AustLit

'In this essay, I argue that literature has been profoundly misunderstood by scholars of bioethics.

'Bioethicists in analyzing moral problems have often drawn upon literary texts as sources for “rich cases,” for they have long recognized that the traditional genre of the ethics case was limited in its portrayal of the complexity of the moral landscape of actual medical practice. This traditional utilization of literature in bioethics is critically examined by James Terry and Peter Williams in an essay published in Literature and Medicine: “Short stories and poems that are evocative, complex, and imaginatively challenging have been used to supplement or supplant the traditional case study as instruments for raising ethical issues. At best, these literary works more vividly present moral questions and even raise some kinds of issues that case studies leave out.” The real purpose of Terry and Williams’s essay is to sound an alarm on this casual, unreflective use of literature: while literary works may at first appear to furnish desirable descriptions of moral problems, they caution, these texts and bioethics cases have distinct, and at times divergent, goals.' (Publication abstract)