Stories and Their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics

by Hilde Lindemann Nelson (Editor)

Narratives have always played a prominent role in both bioethics and medicine; the fields have attracted much storytelling, ranging from great literature to humbler stories of sickness and personal histories. And all bioethicists work with cases--from court cases that shape policy matters to case studies that chronicle sickness. But how useful are these various narratives for sorting out moral matters? What kind of ethical work can stories do--and what are the limits to this work? The new essays in Stories and Their Limits offer insightful reflections on the relationship between narratives and ethics.

306 pages, Hardcover

First published October 3, 1997

About the author

Hilde Lindemann is a Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. She has written books under the names Hilde Lindemann and Hilde Lindemann Nelson. She has coauthored a number of books with James Lindemann Nelson.

She is a former editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She was also coeditor of Rowman & Littlefield's Feminist Constructions series and the general coeditor of the Reflective Bioethics series at Routledge.

A Fellow of the Hastings Center, her ongoing research interests are in feminist bioethics, feminist ethics, the ethics of families, and the social construction of persons and their identities.

Reviews

[Hibah Fatteh]

Very useful for my capstone. Because each chapter was from a different author, it sometimes felt disjointed and repetitive

[Michael Burnam-Fink]

This is a fascinating little interdisciplinary volume on narrative and bioethics which grew out of 1996 meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values. The many chapters cover a variety of approaches to narrative, from critiques of purely principlist deliberation, to the use of narrative in the clinic and consultation, to literary criticism of particularly powerful works. I could see assigning several of the chapters in a class on bioethics, particularly Nelson's introduction, Arras's piece on the limits of narrative, Montello's chapter on narrative competence, and Hunter's chapter on mediating opposing maxims.