narrative essay on work ethics

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Importance of Work Ethic

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How to Develop a Strong Work Ethic

Tutti Taygerly

Hiring managers want to see your motivation, can-do attitude, and dedication.

In our early career years, it can be challenging to figure out what behaviors are and are not acceptable in different professional environments. Employers are now expecting more of entry-level workers and they want to see that you have good work ethic. So what is work ethic?

Work ethic refers to a set of moral principles, values, and attitudes around how to act at work. It often surrounds what behaviors are commonly acceptable and appropriate (or not).
Qualities like reliability, productivity, ownership and team support all demonstrate professional integrity, or a strong commitment to ethical behavior at work. In contrast, low-quality work, tardiness, or lack of attention to details demonstrates bad work ethic.
If you’re new to the workplace, a good way to start is by observing. Pay attention to how your coworkers behave in meetings to gain a better understanding of their “etiquette,” as well as the communication styles of different people and teams. Another essential part of building good work ethic is adopting a “do it like you own it” attitude. You can do this by being proactive in small, but powerful, ways.

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

Have you ever wondered about how to behave appropriately at work? Throughout your career, and especially in the early years, it’s challenging to figure out what behaviors and attitudes are and are not acceptable in different professional environments. The more you traverse companies and industries, the clearer your understanding will become. When you’re just starting out, though, it can be hard to pin down these behaviors.

Tutti Taygerly is an executive coach and speaker with 20+ years of product design experience in Silicon Valley. Her book Make Space to Lead: Break Patterns to Find Flow and Focus on What Matters Most (Taygerly Labs, 2021) shows high achievers how to reframe their relationship to work.

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Ethics Alive! Narrative Ethics and the Value of Storytelling

by Allan Barsky

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto/Dzmitry Dzemidovich

We All Have Stories To Tell

by Allan Barsky, JD, MSW, PhD

When I conduct ethics workshops with social workers around the United States, I often start with the following question:

Assume that a challenging ethical issue arises between you and a client. What strategies would you use to help you manage the issue?

The most common response is reaching out for assistance . When faced with ethical issues, social workers often speak with their supervisors, peer consultants, NASW’s ethics consultation service, attorneys, liability insurance providers, or others who can help them determine the best way to proceed. Other common responses include referring to the NASW Code of Ethics, agency policies, or regulatory laws , such as professional licensing laws or laws that regulate particular fields of practice. Some people say they use an ethical problem-solving model that they learned in their BSW/MSW programs. All of these options are valid and helpful.

One response that I have never heard is engage the client in storytelling . When I raise this possibility, people generally respond that they have never heard of storytelling as an approach to managing ethical issues. As you read this article, I hope you’ll think about ways that storytelling can be helpful, not as a substitute for other strategies, but as a method that you can use in combination with other strategies (Brody & Clark, 2014).

What Is Narrative Ethics?

Narrative ethics is an approach to exploring ethical issues by engaging people in storytelling. Narrative ethics has a similar theoretical foundation as narrative therapy in that both are based on social constructionism. According to social constructionism, there is no singular objective truth. Our identities, values, and belief systems are based on the stories that we tell about ourselves. To put narrative ethics into practice, we can use skills such as inviting storytelling, listening attentively to one another, identifying ethical lessons and moral virtues that can be derived from the stories, and working together to co-construct the next steps of the story’s plot (Barsky, 2022). Stories help us understand one another’s morals and values, including what each person deems to be ethical or unethical. We can take what we learn from one another’s stories and explore how to move the story forward in an ethical manner.

An Example of Narrative Ethics

When I refer to myself as a social worker, different people may have different interpretations of what that means. To help others understand my professional identity and value system, I can share stories about what I actually do in practice. I remember, for example, helping a particular teenager, Ashton. [1] I met Ashton in a park where he sat next to a knapsack with all his possessions. As he shared his story, I learned that he had left home eight months earlier because his parents had problems with alcohol. They were often violent while intoxicated. He eventually decided that it was better to live on his own, even if that meant living on the street. He said he used drugs to cope with feelings of depression and loneliness. He also shared that he engaged in sex trade to earn money to pay for drugs, food, and other necessities.

As a street-outreach social worker, my job was to offer help, not to judge, blame, or dictate what Ashton should do or how to lead his life. We discussed various options, including the possibility of going to a residential addictions treatment program. A residential program would offer him a safe place to stay, food to eat, and a fresh start in life. Residential treatment programs are abstinence-based, meaning that he would need to be drug free. He told me very adamantly that he did not want to stop using drugs. He felt that drugs were his only way to cope. After further discussions, we agreed to use a harm reduction approach. Rather than focusing on abstinence, we talked about ways to use drugs in a safer manner (e.g., using clean needles, injecting safely, and avoiding overdoses).

