and trust—values that are best preserved by random selection (179). Along similar lines, Childress asks us to consider how criteria for distributing scarce lifesaving medical resources would be conceived from behind a veil of ignorance, and he concludes that the rational choice arising from deliberations behind the veil would be random selection, “since this [random selection] alone provides equality of opportunity” (177).With these ideas in mind, Childress targets two alternatives regarding the ethics of rationing medical lifesaving resources: letting everyone die or deciding who receives scarce resources on the basis of social worth.The first alternative, letting everyone die, would disavow rationing altogether and would capitulate to circumstances of bad luck. One might label it a position of negative equality: each person has an equal right to live, creating a situation in which each person's claim to scarce lifesaving resources leads to a wholesale cancelation of rights claims. Because of this wholesale cancelation, all must accept the fate to die. I will call this an egalitarian bad luck position. Stated more dramatically if not more precisely, it is a nihilistic proposal, claiming as it does to preserve no life and no demonstrable value. But if everyone is fated to die, one might reasonably ask whether there is a way to preserve some value. While not exactly the same kind of case as a trolley dilemma, in which a conductor must choose between taking one life or taking several, the case of determining who shall live when not all can live confronts us with a similar problem, namely, whether and how it is justifiable to preserve some value in an otherwise irresolvable life-against-life, or a rights-against-rights, conflict.Childress identifies two ways of considering moral possibilities within the nihilistic proposal, the first of which aims to preserve some value. That option is to hope that some persons will step forward and volunteer to die, thereby resolving the egalitarian bad luck position with a saintly/heroic answer. Nihilism would thus be averted by heroism. Childress puts aside that possibility because it does not accord with the idea of limited altruism, which would paint the heroic picture as unrealistic, given what we may reasonably presume about the general reluctance to perform self-sacrifice.Similarly, Childress rejects the egalitarian bad luck position as because it ignores the human to seek That is to say, the nihilistic alternative ignores another feature of human namely, the of and At a that idea that to consider the of rationing should seek an equitable that aims to preserve some features about human are thus to discount the egalitarian bad luck it would be only by moral which seems or it contrary to the human of These ideas about human limited and for show how the nihilistic alternative is when thinking about the of rationing lifesaving medical resources. The effort necessary to a situation of and the to accept seem is a problem, however, with the second line of argument that Childress offers against the egalitarian bad luck if the to seek good is and a right to is upon then those rights each other out in of That everyone has an equal right to of them from an that claims to scarce lifesaving medical That fact us to the egalitarian bad luck everyone and should fated to die. What to be one way of the of idea of and rights that from ethical support to in this the to accept fate is to the moral to indicate what values must be as a basis for a procedure as that us to Childress's argument and to ideas into his overall I will to this point second alternative to random selection is to who is to receive scarce medical resources on the basis of their social worth. This alternative seeks to preserve some value when all value would otherwise be Childress rejects this alternative for reasons associated with utilitarian considerations of social worth the individual to the social gender, or class into social presupposes the to social and us in debates about criteria for social debates that are in a by a of value (1997d, Childress his to equal human dignity to offer a of the human person than that associated with utilitarian to distributing scarce lifesaving medical resources. On this matter of philosophical he challenges the that views of the are and an of human and In this respect Childress his to avoid nihilism with the effort to avoid appeals to social value, he argues, in the person to his social and it and the sense of the person's his dignity as a which cannot be to his or to (Childress 1997d, The to human in to of personhood to role morality or accounts of human the as features of human personhood that views of can the main of Childress's argument now us turn to the central ideas in his position regarding the moral for using a lottery as a method of rationing lifesaving medical resources to patients deemed medically One of aims in Childress's argument is to consider the challenge I in aside the nihilistic alternative, Childress the of his argument to defending the of using a lottery for rationing lifesaving medical resources by with challenges to his ideas lines, focusing on The of his position is that using a lottery is to a utilitarian approach for the reasons given his egalitarian position does not the individual into the social the values for determining social worth in a and are subject to various that render them when applied as moral But his views in to this alternative and his from thinking about the distinction between fairness and chance that would draw at a level when theorizing about justice. That potential and its practical require this of justice and chance, we do well to note to the in