Invited Author

Narrativity and its Place in Medical Ethics Education

10.1501/Tipfak_0000000787

  • Mustafa Volkan Kavas

Received Date: 21.05.2011 Accepted Date: 27.07.2011 J Ankara Univ Fac Med 2011;64(2):59-73

According to the “narrativity” theory, we attribute meaning to our lives by putting our experiences in a story form, namely, by narrating them; we build our personality and ideology through narratives and describe reality and reestablish it in an authentic way with them; we live our lives like a character in a story with a feeling of integrality and we make them valuable in this integrality. The moral meaning embedded in particular experiences can be represented and communicated with narratives, thus they can be disclosed by analyzing them.

Ethics, as generally understood today, is about organizing relationships between strangers in a “proper” manner. Bioethicist behaves like a judge who observes situations from a certain distance about which she is supposed to comment and reach a decision and who never joins persons to whom she advices preferences for action. She focuses on behaviors rather than persons, moral dilemmas rather than moral meanings. This approach is blind to subjective reality, since it considers evaluations made only on objective grounds valid.

Medical ethics education aims to equip students with skills of analyzing ethical dilemmas which they would confront during their professional lives, comprehending related arguments, forming their own arguments in consistency, and expressing and defending them in appropriate ways. However, it makes them gain tools for neither inquiring the moral structure of their profession, nor answering the question “how a good and humane acting is possible?” If medical ethics education is supposed to transform healthcare professional candidate towards being “a good person” and make her adopt a holistic vision on values intrinsic to her profession, it must develop an approach regarding moral meanings hidden in daily experiences of medicine.

Today medical ethics education seems to be determined by two major conceptions: 1) “Evidence based medicine” originating from identifying medicine with science. 2) The claim that ethics education is about developing persons’ ability of analytic reasoning. Narrativity should become a part of this picture; medical ethics education should be fed by narrativity theory and to some extent determined by it.

Keywords: Medical ethics education, narrativity, narrative ethics, particularity