Narrative Ethics Research Articles

Practical tips for teaching ethics and humanism to medical students.

This article presents the results of a decade's experiment in creating a longitudinal ethics and humanism curriculum for the core clinical year at UNC School of Medicine, North Carolina, United States. This curriculum applies published research on best practices in medical ethics education. Sample comments from course evaluations of the students who have completed this curriculum provide support for its success at achieving its desired learning outcomes. To create a similar ethics curriculum in the core clinical year at other medical schools, there are twelve practical tips: preparation: read the research on the ethical challenges for medical students; recruit an interdisciplinary teaching team; create cohorts for this aspect of the curriculum that will stay together for the year; grade only with pass/fail; have the students bring the cases from their clinical experiences; feed them if possible, and structure the time together carefully. Use a narrative ethics methodology and introduce alternative methods for student writing and group process. Connect students with literature in medical humanities and bioethics and encourage publication of their narratives. As with any good creation, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and each campus can adapt these guidelines for their people and programs.

‘Tension and release and tension and…’: The Ethics of Narrative and Aesthetic Construction in Contemporary Streaming True Crime Docuseries

The critical and commercial success of the contemporary American long-form true crime docuseries has rapidly codified a series of narrative practices, particularly in works developed by streaming channels (Netflix, Amazon Prime) and premium cable networks (HBO) promoting quality television as part of their featured output. This article considers ethical concerns arising from the intersection of true crime documentary, narrative prorogation, and audio/visual rhetoric. Focusing primarily on Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos’ Making A Murderer (2015–2018), I argue that documentaries in this field develop – whilst also depoliticising and depersonalising – the narrative, aesthetic, and intellectual concepts introduced to the field by the so-called ‘New Documentary’. I outline what is at stake in docuseries works intersecting the true crime genre which utilise aesthetic strategies of New Documentary that lack foundation in either the socially-minded counter-narrative or self-critique that has historically underscored their power: namely a narrative capability enriched by a medium demanding content in terms of the durational, but thwarted by the episodic ‘bingeworthy’ form that withholds information, the unyielding commercial demands of the platform, and the clashing of earnest fact-finding with a critical artifice shorn of its reason for deployment.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Womanist Ethics as a Contribution to Bioethics.

This essay argues that womanism, a social theory focused on the embodied lives of Black women, can be useful to bioethicists as they consider health care ethics during a pandemic-and beyond. A general social justice-oriented ethical framework is helpful to begin a conversation on pandemic ethics, but it does not directly lead to the kind of on-the-margins-of-society framework that is necessary to increase health equity and justice. With particular concern for poor Black women, I discuss three main reasons that such an ethics framework needs to incorporate womanist ethics: the feminization of poverty, lack of access to high-quality health care, and rape and other historical violence against Black women. I conclude by proposing that an understanding of womanism as a correlative to the Black Lives Matter clarion call can create an ethical narrative in bioethics that can exist beyond times of pandemic.

