Narrative Ethics: A Modest Proposal

“I wryly refer to the universal adoption of narrative ethics as a ‘modest proposal’ because while telling stories is a fundamental part of human nature, telling stories in perfectly ethical ways is, unfortunately, too often alien to our nature.”

Stories are the rivets that hold together the machine of human cognition. Stories are omnipresent in our society, thoughts, and creations. Our conversations, religious texts, legal claims, scientific articles, creative works, and historical works tend to be structured as narratives. We are hardwired to think in narrative formats. It is, thus, no wonder that the very human belief in stories’ fundamental importance has been called “the foundational assumption of our species.”

What happens, then, when a story is falsely or unethically told? The answer can range anywhere from personal offense at best to tragedy at worst. On an individual level, there are few insults graver or offenses deeper than to have a false or incomplete story told about one. Worse than a personal offense, in the medical arena, an incomplete case history or one that lacks nuance can lead to ineffective care or devastating medical consequences. For example, there is a long and devastating tradition of medical providers downplaying or dismissing pain experienced by women and people of color, leading to delayed or absent treatment, individual tragedies, and public health crises like high rates of maternal and infant mortality. On a societal level, the effects can be catastrophic. A politician can lie about breaking into an opponent’s election headquarters, lie that a country has weapons of mass destruction to justify a war, or help to incite an insurrection within his own country. At the very extreme of this noxious phenomenon, leaders can advance false or misleading stories about entire groups of people, often to provide amoral “justifications” for those targeted groups to be persecuted, enslaved, or even systematically killed.

The field of narrative ethics can serve to combat unethical stories of all types and magnitudes. Narrative ethics advances that all stories—from novels to medical case histories and beyond—are constructed rather than composed purely of objective fact, as well as that ethical questions are inevitably part of the composition of all stories. Stories are inherently subjective, but that does not mean that there are not vital ethical considerations inherent in the process of constructing and telling them. While every person and organization inevitably has beliefs, values, and agendas, we more or less universally condemn both lying and intentionally perpetuating falsehoods that harm others. Therein lies the scientific validity, political neutrality, and moral urgency and prescience of narrative ethics. Narrative ethics can (and should) be applied to any story, but the field had its origins in medicine and it has particular relevance there.