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“Who You Talkin’ About?” Parallel Truthiness ConcernsBetween Autobiography and Biography in BioethicsJonathan K. Crane aa Emory UniversityPublished online: 08 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Jonathan K. Crane (2012) “Who You Talkin’ About?” Parallel Truthiness Concerns Between Autobiographyand Biography in Bioethics, AJOB Neuroscience, 3:4, 82-83, DOI: 10.1080/21507740.2012.721458

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AJOB Neuroscience

“Who You Talkin’ About?” ParallelTruthiness Concerns BetweenAutobiography and Biography

in BioethicsJonathan K. Crane, Emory University

If Walker’s (2012) theory of narrative self-understanding iscorrect—that it includes both selecting events and interpret-ing them in juxtaposition to each other, and this necessarilycompromises but not completely erases a narrative’s overalltruth—it urges looking again at normative ethical discourseand its claims to truth, especially when it relies upon self-narratives or narratives about others. Take Jewish bioethicaldiscourse as an example in which practical arguments aboutwhat people should do are based upon readings of classicaltexts. Many of those texts are law, to be sure; but many arealso stories—some about the author, though most are aboutothers. It is these narratives that modern bioethicists oftenread with selectivity and interpretation similar to Walker’stheory that betrays the bioethicists’ agendas and ulteriormotives. This suggests that modern (Jewish) bioethical dis-course that turns to and on narratives is doubly skewedfrom reality and any claims to truth therein warrant doublescrutiny.

There are at least two ways to put flesh on the analogybetween self-narratives and ethical discourse: first, by look-ing at what these genres do, and second, at their claims totruth.

Walker proposes that self-narratives do three things si-multaneously. First, they articulate a person’s ways of ex-periencing the world, which, through time, change becauseof new experiences and reinterpretations of those experi-ences in light of each other. In this way self-narratives alsoshape an individual’s character to the degree they nourishparticular self-conceptions. And finally, since they frameand constrain self-images they perforce inform decisionsabout behavior: They perform or are enacted, as Walker says.In this way self-narratives constitute an individual’s verybeing.

Ethical arguments also do these three things: They ar-ticulate certain ways of experiencing the world insofar asthey identify and explicate the morally problematic; theyshape character insofar as they model idealized ways ofnavigating moral conundrums that others should emulate;and they perform in and through others’ enactment of theirprescriptions. As such, they too constitute the communitiesand individuals who produce and consume them.

In regard to claims to truth, Walker demonstrates thatself-narratives merit suspicion for two primary reasons.

Address correspondence to Jonathan K. Crane, PhD, Raymond F. Schinazi Junior Scholar in Bioethics and Jewish Thought, Center forEthics, Emory University, 1531 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. E-mail: Jonathan.k.crane@emory.edu

They are inherently selective and by definition are interpre-tative of what they select. Any self-narrative requires iden-tifying certain events—and only certain elements or facetsof those events—to highlight in one’s narrative, for it isimpossible for most of us to remember absolutely every-thing about every moment (of course, Aleksander Luria’s[1968] mnemonist, S., is a prominent exception). This se-lection perforce requires skipping over or skewing otherevents and elements. Narratives not only stitch piecemealdetails and events together, they imbue them with meaningin that very juxtaposition. Such interpenetrating interpreta-tion is never static. Rather, it is an iterative process, muchlike the ongoing dialectic between ethics and religion thatLenn Goodman (2008) calls chimneying. By bounding be-tween opposing faces of seemingly discrete events, individ-uals cleave them together in novel ways much like climbersascending edifices and crevices along new tracks. As eachascent is unique, so too is every self-narrative different fromits previous incarnation.

But we must wonder whether any ascending self-storyis true, since some steps are missing and new approachesand angles are used. The precariousness of such stories leadsJohn Hardwig (1997) to be skeptical of self-narrative’s verac-ity. He asserts that every autobiography is riddled with epis-temological black holes into which critical elements com-prising a person’s self-narrative get sucked. Ignorance, in-nocent mistakes, self-deception, and lies pockmark any andevery self-narrative irrespective of a person’s consciousnessof them. Because these errors mar self-narratives, it wouldbe dangerous to rely exclusively on autobiographies whenforging norms, such as prescribing treatment plans to a realpatient in one’s clinic or to an imagined audience of one’sbioethical tract.

Similar skepticism can be levied, and rightfully so, atbiographies. Such narratives about others are limited by thereach of research, vulnerable to authorial bias, and compli-cated by the politics of the age in which they are written.In some cases, what is claimed about an individual may bemore legend than fact. This is certainly true in regard to bio-graphical material found in classic rabbinic texts, texts thatmodern Jewish bioethicists plumb for normative guidanceand upon which they ground their prescriptive conclusions.The inaccuracy of Talmudic biographical information is

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Neuroscience, Self-Understanding, and Narrative Truth

indisputable because of their late provenance, brevity, andintention; according to Stemberger (1996), theirs is a “re-duced reliability.” Thus, bioethical discourse reliant uponeither dubious autobiography or fanciful biography is dou-bly suspect.