Narrative Aesthetics and Ethics in On Beauty by Zadie Smith

این مقاله بر رابطه‌ی بین زیبایی‌شناسی و اخلاق مبتنی است و با محوریت روایت‌شناسی بلاغی و فلسفه اخلاق، به بررسی اخلاقیات تنیده در شگردهای روایی رمان در باب زیبایی زیدی اسمیت می‌پردازد. چهارچوب نظری این تحقیقِ میان رشته‌ای بر روایت‌شناسی بلاغی جیمز فیلان و فلسفه اخلاق چارلز تیلور استوار است. فیلان جنبه زیبایی‌شناسی روایت را در بکارگیری شگردهای روایی می‌داند که دارای دامنۀ اخلاقی بوده و در نهایت منجر به داوری‌های اخلاقی مخاطب می‌گردند. در بررسی زیبایی‌شناسی روایی شگردهای اسمیت در استفاده از گفتمان غیرمستقیم آزاد و آوای روایی و کارکرد بلاغی آنها در انتقال ارزش‌های جهان داستانی نویسنده مورد کنکاش قرار می‌گیرد. در بحث نظام اخلاقی رمان، چگونگی ترسیم هویت شخصیت‌های داستان در ارتباط با طرز تلقی آنها از مفهوم زیبایی به مثابه خیری اخلاقی ، و دیدگاه اسمیت در تبیین فضیلت دغدغه مندی برای دیگری بررسی می شود. رمان در باب زیبایی قلمرو واقعیت انسان قرن بیست و یکم است که از یک سو به دنبال بیان هویت اصیل انسانی در بستری متکثر با چالش‌هایی بنیادین روبروست و از سویی دیگر درصدد کشف تعریفی مناسب برای دیگر دوستی در جامعه چند فرهنگی کنونی می‌باشد. این مقاله نشان می‌دهد که چگونه دامنه اخلاقی شگردهای روایی اسمیت، به بازنمایی جهانی می‌پردازد که در عین تکثر از جهان پاره پاره پسامدرن فاصله گرفته و مخاطب را به ارزیابی‌های اخلاقی متناسب با واقعیت معاصر فرا می‌خواند.

Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced: Principlism, Narrative Ethics, and the Case of Living Donor Liver Transplantation.

The dominant model for bioethical inquiry taught in medical schools is that of principlism. The heritage of this methodology can be traced to the Enlightenment project of generating a universalizable justification for normative morality arising from within the individual, rational agent. This project has been criticized by Alasdair MacIntyre who suggests that its failure has resulted in a fragmented and incoherent contemporary ethical framework characterized by fundamental intractability in moral debate. This incoherence implicates principlist conceptions of bioethics. Medical ethics as practiced, though, is partially in keeping with teleological alternatives to principlism. Nonetheless, the hegemony of principlism threatens to harm the practice of good medicine whenever it is used to provide justification for the sanction or prohibition of practices, despite not being equipped to grant moral authority to such justifications. An example of this failure and its resulting harm is expressed in the growing obsolescence of living donor liver transplantation.

Making and Seeing Modern Texts

Making and Seeing Modern Texts

Building Ethical Narratives: The Audiences for AICPA Editorials

Building Ethical Narratives: The Audiences for AICPA Editorials

Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Alexander Spektor. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. xiv, 242 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $39.95, paper.

Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Alexander Spektor. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. xiv, 242 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $39.95, paper. - Volume 81 Issue 1

Teaching Medical Ethics through Medical Law

Medical ethics is normally taught in a combination of three ways: through discussions of normative theories and principles; through for-and-against debating of topics; or through case studies (narrative ethics). I want to argue that a fourth approach might be better, and should be used more: teaching medical ethics through medical law. Medical law is already deeply imbued with ethical concepts, principles and reasons, and allows the discussion of ethics through the “back door,” as it were. The two greatest advantages of the law are (i) its familiar authority, especially among the disengaged medical students who have little interest or respect for the subject of ethics; and (ii) its focus on the reality of the people and the tragedies discussed (as opposed to the abstractness of a lot of ethical discussion). Finally, I argue that medical law, unlike ethics, allows more efficient and more detailed MCQ assessment.

Serving face: fashion, music and transatlantic crossing scenes Brazil-Portugal (2018-2022)

In this work, I seek to analyzethe impacts of Brazilian LGBTQIAPN+ immigration as a potent innovation in political and aesthetic discourses, especially concerning fashion and leisure spaces, on the Portuguese youth. I shall focus on elements pertaining to queer appearances and their narratives. Also, I observe how appearances allied to political discourses become an important tool in the construction of political, aesthetic and ethical narratives outside of a colonial perspective

