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“Who You Talkin’ About?” Parallel Truthiness Concerns Between Autobiography and Biography in Bioethics

If Walker’s (2012) theory of narrative self-understanding is correct—that it includes both selecting events and interpreting them in juxtaposition to each other, and this necessarily compromises but not completely erases a narrative’s overall truth—it urges looking again at normative ethical discourse and its claims to truth, especially when it relies upon selfnarratives or narratives about others. Take Jewish bioethical discourse as an example in which practical arguments about what people should do are based upon readings of classical texts. Many of those texts are law, to be sure; but many are also stories—some about the author, though most are about others. It is these narratives that modern bioethicists often read with selectivity and interpretation similar to Walker’s theory that betrays the bioethicists’ agendas and ulterior motives. This suggests that modern (Jewish) bioethical discourse that turns to and on narratives is doubly skewed from reality and any claims to truth therein warrant double scrutiny. There are at least two ways to put flesh on the analogy between self-narratives and ethical discourse: first, by looking at what these genres do, and second, at their claims to truth. Walker proposes that self-narratives do three things simultaneously. First, they articulate a person’s ways of experiencing the world, which, through time, change because of new experiences and reinterpretations of those experiences in light of each other. In this way self-narratives also shape an individual’s character to the degree they nourish particular self-conceptions. And finally, since they frame and constrain self-images they perforce inform decisions about behavior: They perform or are enacted, as Walker says. In this way self-narratives constitute an individual’s very being. Ethical arguments also do these three things: They articulate certain ways of experiencing the world insofar as they identify and explicate the morally problematic; they shape character insofar as they model idealized ways of navigating moral conundrums that others should emulate; and they perform in and through others’ enactment of their prescriptions. As such, they too constitute the communities and individuals who produce and consume them. In regard to claims to truth, Walker demonstrates that self-narratives merit suspicion for two primary reasons.