Some people might hear this story and see me as an enabler. Rather than helping the client, was I enabling him to continue to use illicit drugs? And, if he continued to use drugs, would his health and well-being continue to spiral downward? As a social worker, however, I believe in the ethical principles of service, respect for the dignity and worth of all people, and human relationships. Initially, I offered services that I thought might be most helpful. When he rejected them, I knew that I needed to start with Ashton and his wishes. I needed to work with him as a partner. I needed to take his social situation into account and try to see things from his perspective. Essentially, I needed to honor his self-determination, dignity, and worth. These principles help to define who I am as a social worker.

Relational and Situational

Narrative ethics is a relational and situational approach to ethics. Whereas some ethics approaches suggest that we should analyze ethical issues as if we are objective third parties (rational outsiders), the relational aspect of narrative ethics means that ethics decisions should be made in the context of human relationships. As a caring social worker, I am not dispassionate about the people I serve. I care about them (Wilks, 2005). I am attentive and responsive to their needs. In many courtrooms across America, we see images of Lady Justice holding the scales of justice in her hands and wearing a blindfold across her eyes. According to this story, “Justice is blind.” As a social worker, however, I don’t wear a mask over my eyes. I strive to see the whole person. I strive to be responsive to the person as a unique individual.

Whereas some ethics approaches suggest that we should apply universal rules or ethical principles, narrative ethics notes that each situation is unique (Barsky, 2019). What is good or right for one situation may not be good or right for another. If I were working with Ashton in a different context, my ethical decision making could be very different. At another stage of my social work career, I worked for the Children’s Aid Society and served clients referred from the criminal court. If Ashton had disclosed child abuse to me in this situation, I would certainly have been required by child welfare laws and my code of ethics to report Ashton to child protection services. The situation is different, however, when Ashton is living on the street and I am serving him in my street outreach role. In this capacity, I am supposed to help Ashton with basic needs, including safety and security. If I said that I was required to report his parents to child protective services and get him into foster care, he might refuse to work with me. If he refused to work with me, his health and life could be put in greater danger. My ethical responsibilities depend, in part, on the role that I am playing and the needs of my clients.

When we exchange stories and reflect on the underlying ethics, we may or may not reach agreement about the most ethical path forward. Still, listening to one another’s stories provides us with opportunities to gain empathy (Halpern, 2018). As we share stories, we can validate each other’s beliefs, values, and experiences. As we develop mutual understanding, there is greater opportunity for us to work together and resolve ethical issues in a collaborative manner.

Applications of Narrative Ethics

Storytelling is already integral to many aspects of social work practice. When we conduct psychosocial assessments, we invite clients to share their stories:

What brought you in today? When did these concerns start? How have you tried to deal with these concerns up to now? And what are your goals moving forward?

To apply narrative ethics, we may attend specifically to moral and ethical factors:

Please tell me about your family and cultural background. What were some of the stories passed down from your parents or elders? What moral lessons have you learned from these stories?

When helping clients develop goals and action plans, we can also help them build on their core values and morals:

You mentioned earlier that “family responsibility” is a core value. How can we ensure that this value fits with the work that we are doing here?

We also use narrative ethics when we ask supervisors or others for help. We do not simply ask a supervisor, “Is it okay for me to engage with a client in a dual relationship?” We share the story, providing context and allowing for a holistic analysis of the situation. In one situation, I might share that I live in a small community where everyone knows one another and it would be impossible to avoid dual relationships. In another situation, I might explain that I work at a hospice that authorizes me to provide both individual and group counseling to the same clients. Although this situation involves dual relationships, I could share stories that illuminate the rationale for my agency’s policy and the steps that we take to minimize the risks. By sharing more details of the story, we can make sure that our decisions about how to move the story forward build on the existing context.

Practicing Narrative Ethics

One way to practice narrative ethics is to begin with yourself. How do you identify as a professional (for instance, as a social worker, counselor, advocate, or community organizer)? Write down a brief story about an actual experience in this role that suggests something important regarding who you are as this professional. What does this story say about your professional identity, including what values you hold and what moral qualities are important to you? What does this story say about how you view people and how you view your role as an agent of change? We may have many different stories that shine lights on different aspects of our values and ethics. We do not assume that one story tells everything about us. However, each story may provide important insights into who we are as moral professional beings.

As social workers, we often say that it is important to have a high level of self-awareness. Without critical self-awareness, we might unintentionally impose values, ethics, and biases on our clients. By reflecting first on our own stories, we are raising awareness about our social location, our worldview, and our ethics. We are then in a better position to listen to the stories of the people we serve.