“Grafting” Hope: The Ethics of Rewriting In Colm Tóibín’s House of Names

Exploring the particularities of rewriting in Irish contemporary fiction through an analysis of Colm Tóibín’s House of Names (2017) within a theoretical framework of narrative ethics, this paper argues that a function of cultural healing is actualized both within the retold story of the Oresteia and in the context of civil war violence to which the novel responds. Drawing on the work of Hanna Meretoja and Dorothy J. Hale, it suggests that a source of potential ethical power is revealed through the reworking of the ancient tragedy using the structures and techniques of the contemporary novel. Traces of differing worldviews or even ways of constructing cognitive and affective complexity determine a constant oscillation between original and rewritten that creates a space of epistemological uncertainty. Valorised through the meta-ethical affect of unverifiability conceptualised by Hale, this effect is also read in light of Meretoja’s understanding of a narrative-bound sense of possibility and the challenges that both contemporary and ancient understandings of hope or catastrophe pose to its ethically valuable expansion.

Ìwà l’ẹwà: Towards a Yorùbá Feminist Ethics

This paper explores a narrative path towards foregrounding what it calls a gender-relative morality as a core dimension of female subordination. It takes a feminist approach to ethics, which stresses specifically the political enterprise of eradicating systems and structures of male domination and female subordination in both the public and the private domains. The theoretical implications of Feminist narrative ethics is then applied to the philosophical imports of Yorùbá proverbs about women as a way to tease out how female subordination is grounded in Yorùbá ontology and ethics. Spe[1]cifically, the essay interrogates the ethical and aesthetical trajectory that leads from ìwà l’ẹwà (character is beauty), a Yoruba moral dictum, to ìwà l’ẹwà obìnrin ([good moral] character is a woman’s beauty). Within this transition, there is the possibility that the woman is excluded from the category of those properly referred to as ọmọlúwàbí.

Phantom Physicians and Medical Catfishing: A Narrative Ethics Approach to Ghost Surgery

The concerns raised by ghost surgery, an unethical practice in which someone other than the surgeon who obtains consent performs an operative procedure without the patient's knowledge, have long been ignored by bioethics and other related disciplines. Indeed, ghost surgery is neither tracked nor studied in the United States, and the practice itself remains underreported. Ghost surgery represents a corporeal transgression as well as a relational rift: what was communicated by physicians is rendered null and void, and the surgical narrative that patients thought they knew is disrobed as a lie and revealed to be a catfish. In order to combat this practice and prevent any form of medical catfishing, physicians must guarantee effective communication and transparency and view themselves as storytellers alongside their patients. By following such a framework, physicians can ideally end the simulation and suture an ethic of accountability within a co-constructed narrative.

Andrićeva pripovijetka Most na Žepi kroz perspektivu hermeneutičke narativne etike Hanne Meretoje / Andrić's Short Story The Bridge On Žepa Through the Perspective of Hanna Meretoja's Hermeneutic Narrative Ethics

The paper analyzes the story of Ivo Andrić The Bridge on the Žepa in the interpretive key of hermeneutic narrative ethics. The goals of the work were multiple. The first goal was to look at and explain the mentioned theoretical-analytical framework, which has not been the subject of the study within the Bosnian-Herzegovinian literary-theoretical discourse. The reason why hermeneutic narrative ethics is presented is that it, as a new, insufficiently known approach to storytelling, enables new readings of narrative texts. This goal was realized by presenting the methodological apparatus of this framework, which includes the following concepts: ethical potentials of storytelling, sense of the possible, historical imagination, dialogicity, subversive narrative understanding, awareness of other people’s perspectives, ethical search. These concepts are applied in the second part of the paper, which offers a new reading of the short story The Bridge on the Žepa. The main hypothesis of the paper is that Andrić’s story develops certain ethical potentials of storytelling. The paper showed that the stated interpretive approach with its methodological apparatus enables the understanding of the ethical potentials of Andrić’s story The Bridge on the Žepa, which were not the subject of literary criticism. The analysis also revealed that the narrative of the circumstances of the construction of the magnificent bridge in Žepa is a means of understanding the individual and wider cultural past of characters whose lives took place in the space of possibilities of a particular historical world, and that the story is a form of ethical search, which develops the ethos of dialogue because it encourages the dialogic conception of narration.

