Tod Chambers

As many in the United States feel a need to take a side in the ongoing culture wars, the people who make up the field of bioethics have an obligation to directly engage with those who hold different political views. If bioethics is an academic field, it must also affirm the overall values of the academy to continually challenge central assumptions. If the field wishes to be a part of the development of public policy, it must be able to construct such policies that in some fundamental manner honor the values of the opposition.

Can one publish a bioethics case ethically? I suspect that most in bioethics would feel comfortable publishing a case if the subject—the patient—gave explicit permission, the amount of biographical information revealed was under the control of the subject, and the subject fully understood the benefits and risks of publishing the case. Some might add that the subject should have a chance to approve the final representation. I think that the ethics of publishing cases needs to be rethought. And this rethinking needs to be focused not on the way publishing a case might harm a patient (that is, nonmaleficence) but, rather, on how a case presentation does not convey the patient’s own voice in the narrative (that is, respect for autonomy). Bioethics needs a new model of case presentation: the polyphonic case, which demands that the subject be a part of the case’s construction.

When I heard that a laboratory in China had cloned two long‐tailed macaques, I thought of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. When academics write about the novel, many point out that the reason the creature becomes a “monster” is not that he has any inherently evil qualities but that Victor Frankenstein, the creature's “mother,” immediately rejects him. All later problems can be traced to the fact that Frankenstein does not take responsibility for his creation. While I do not disagree with this, we need to think beyond (or before) Frankenstein's rejection to the reason he rejects it. I would like to suggest that this reason reveals something about how bioethics judges new biological technologies. I suggest that what causes Frankenstein to feel revulsion toward his creation is its unsettling mix of the beautiful and the ugly.

The authors of “A Conceptual Model for the Translation of Bioethics Research and Scholarship” argue that bioethics must respond to institutional pressures by demonstrating that it is having an impact in the world. Any impact, the authors observe, must be “informed” by the goals of the discipline of bioethics. The concept of bioethics as a discipline is central to their argument. They begin by citing an essay that Daniel Callahan wrote in the first issue of Hastings Center Studies. Callahan argued in this 1973 piece that bioethics had yet to attain the status of a discipline, and he lauded the freedom of being able to define a new discipline. Callahan's essay shares with Mathews and colleague's a peculiarity: neither ever defines what it means to refer to something as a “discipline.” To define a discipline does mean attending to the intended end product of scholarly activity, so I concur with Mathews et al.’s focus on outcomes. But I am concerned that in their argument they confusingly entangle their understanding of an academic discipline's internal goals, its telos, with its potential to have an impact on the external world, its praxis. The confusion that this can bring exposes what I believe is a profound problem within bioethics, the discipline's peculiar and at times intellectually hazardous relationship with its institutional hosts.

It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. Bioethics has been particularly attentive to the role of metaphors in the discourse on moral issues in medicine. In The Physician’s Covenant, William May discusses how the various metaphors of the physician influence the manner in which we analyze problems in clinical ethics. Meaghan O’Keefe and colleagues have argued that particular metaphors dominate and in turn mediate the representation of genetic modification to the public’. Craig Klugman has analyzed the power of various metaphors used in the discussion of...

This narrative symposium examines the relationship of bioethics practice to personal experiences of illness. A call for stories was developed by Tod Chambers, the symposium editor, and editorial staff and was sent to several commonly used bioethics listservs and posted on the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics website. The call asked authors to relate a personal story of being ill or caring for a person who is ill, and to describe how this affected how they think about bioethical questions and the practice of medicine. Eighteen individuals were invited to submit full stories based on review of their proposals. Twelve stories are published in this symposium, and six supplemental stories are published online only through Project MUSE. Authors explore themes of vulnerability, suffering, communication, voluntariness, cultural barriers, and flaws in local healthcare systems through stories about their own illnesses or about caring for children, partners, parents and grandparents. Commentary articles by Arthur Frank, Bradley Lewis, and Carol Taylor follow the collection of personal narratives.

Linguistic capital is what is at issue when we ask who can speak for a religion. But asking who has the linguistic capital to speak for a religious community in public policy forums is different from asking who has linguistic capital within the religious community. The first question forces us to examine the acquisition of linguistic capital in three separate — yet overlapping — fields of social discourse: academia, religion, and government. Each of these requires distinctive ways of earning the necessary social capital to be authorized to speak. The issue of who has the status to speak for a religion in a political forum is essentially a question of what types of linguistic capital gained in one field are deemed legal tender within another field.