Redescribing Bioethics: How the Field Constructs Its Argument

It has traditionally been accepted that one cannot derive how the world ought to be from the way the world is. The discipline of bioethics endeavors to respond to ethical issues as they arise in the world. For these issues to be analyzed, they must first be described. Redescribing Bioethics: How the Field Constructs Its Argument argues the descriptions bioethicists provide of the moral problems anticipate the proposed solution to these problems. To understand the rhetorical power of bioethics arguments, we need to reverse the structure of the argument, seeing the anticipated solution as driving the presentation of the problem.

Arguing the story of bioethics is as much one of powerful redescriptions as of proposed solutions, Tod S. Chambers examines seven rhetorical strategies in how bioethics texts have steered readers toward a particular moral vision of the world: retrodiction, anagnorisis, imbalance, dissociation, metaphor, sources, and hypertextuality. Through these techniques, bioethicists construct a world in which their particular moral theory thrives, and alternative theories will struggle.

Tod S. Chambers is associate professor of medical education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.