What is “Narrative Bioethics”

It was not me who coined the term “ narrative bioethics.” I discovered the term in the title of a dissertation, written by a young theologian, Katrin Bentele, which dealt with ethical dilemmas in doing research on Parkinson (Bentele, 2007). She concluded her dissertation with a quotation out of my book, which has the title, in English, “Deep in the brain” (Dubiel, 2009). This book, in which I described my experience with living with Parkinson and with deep brain stimulation, turned out to be – compared to the books I had published previously – a real bestseller. What struck me in particular was that, from the moment of its appearance, this slim book of mine was praised as a decisive contribution in the field of narrative bioethics. The above mentioned Katrin Bentele went so far to quote 10 pages out of my book, calling it social scientific discipline “avant la lettre.” The first question I want to raise is how the ethical, political, and cultural implications and consequences of the new high-risk technologies differ from other technologies of the past century, like nuclear energy or nano-technology. To my impression, no other technology has raised even prior to its final implementation a comparable mix of apocalyptic anxieties and chiliastic hopes. Bioethicians are not motivated – like many of their critics seem to suppose – by a naive form of technophobia, inspired by irrational ideologies. Nor do they indulge in a blind appraisal for anything that is technically new, irrespective of the purposes it serves. The ethical evaluation of a new surgery technique, a new pill or a new treatment usually starts with general principles or norms, which are sharpened (or specified) in a dialectical interplay with individual case studies. Thus they pretend to arrive at bioethical positions, which are “thick” and “thin” at the same time. They are “thick” in the sense of having absorbed a lot of empirical context– knowledge; they are “thin” in the sense of having been inspired by the most abstract set of cognitive and ethical principles. Some bioethicians are convinced to have discovered a scheme of judgment, which is no longer affected or distorted by empirical contingencies or too high levels of theoretical abstraction. This kind of (over-) generalized principles are also called the “the first order principles,” such as truthfulness, justice, fairness, universability (Kant’s “Categorical Imperative”), “divinecommand.” These “first order principles” will soon prove to be too abstract for constructing the foundations of an applied ethics like bioethics. In this case you have to construe an elaborated set of “second order principles.” Examples for “second order principles” taken out of the context of bioethics are: