Narrative in Bioethics

For this reader of Tod Chambers' précis of The Fiction of Bioethics, his other work with narrative ethics, and the commentaries on that work, the question begging an answer is not whether bioethics will employ narrative and its theory (it does, always has, and always will), but how bioethicists might use Chambers's and others' insights into the workings of narrative to create more humane, more habitable medical and professional realities. My fellow commentators suggest many answers, some rich with possibility, some less so. Carl Elliott, for example, kindly invites us to the poker table, to a mildly uncomfortable, though accurate and benign, diagnosis of his and our shortcomings. Arthur Frank reveals to us the story of his reading as he struggles with one of Chambers's cases. Stuart Finder and Mark Bliton give us five different narrative openings in search of the experience of being in an ethics consultation. And Robert Baker creates an "accusatory" narrative of salvation and damnation designed to divide, to reduce, and to demolish.

To sort out our own uses of narrative and to suggest ways in which we might begin, as a community, to more consciously, consistently, and productively engage the narratives within which and by which we work, I take the Gorgias, an early statement of Plato's view of human ethical relations, as my starting point. A long way from Chambers's text, this dialogue addresses questions of process and effect that many of Chambers's commentators, here and elsewhere, have asked.

The Gorgias deals with an unconventional and therefore outrageous assertion and its corollary: that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, and that the only greater evil is not to be punished for doing wrong. The dialogue seems narrow and unrelenting. Socrates appears to use whatever strategies he can to demolish his opposition—as Polus and Callicles, his two main interlocutors, accuse him of doing. Socrates, however, denies that he is only out to win, volunteers to switch sides, and characterizes his interlocutors not as enemies but as his friends, begging them not to withdraw, to consider his best interests as he considers theirs, to correct him if he goes astray.

At critical points throughout the Gorgias, Socrates shifts from argumentative to narrative discourse. These shifts serve two crucial functions:

1. They introduce a contrapuntal rhythm, moving the interlocutors and the audience from thought to image, argument to experience and back again; and
2. They actualize or, as Aristotle might put it (Rhetoric, 3.10), "bring before the eyes" the worlds suggested by the more or less rational arguments made throughout the discussion.

As his interlocutors imaginatively enter those "virtual" worlds, they discover that their ethical positions, no matter how logical, compelling, or generally accepted, lead directly to realities that are simply uninhabitable. James Boyd White shows how the process works in his description and analysis of the scene in which Socrates shows Callicles that the orderly man is happier than the licentious man:

Imagine two men, he says, each with a number of jars to be filled with wine, honey, or milk. The jars of one are sound and full, and he wants nothing; the jars of the other are leaky, and he must constantly struggle to keep them full. Does this image not portray the difference between the life of one who wants nothing and the life of one who is constantly scurrying after pleasures? (493e-494a) This fable is not addressed to the intellectual part of Callicles but to the part of his mind that thinks and feels in images. It asks him to imagine what it would really be like .. . to be a leaky jar, constantly running out and being refilled, and an owner in frantic motion, constantly filling, and what, on the contrary, it would be like to be sound and full and at rest. . . . The self takes more than one form, here both jar and owner, and the story is...