In 2021, the National Association of Social Workers (2021) added the concept of cultural humility to Standard 1.05 of the NASW Code of Ethics . Cultural humility suggests that we should treat clients as experts in their own lives. One way to put cultural humility into practice is engaging clients in storytelling, listening with an open mind and an open heart, and striving to gain a better understanding of their cultural attributes, including their values and ethics. As we work through ethical issues with our clients, we can continue the storying process, constructing a future that takes each of the relevant individual’s values, ethics, and morals into account.

Barsky, A. E. (2022). Essential ethics for social work practice . Oxford University Press.

Barsky, A. E. (2019). Narrative ethics in social work practice. In S. Marson and McKinney, R. (Eds.). The Routledge handbook of social work ethics and values (Chapter 8). Routledge.

Brody, H., & Clark, M. (2014). Narrative ethics: A narrative. Hastings Center Report , 44 (1): S7–11.

Halpern, F. (2018). Closeness through unreliability: Sympathy, empathy, and ethics in narrative communication. Narrative, 26 (2), 125-145.

National Association of Social Workers. (2021). Code of Ethics . Author.

Wilks, T. (2005). Social work and narrative ethics. British Journal of Social Work , 35 , 1249–1264.

Allan Barsky, PhD, JD, MSW, is Professor of Social Work at Florida Atlantic University and author of Social Work Values and Ethics (Oxford University Press).

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the views of any of the organizations to which the author is affiliated, or the views of The New Social Worker magazine or White Hat Communications.

[1] To protect client privacy, this name is not the youth’s actual name.

All material published on this website Copyright 1994-2023 White Hat Communications. All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher for permission to reproduce or reprint any materials on this site. Opinions expressed on this site are the opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the publisher. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

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Narrative Ethics

Narrative ethics explores the intersections between the domain of stories and storytelling and that of moral values. Narrative ethics regards moral values as an integral part of stories and storytelling because narratives themselves implicitly or explicitly ask the question, “How should one think, judge, and act—as author, narrator, character, or audience—for the greater good?”

Explication

Characteristic questions and positions.

Investigations into narrative ethics have been diverse and wide-ranging, but they can be usefully understood as focused on one or more of four issues: (1) the ethics of the told; (2) the ethics of the telling; (3) the ethics of writing/producing; and (4) the ethics of reading/reception.

Questions about the ethics of the told focus on characters and events. Sample questions: What are the ethical dimensions of characters’ actions, especially the conflicts they face and the choices they make about those conflicts? What are the ethical dimensions of any one character’s interactions with other characters? How does a narrative’s plot signal its stance on the ethical issues faced by its characters?

Questions about the ethics of the telling focus on text-internal matters involving implied authors, narrators, and audiences. Sample questions: What are the ethical responsibilities, if any, of storytellers to their audiences? What are the ethical dimensions of the narrative’s techniques? How does the use of these techniques imply and convey the values underlying the relations of the storytellers (implied authors and narrators) to their materials (events and characters) and their audiences (narratees, implied readers, actual audiences)? (Schmid → Implied Author ; Margolin → Narrator ; Schmid → Narratee ; Schmid → Implied Reader )

Questions about the ethics of writing/producing focus on text-external matters involving actual authors, film directors, or other constructing agents. Sample questions: What, if any, are the ethical obligations of the constructive agents of the narrative to its materials? For example, what obligations, if any, does a memoir writer have to other people whose experiences s/he narrates? What responsibilities, if any, does a filmmaker adapting a novel have to that novel and its author? What are the ethical implications of choosing to tell one kind of story rather than another in a given historical context? For example, what are the ethics of a fiction writer living under a repressive regime refusing to write about those socio-political conditions? Does developing a narrative about one’s own life help one become a better, more ethically sound person?

Questions about the ethics of reading/reception focus on issues about audiences and the consequences of their engagements with narratives. Sample questions: What, if any, are the ethical obligations of the audience to the narrative itself, to its materials, and to its author? What, if any, are the consequences of an audience’s success or failure in meeting those obligations? Does reading narrative help one become a better, more ethically sound, person? (Prince → Reader )

These four kinds of questions roughly correspond to four ethical positions occupied by the main agents involved in stories and storytelling (and again individual investigations vary in how many of these positions they focus on and which ones they make most important): (1) those of characters in relation to each other and to the situations they face; (2) those of the narrator(s) in relation to the characters and to the narratee(s); (3) those of the implied author in relation to the characters, the narrator(s), and the implied and actual audiences; (4) those of actual audience members (and the ethical beliefs they bring to the reading experience) in response to the first three ethical positions.

