'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)
Epigraph:
We may have mated with them; we may have eaten them. There’s no way to know.
—Dale Clayton of the University of Utah on confirming that two species of early humans had had contact with each other, as quoted in the Washington Post
Go to the meatmarket of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal?
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Edibility is inversely related to humanity.
—Marshall Sahlins, “La Pensée Bourgeoise”