Stories and Their Limits (Reflective Bioethics)

This is a fascinating little interdisciplinary volume on narrative and bioethics which grew out of a 1996 meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values. The many chapters cover a variety of approaches to narrative, from critiques of purely principlist deliberation, to the use of narrative in the clinic and consultation, to literary criticism of particularly powerful works. I could see assigning several of the chapters in a class on bioethics, particularly Nelson’s introduction, Arras’s piece on the limits of narrative, Montello’s chapter on narrative competence, and Hunter’s chapter on mediating opposing maxims.