What We Talk About When We Talk About Right and Wrong

Whenever I hear Tod Chambers talk about cases, I get very self-conscious. When I listen to fashion experts, I get self-conscious about my clothes; when I listen to psychiatrists, I get self-conscious about my neuroses; and when I listen to Chambers talk about ethics cases, I get self-conscious about my writing. It's like trying to play poker with a card shark sitting beside you, whispering in your ear about your tells. Don't scratch your ear; you always do that when you're bluffing. Hold your cards up; you are always laying them on the table when you think you have a winner. Don't clear your throat. Don't touch your hair. Don't blush, don't tremble, don't sweat. Enough of this kind of thing and pretty soon you're ready to throw down your cards and walk away from the table.

Which is not to suggest that Chambers is wrong. His diagnoses are uncomfortably accurate. Read his book: he artfully dissects the writing of Robert Veatch, Richard Zaner, Warren Reich, Haavi Morreim, Terrence Ackerman, Carson Strong, Tom Beauchamp, and Laurence McCullough (among many others), leaving literary corpses strewn all about the pathology lab (Chambers 1999). The difficulty is how to proceed once you take his advice seriously. Academics are not novelists. Most of us have trouble writing a clear paragraph, much less a skillful narrative that takes account of reportability, point of view, chronotope, gender, dialogue, narrator persona, plot, and medium of presentation. Should we write more self- consciously? Make our hidden agendas plain? Announce our intentions in the text? Deconstruct ourselves before someone else does it for us? Maybe this would be more honest, but it sounds like a recipe for some pretty dismal writing. Some people will be tempted to give up cases entirely. Whereof one cannot speak, therof one must remain silent. It is not an unappealing thought. The danger is that of becoming further and further removed from the moral life itself. The moral life is not just about moral action. It is about the way we represent moral actions through language. To detach yourself from cases, and from talking and writing about cases, would be to detach yourself from a constitutive part of the moral life. It would be to remove yourself from the acts of describing, persuading, debating, excusing, rationalizing, pleading a case, deflating an argument, justifying yourself before your God. All these moves are part of this peculiar language game we call morality(Elliott 1998). Somebody has to play it, or else we will have no players, only critics and commentators. No Joe Namaths, only Howard Cosells.

Having compared Chambers to a card shark, a vivisectionist, and Howard Cosell, let me now say that The Fiction of Bioethics is an absolutely splendid book. It is utterly unlike anything else being produced in bioethics or the medical humanities. What genre is it, anyway? Not quite bioethics, not quite literary criticism, not quite cultural studies, it reads like a blend of all three, seasoned by a pinch or two of ethnography and moral philosophy. In a field that has tended to be rather literal-minded, Chambers's work takes a self-conscious step back to ask not just how bioethics is done, but how the way it is done compares with the way bioethicists think it is done. The difference is often striking. As intimidating as this book may be for a writer of cases, it is tremendously liberating for a reader of them, who is supplied with ample tools to detect what was previously hidden. As much as anything else, The Fiction of Bioethics represents a turn towards the ironic stance in bioethics. An ironist, writes Richard Rorty, realizes that "anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed." No style, no way of presenting a case, is innocent. What is meant is never simply what is said; what is written between the lines is as important as what is written in them; and every text has a subtext. Ironists, Rorty writes, have been impressed...