his and how his ideas about luck and morality by in her of in The of and in and and upon by in an article on the and the fact of luck to challenge theories of the of and Kantian views of moral and theories of and us instead to think about the moral life in terms of and They believe that and fail to account of the fact of luck and how luck the and of our A of their arguments beyond the of this My point is to note how and that luck and in thought at at with one In their view, moral philosophy and the picture of the human subject to which it is are too to account for the experience of luck, human and in and to philosophy and to about the moral life that are ignored or off by and utilitarian on the idea that there is one of value, moral value, which is to provides a account of the Kantian view that he rejects in this in the of it is that not or or in it is not in the but With these considerations there is to that luck from which the to The for moral is present to rational The successful moral from considerations of or of the of a is as a not to the but to a which all rational necessarily in the same Such a has an of justice at its and that is its is only it offers an to a sense of the In a similar how account of presupposes being the of certain and being the as for the good of morality that the control. views from and but the general of his account in the same the of the will for theorizing about morality in with the that to the idea of and on the one hand, and the idea that we are subject to to our on the With these in the background we can from different the stakes in defending luck in light of moral reason, as Childress does in his defense of using a lottery to ration lifesaving medical resources. For moral reason can the of luck in rationing for and the fact of luck the of providing moral Childress's defense of luck does not ideas about human and in ways that resonate with the of and argument instead has a Kantian and focusing as it does on the egalitarian ideas of human dignity and respect for persons as a basis for the equal claims that potential recipients have for scarce lifesaving medical resources. defense is of the sort of to equal that in the contrary to that might be from the of and a Kantian to Childress's proposal has resources for thinking about luck, and in moral The in this case in the fact that some patients will be the victims of bad luck in more than one kind of particular lottery. is the and the of efforts to a situation in which life with When shall live when not all can those who shall live in Childress's account are

When the study of narrative was initially introduced into the formal curricula of some American medical schools in the early 1970s, the primary goal was to provide an alternative avenue for enhancing empathy, improving skills in interpretation, and complementing the teaching of traditional medical ethics.1 It can be argued, however, that no area of medical education and practice reaps the benefits of narrative knowledge and methods in a more fundamental and far-reaching way than does medical ethics.2 In his 1989 essay “Medical Ethics and Living a Life,” the physician author Robert Coles championed the narrative approach when he suggested that medical ethics might best be taught by reading creative literature rather than textbooks. As the use of narrative in medicine has expanded over the past 30 years, narrative has increasingly supplanted traditional principles-based ethics teaching, which historically viewed moral decision-making as a rational puzzle to be resolved by weighing various esoteric concepts such as autonomy, beneficence/nonmaleficence, and justice. Narrative ethics is the umbrella term connoting ethics derived from stories rather than from fixed principles. Narrative ethics recognizes the value of principles and rules in moral reasoning, but it also recognizes that some crucial moral insights escape prepositional moral logic.3 Narrative ethics centers the ethical dilemma squarely in the patient’s life, and recognizes the patient as the author of his or her own life story. By presenting the complex events of illness with all their contradictions and nuances for interpretation and understanding, narrative analysis is quickly becoming as vital and important to the discipline as moral theory itself.4 The practice of ethics involves formulating the case and interpreting it, which requires the exercise of narrative skills as well as some degree of literary capability. A narrative approach to ethics recognizes that the individual case is actualized only through the act of telling it, and that each narrator shapes the story to tell the tale. How the patient conveys the details of his or her illness, how the clinician or ethicist represents it in words, who listens as it is presented, and what the listener is moved to feel or think are all narrative dimensions with profound and defining importance in ethics and patient care.5 Narrative provides the ideal framework through which medical ethics deliberations can improve and ethical quandaries be avoided via early recognition and resolution of ethical issues. In its simplest interpretation, a narrative is a story. Stories have traditionally come from literature, such as short stories and novels, but can also be derived from personal experiences or histories. Stories, both ficThe Just Ethics feature is a forum for sharing insights, experiences, and literature on how we do and should teach ethics to our students. All who teach bioethics are invited to share their personal insights, experiences, and approaches to teaching this foundational and essential topic. Authors desiring to contribute to Just Ethics should forward submissions to: