Hermeneutic Ethics Research Articles

Practice in focus: A hermeneutic approach to research ethics

SummaryThis article argues that the interpretative and negotiating approach of hermeneutic ethics can inform research into the experiences of people with learning disability more usefully than bioethics. Terms and ideas are defined; philosophers and researchers who have employed them are described; arguments for and against the proposition are considered; it concludes by summarizing the position and its implications. Two final reflections pose questions researchers may find it fruitful to consider, or to discuss with users, carers and professionals.

Hermeneutics of medicine in the wake of Gadamer: the issue of phronesis.

The relevance of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis--practical wisdom--for medicine and medical ethics has been much debated during the last two decades. This paper attempts to show how Aristotle's practical philosophy was of central importance to Hans-Georg Gadamer and to the development of his philosophical hermeneutics, and how, accordingly, the concept of phronesis will be central to a Gadamerian hermeneutics of medicine. If medical practice is conceived of as an interpretative meeting between doctor and patient with the aim of restoring the health of the latter, then phronesis is the mark of the good physician, who through interpretation comes to know the best thing to do for this particular patient at this particular time. The potential fruitfulness of this hermeneutical appropriation of phronesis for the field of medical ethics is also discussed. The concept can be (and has been) used in critiques of the conceptualization of bioethics as the application of principle-based theory to clinical situations, since Aristotle's point is exactly that problems of praxis cannot be approached in this way. It can also point the way for alternative forms of medical ethics, such as virtue ethics or a phenomenological and hermeneutical ethics. The latter alternative would have to address the phenomena of health and the good life as issues for medical practice. It would also have to map out in detail the terrain of the medical meeting and the acts of interpretation through which phronesis is exercised.

Ethical Hermeneutics

Ethical Hermeneutics

The Question of Hermeneutic Alterity

WHO IS THE "OTHER" FOR PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS? This essay seeks to draw attention to an ambiguity concerning the nature of the "other" in Gadamer's thought. In part 2 of Truth and Method, near the end of his discussion of hermeneutic experience, or the experience of tradition, Gadamer suggests that hermeneutic experience resembles moral experience in that tradition "expresses itself like a Thou."1 As Gadamer goes on to explain, this means that one's comportment with regard to tradition should be something like that which is called for in interpersonal relations. One might be tempted on this basis to ask whether it is possible to discern the outlines of something like a hermeneutic ethics. However, Gadamer also asserts repeatedly that hermeneutics is not concerned with other persons as such, whether the author of a text or one's partner in a conversation. One may therefore ask: what is the nature of the other, the Thou, with which hermeneutics is concerned? It is worth noting that the question of the relationship between hermeneutics and ethics is further complicated by Gadamer's frequent indications that hermeneutics should be regarded as an heir to the ancient tradition of practical philosophy, by which he means that understanding belongs to the realm of practice. Here Gadamer obviously has in mind not only Aristotelian politics, ethics, and rhetoric, but also, if less obviously, Platonic dialectic. In both cases what is decisive is an orientation to what might be called "the primacy of practice." This phrase suggests the way in which hermeneutics strives to maintain the standpoint of finitude by conceiving of language as an event, namely, the event or happening in which meaning brings itself to language and in so doing first comes into its own. In Aristotle the primacy of practice shows itself conceptually, for example in the analysis of phronesis, which Gadamer takes up in Truth and Method as a way of elucidating the fundamental hermeneutic significance of application. In Plato, on the other hand, the primacy of practice can be observed not so much conceptually as performatively, as Gadamer suggests when he draws insights concerning the logic of question and answer from the "model of Platonic dialectic." The notion of the question is of particular importance here inasmuch as it belongs to the nature of questioning that a question must always be asked anew, i.e., it must be posed in a way that makes it present, here and now. This implies, as I will indicate below, that whoever really wants to know something cannot remain at a distance from it but must instead participate in the event of its disclosure. However, to return to the main question of this essay, the hermeneutic orientation to the primacy of practice appears to problematize Gadamer's insistence that understanding has to do with meaning-in particular, meaning that is "detached from the person who means it, from an I or a Thou."2 I will not be able to develop further the important connection between hermeneutics and practical philosophy, although I would like for it to remain on the horizon of the following remarks. Here I would simply like to suggest that, in comparing tradition to a Thou, Gadamer is not really proposing a true analogy between hermeneutics and ethics-or, more precisely, that the analogy which he does propose is restricted by an important, indeed essential, ambiguity in the nature of the hermeneutic other. For, despite the comparison, hermeneutic experience and moral experience are ultimately concerned with different forms of alterity. The precise sense of this difference will be the focus of the second part of my paper. In the first part, however, I would like to spend some time looking at how Gadamer's comparison is indeed pertinent. But before any of that, let me make two final prefatory remarks. First, my purpose here is not to identify the ambiguity in the hermeneutic conception of alterity as a point of weakness or a lacuna in Gadamer's thought. …

