Redescribing Bioethics
How the Field Constructs its Argument
1st Edition
Published on 19. November 2024
196 pages
978-1-9787-7835-1 (ISBN)
Description
Choice 2025 Outstanding Academic Title
It has traditionally been accepted that one cannot derive how the world ought to be from the way the world is. The discipline of bioethics endeavors to respond to ethical issues as they arise in the world. For these issues to be analyzed, they must first be described. Redescribing Bioethics: How the Field Constructs Its Argument argues the descriptions bioethicists provide of the moral problems anticipate the proposed solution to these problems. To understand the rhetorical power of bioethics arguments, we need to reverse the structure of the argument, seeing the anticipated solution as driving the presentation of the problem.
Arguing the story of bioethics is as much one of powerful redescriptions as of proposed solutions, Tod S. Chambers examines seven rhetorical strategies in how bioethics texts have steered readers toward a particular moral vision of the world: retrodiction, anagnorisis, imbalance, dissociation, metaphor, sources, and hypertextuality. Through these techniques, bioethicists construct a world in which their particular moral theory thrives, and alternative theories will struggle.
It has traditionally been accepted that one cannot derive how the world ought to be from the way the world is. The discipline of bioethics endeavors to respond to ethical issues as they arise in the world. For these issues to be analyzed, they must first be described. Redescribing Bioethics: How the Field Constructs Its Argument argues the descriptions bioethicists provide of the moral problems anticipate the proposed solution to these problems. To understand the rhetorical power of bioethics arguments, we need to reverse the structure of the argument, seeing the anticipated solution as driving the presentation of the problem.
Arguing the story of bioethics is as much one of powerful redescriptions as of proposed solutions, Tod S. Chambers examines seven rhetorical strategies in how bioethics texts have steered readers toward a particular moral vision of the world: retrodiction, anagnorisis, imbalance, dissociation, metaphor, sources, and hypertextuality. Through these techniques, bioethicists construct a world in which their particular moral theory thrives, and alternative theories will struggle.
More details
Series
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Target group
Professional and scholarly
ISBN-13
978-1-9787-7835-1 (9781978778351)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
05/2026
Lexington Books
€57.01
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Person
Tod S. Chambers is associate professor of medical education at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.
Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Describing the World
1. Retrodiction
2. Anagnorisis
3. Trouble
4. Dissociation
5. Metaphor
6. Sources
7. Hypertextuality
Conclusion: The Bioethicist as Poet
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Introduction: Describing the World
1. Retrodiction
2. Anagnorisis
3. Trouble
4. Dissociation
5. Metaphor
6. Sources
7. Hypertextuality
Conclusion: The Bioethicist as Poet
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