Novel Traces of the Qur'an?

Novel Traces of the Qur'an?

A Framework for Authentic Ethical Decision Making in the Face of Grand Challenges: A Lonerganian Gradation

This paper contributes to the contemporary business ethics narrative by proposing an approach to corporate ethical decision making (EDM) which serves as an alternative to the imposition of codes and standards to address the ethical consequences of grand challenges, like COVID-19, which are impacting today’s society. Our alternative approach to EDM embraces the concept of reflexive thinking and ethical consciousness among the individual agents who collectively are the corporation and who make ethical decisions, often in isolation, removed from the collocated corporate setting. We draw on the teachings of the Canadian philosopher and theologian, Fr. Bernard Lonergan, to conceptualize an approach to EDM which focuses on the ethics of the corporate agent by nurturing the universal and invariant structure that is operational in all human beings. Embracing Lonergan’s dynamic cognitive structure of human knowing, and the structure of the human good, we advance a paradigm of EDM in business which emboldens authentic ethical thought, decision making, and action commensurate with virtuous living and germane to human flourishing. Lonergan’s philosophy guides us away from the imposition of over-arching corporate codes of ethics and inspires us, as individual agents, to attend to the data of our own consciousness in our ethical decision making. Such cognitional endowment leads us out of the ethics of the ‘timeless present’ (Islam and Greenwood in Journal of Business Ethics 170: 1–4, 2021) towards ethical authenticity in business, leaving us better placed to reflect upon and address the ethical issues emanating from grand challenges like COVID-19.

The World Will Never Be the Same … But Will I Change? Anticipated Moral Change in Generation X Post-Corona Narratives

"In the “Letters from a Post-Corona Future” study, we asked participants to imagine a desirable world after the Corona crisis and their own place within it. In resulting narratives, any imagined that the future will not look like the past, but did they also imagine that their own moral orientation would change, that is, their stance towards what is a good human life, the norms and values deserving respect, and their moral behavior? To explore what we call “anticipated moral change”, we focused on Generation X participants (born between 1965 and 1980) since they may be sufficiently mature to have a settled moral orientation and feel concerned by the future, yet sufficiently adaptable to envision internal change. A total of 64 letters from 11 countries were examined. We used concepts from narrative ethics and futures studies to investigate whether anticipated moral change was present in the letters, and if so, in what direction. We identified six categories of anticipated moral change, from radical moral innovation to daily behavior change. We analyzed how these changes were depicted (e.g., metaphors, modals, idiomatic expressions, narrated futures), felt, justified or evaluated. Results consider the forward-looking moral self-perception of participants in terms of daily behavior, emotions, thoughts, self-advice, norms, values, ideals, images, and dreams, thus contribudting to a better understanding of prospective moral change in times of health crisis. We further conceptualized two important categories of change: the inclusion of personal change into collective moral change and renewed moral awareness. "

Professional ethics and social responsibility: military work and peacebuilding

This paper investigates four questions related to ethical issues associated with the involvement of engineers and scientists in 'military work', including the influence of ethical values and beliefs, the role of gendered perspectives and moves beyond the purely technical. It fits strongly into a human (and planet)-centred systems perspective and extends my previous AI and Society papers on othering and narrative ethics, and ethics and social responsibility. It has two main contributions. The first involves an analysis of the literature through the application of different ethical theories and the application of gendered analysis to discussion of masculinities in engineering and the military. The second is a survey of scientists and engineers to investigate their opinions and experiences. The conclusions draw together the results of these two contributions to provide preliminary responses to the four questions and include a series of recommendations covering education and training, ethical approval of work not involving human participants or animals, the need for organisational support, approaches covering wider perspectives and the encouragement of individual ethical commitment.

Striver·ish: Young Strivers and the Formation of Ethical Narratives

Striver·ish: Young Strivers and the Formation of Ethical Narratives