Memory and Social Imagination: Latin American Reflections

The imagination opens onto a reconciliation of the past with the future, especially when it is activated as a retrieval of the memories of collective suffering. This is especially the case with the Latin American experience, with its history of military governments and their ‘dirty wars’ against their civilians. Using Ricoeur's notion of the metaphorical imagination, and drawing on Dussel's work on ethical hermeneutics, this paper argues that, in the act of remembering, other social imaginaries can be created as possibilities that go beyond the concrete present, and which occur from the vantage points of oppressed others.

Ethical hermeneutics: rationality in Enrique Dussel's philosophy of liberation

Ethical hermeneutics: rationality in Enrique Dussel's philosophy of liberation

Teaching for patient-centred ethics.

In this paper three models of teaching and learning medical ethics are discussed critically, the traditional and revised vocational models, and the patient-centred model. The autonomy-oriented patient-centred ethics of Beauchamp and Childress is rejected in favour of a hermeneutic practical ethics. A performative conception of ethics teaching is recommended as the most appropriate model for use in the theory and practice of ethics pedagogy.

Aliens and others: Between Girard and Derrida

In the work of Levinas, thought of the Other establishes an infinite responsibility and in that of Derrida's latest work an infinite duty of hospitality. Such thought nonetheless leaves a problem of judgement and decision. This paper uses the work of the French philosopher René Girard, and in particular his account of scapegoating, to critically discern between malign and benign otherness. It argues that a logic of undecidability needs an ethical hermeneutics capable of discerning between good and evil.

Creating Moral Space in Prenatal Genetic Services

The purpose of this article is to explicate clear research methods for doing phenomenology and hermeneutics and state how they converge into narrative ethics. Phenomenology, hermeneutics, and narrative ethics are used to explore values and beliefs that influence decision-making practices of 12 expectant couples who were eligible for prenatal genetic testing due to advanced maternal age. Seven couples who accepted and 5 couple who declined testing volunteered for this study; women and spouses were interviewed separately. Three methods for analyzing 32 verbatim interviews were developed from Husserl's descriptive theory and Heidegger's interpretive theory. Excerpts from the findings show how each provides a layer of knowledge and how they converge into a larger conversation that informs practice. The research outcomes produced (a) descriptive narratives, (b) three conceptual thematic patterns of human responding, and (c) hermeneutic interpretive exemplars. Phenomenology, hermeneutic, and narrative ethics separately and collectively offer women and their partners a way to participate in defining moral, ethical, and social issues emanating from prenatal genetic technology.

Medical ethics research between theory and practice.

The main object of criticism of present-day medical ethics is the standard view of the relationship between theory and practice. Medical ethics is more than the application of moral theories and principles, and health care is more than the domain of application of moral theories. Moral theories and principles are necessarily abstract, and therefore fail to take account of the sometimes idiosyncratic reality of clinical work and the actual experiences of practitioners. Suggestions to remedy the illness of contemporary medical ethics focus on re-establishing the connection between the internal and external morality of medicine. This article discusses the question how to develop a theoretical perspective on medical ethical issues that connects philosophical reflection with the everyday realities of medical practice. Four steps in a comprehensive approach of medical ethics research are distinguished: (1) examine health care contexts in order to obtain a better understanding of the internal morality of these practices; this requires empirical research; (2) analyze and interpret the external morality governing health care practices; sociological study of prevalent values, norms, and attitudes concerning medical-ethical issues is required; (3) creation of new theoretical perspectives on health care practices; Jensen's theory of healthcare practices will be useful here; (4) develop a new conception of bioethics that illuminates and clarifies the complex interaction between the internal and external morality of health care practices. Hermeneutical ethics can be helpful for integrating the experiences disclosed in the empirical ethical studies, as well as utilizing the insights gained from describing the value-contexts of health care practices. For a critical and normative perspective, hermeneutical ethics has to examine and explain the moral experiences uncovered, in order to understand what they tell us.