To illustrate this problem, we turn now to Jewishbioethics, where stories loom large. Some Orthodox Jew-ish bioethicists might balk at this claim, but they cannotdeny that they too render normative decisions based ontheir readings of certain stories found in classical sources.Though I investigate the story of stories within Jewishbioethics elsewhere, I offer here but one example of howJewish bioethicists chimney through a classic story to reachpredetermined desired ends (Crane in press). The Babylo-nian Talmud records the story of Rabbi Chananya ben Ter-adyon (c. 2nd century CE) being burned at the stake by theRomans for teaching Torah in public—a capital crime in theeyes of that ancient regime (BT Avodah Zarah 18a). This storyis universally invoked by Jewish bioethicists wrestling withthe morally thorny issues of euthanasia.

According to the printed edition of the Talmud, the storygoes as follows: Chananya is wrapped in the Torah scroll,tufts of wool are affixed to his chest, and he is mountedupon a pyre and lit aflame. His daughter wails about seeinghim thus and he calms her by saying that the one who takesumbrage at the insult to the Torah will also take umbrageat the insult to him. His students ask what he sees, and hereplies that he sees the parchment burning and the letterssoaring. They encourage him to open his mouth, presum-ably so that he would asphyxiate faster. He responds, “Itis better that the one who gave it [my life] takes it, andone may not injure oneself.” The executioner approacheshim and offers to increase the flames and remove the wettufts of wool from his chest if he, Chananya, will bring himinto the World to Come. Chananya agrees to the plan, andthe executioner asks him to swear by it, which he does.The executioner then removes the tufts of wool and in-creases the flames, as he promised, and then jumps into thefire himself. A heavenly voice declares that both Chananyaand the executioner have been assigned to the World toCome. Rabbi Judah HaNasi, the greatest sage of his gen-eration, tearfully laments that some acquire their eternalreward in one moment and others only after many years ofpiety.

Indubitably this is a story, and like any story it high-lights certain elements and glosses over others. And its se-quential recitation of these few features offers a particularinterpretation of each of its elements, as well as an overarch-ing attitude about the anxieties of intervening in another’sdemise. It would be wrongheaded to assume that this storyoffers a comprehensive retelling of all that happened whenChananya was killed. Indeed, other stories with dramati-cally different details exist about his fiery end.

This story’s questionable verisimilitude goes unheededby modern bioethicists, however. The vast majority seesin this story clear normative guidance about what (not) to

do regarding euthanasia. For some, Chananya’s teachingto his students is an unambiguous principle that anythinghastening death must be proscribed. Other bioethicists fix-ate on the executioner’s proposal to remove the tufts ofwool, which they construe as permission to withdraw life-sustaining treatments from an otherwise medically futilepatient. And a few hone in on the executioner’s plan toincrease the flames: For them this obviously means that ac-tively bringing about someone’s demise is palatable. Thatis, this single story apparently lends support for proscrib-ing any euthanasia strategy, promoting passive euthanasia,and even endorsing active euthanasia—depending on whoreads it and how.

To be sure, such selective readings of this story are aspiecemeal as the story itself. And like the original story, byhighlighting one or two bits of the story, bioethicists as-cribe to it a particular interpretation that suits their pre-determined desired ends. And, lo, the textual traditionsupports their position—whatever it might be—vis-a-viseuthanasia.

However convenient this strategy may be, it is doublyworrisome. At one level bioethicists model poor readingstrategies insofar as they truncate the story, and many mu-tate the tiny bits they invoke. Since the original story’s ve-racity is already questionable, their all too brief treatment ofit further reduces its truth. And at a more disturbing level iswhen bioethicists insist that theirs is a complete and accu-rate reading of the textual tradition, and that whatever normthey propose reflects the totality of the tradition. This is anoutright lie insofar as conflicting stories exist, and this storyin particular countenances both ambiguity and ambivalencethat preclude discerning a clear and unequivocal norma-tive position on any aspect of euthanasia. All this suggeststhat modern bioethicists turning to narratives—whether au-tobiographies of living patients or biographies of ancientfigures—should be doubly vigilant about how they hear-ken to them.

REFERENCES

Crane, J. K. In press. Narratives and Jewish bioethics. New York, NY:Palgrave Macmillan.

Goodman, L. 2008. Love thy neighbor as thyself. New York, NY: Ox-ford University Press.

Hardwig, J. 1997. Autobiography, biography, and narrativeethics. In Stories and their limits: Narrative approaches tobioethics, ed. H. Lindemann Nelson, 50–64. New York, NY:Routledge.

Luria, A. R. 1968. The mind of a mnemonist; A little book about a vastmemory. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Stemberger, G. 1996. Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, 2nd ed.,trans. and ed. M. Bockmuehl. Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark.

Walker, M. J. 2012. Neuroscience, self-understanding, and narrativetruth. AJOB Neuroscience 3(4): 63–74.

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