Ethics, Positivity, and Gender

In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault argues that the art of Deleuze and Guattari's work lies in its formulation of new questions: Questions that are less concerned with why this or that than with how to proceed (xii). Foucault also describes Anti-Oedipus as a book of precisely because it acts as, and concems itself with, art: Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica (xii). This three-fold connection between art, erotics and the polis is, of course, central to Foucault's own History of Sexuality: a work that also concerns itself with a new type of question. Like Anti-Oedipus, Foucault's genealogy of modem sexual hermeneutics demands that we focus less on an action as meaningful (seeking its origin or why it occurs) and more on the action as an event (describing its function or how it works). In fact, Foucault's genealogy can itself be seen as an event; for the History of Sexuality will describe an ethics organised according to a series of questions or problems that trouble the self-evidence of modem ethical hermeneutics. In this essay I want to (i) explore the ethical implications of Foucault's anti-hermeneutic concept of the self and (ii) relate Foucault's contribution to traditional theories of ethics and (iii) suggest some ways in which Foucault's work on ethics might contribute to the question of feminist ethics. I Foucault's opposition to the nineteenthcentury tradition of hermeneutics was spelled out clearly in his early archaeological work. One of the distinguishing features of the notion of was its purely immanent systematicity (Archaeology 74). Whereas traditional notions of the sign referred to a prior level of meaning (such as intention, history or Being) that the sign would reveal, discourse was positive (112). It was not the sign of something else (a re-presentation), nor the exterior token of an interior meaning, nor the effect of an exterior ground (history, Spirit, Being). From a Foucauldian point of view thinking discourse as immanent and positive would mean seeing any outside of discourse as an effect of the discursive formation, while also acknowledging that any such posited outside would always be determined or marked by discourse (112). The nineteenth-century positing of History as the absolute ground of human life, for example, produces history as its transcendental exteriority through a number of discourses -Lebensphilosophie, the human sciences, anthropology etc. (Order 368). The aim of the archaeologist, on the other hand, is not to look for meaning behind the sign; rather, the idea of discourse enables a mode of describing the sign itself as active and productive (Archaeology 125). Of course, this is not to suggest that the description of the discursive system is not normative.' If Foucault's work of the early archaeological period was a form of positivism, it was so in at least two senses. Firstly, the emphasis upon pure description without commentary was not so much a reaction against normativity as it was a focus upon discourse itself-as opposed to any intention, meaning, spirit, or consciousness of which discourse would be the sign. (And, as we will see, the anti-normative pretensions of positivism are well and truly set aside in Foucault's later genealogical work.) Secondly, the positivism of archaeology described not only a method but also the nature of discourse itself. If discourse is seen as positive it is because discourse is itself effective, productive, eventful and dynamic. Discourse is not the negation of a silent and ineffable ground (either of consciousness or historicity). Accordingly. archaeology enables an immanent description of the discursive field where signs, events, actions, practices and spaces are discursive, or aspects of a general field of relations and differences. And it is in this sense that Foucault writes of discursive events and discursive practices (Archaeology 164).2 If there is no pure exteriority of which discourse is the sign or effect, then the dynamic character of discourse must be accounted for from within discourse itself. …

Narrative Ethics (review)

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...

Hermeneutical clinical ethics: a commentary.

Essays by Thomasma and ten Have recommend hermeneutical clinical ethics. The use Thomasma makes of hermeneutics is not radical enough because it leaves out basic interpretation of clinical practice and focuses narrowly on ethical principles and rules. Ten Have, while failing to notice that the hyperreality of clinical ethics is a feature of all language, rightly distinguishes four characteristic parameters of a thoroughgoing interpretive clinical ethics: experience, attitudes and emotions, community, and ambiguity. Suggestions are made for implementing hermeneutical ethics in clinical teaching.