These questions and positions shed light on the common claim by ethical critics that their investigations are different from “reading for the moral message,” since such reading has as its goal extracting a neatly packaged lesson from the ethics of the told (e.g. Macbeth teaches us about the evils of ambition). Attending to these four kinds of question and these four positions opens up the multi-layered intersections of narrative and moral values, even in narratives such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and George Orwell’s Animal Farm that offer clear answers to questions about the ethics of the told.

Literary Ethics and Narrative Ethics

Where literary ethics is broadly concerned with the relation between literature and moral values, narrative ethics is specifically concerned with the intersection between various formal aspects of narrative and moral values. Thus, narrative ethics is both broader (including in its domain nonliterary narrative) and narrower (excluding from its domain nonnarrative texts) than literary ethics. At the same time, narrative ethics can be usefully seen as a recent development in the larger trajectory of literary ethics, one beginning in the late 1980s (cf. § 3 below).

Narrative Ethics in Relation to Politics and Aesthetic

The four questions and positions of narrative ethics shed light on how inquiries into narrative ethics can overlap with or be distinct from inquiries in two related domains, the politics of narrative and the aesthetics of narrative. Where ethics is concerned with moral values, politics is concerned with power, especially as it is acquired, exercised, and responded to by governments, institutions, social groups, and individuals. Since, in any given acquisition or deployment of power, moral values will inevitably come into play, ethics can be a lens through which some aspects of politics get examined. In addition, since an individual’s or a group’s application of moral values in any given situation may well be influenced by issues of power, politics can be a lens through which (some aspects of) ethical behavior are examined. In narrative ethics, then, all four categories of questions can include (but are not limited to) questions about the politics of narrative. For example, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice , the ethics of the told include Darcy’s struggle between his love for Elizabeth and his knowledge that her family is socially inferior to his; the ethics of the telling include Austen’s decision to convey the action largely through the consciousness of her young female protagonist rather than, say, through the older, wealthier, and more socially powerful Darcy. The ethics of writing include Austen’s focusing on the adventures of the Bennet sisters in the marriage market rather than on the actions of, say, male characters involved in the deliberations of Parliament; and the ethics of reading/reception include whether and how readers can legitimately claim Austen as a feminist. In terms of positions, the fourth one is where the overlap between ethics and politics will be most immediately evident, as, for example, when an individual reader’s political stance against marriage as an instrument of patriarchy would lead her to find fault with the ethics of the told in Austen’s novel.

Aesthetics is concerned with beauty, or, more generally, the excellence of an art work (or, indeed, of any human construction). The frequent overlap between narrative ethics and narrative aesthetics becomes evident when ethical deficiencies in the told or the telling mar the excellence of a narrative. For example, when in the final chapters of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain has Huck go along with Tom Sawyer’s “Evasion” and the various ways it dehumanizes Jim, Twain introduces a deficiency that is simultaneously ethical and aesthetic. The Huck who has come to recognize and respect Jim’s humanity ought not to condone Jim’s dehumanization. Because Twain does not signal anything but approval for Huck’s behavior, this section of the novel introduces deficiencies in both the ethics of the told and of the telling. These deficiencies simultaneously weaken the aesthetics of the novel because they erode the power of the narrative’s climactic moment (Huck’s decision to go to hell) and verge on making Huck an incoherent character.

Nevertheless, the overlap between narrative ethics and narrative aesthetics is not complete, as becomes evident in cases where ethics seem deficient but aesthetics do not. For example, many readers find the ethics of the told in Nabokov’s Lolita to be abhorrent even as they admire the beauty of the novel’s style.

History of the Concept and its Study

Literary ethics in antiquity.

Although narrative ethics emerged as a clearly identified realm of study only in the 1980s, the interest in literature’s capacity to influence its audience for good or for ill goes back to Plato and Aristotle. Neither philosopher explicitly uses the term ethics in his discussion of literature, but each implicitly recognizes ethics as a substantial part of its appeal to audiences. In addition, the commentaries of the two philosophers provide striking examples of how ethics and aesthetics may overlap and of how a theorist’s understanding of ethics is often part and parcel of a broader philosophical vision. In The Republic , Plato ( 1998a : Book X) explains the defects of poetry (by poetry is meant lyric, epic, and drama) from the perspective of his ontological theory of forms, but that perspective has implications for the ethics of the told. Plato claims that poetry is twice removed from the truth: poetry imitates objects in the actual world, but these objects are themselves imitations of the ideal forms. A republic that welcomed such imitations would be doing its citizens an ethical disservice. In Ion ( 1998b ), Plato contends that poetry has inherent deficiencies in the ethics of the telling that can lead to deficiencies in the ethics of the told: because poetry appeals to its audience’s emotions more than their reason, it can lead its audience to erroneous conclusions about what is good.

Although Aristotle devoted a separate treatise to Ethics (actually, two treatises,the Eudemian Ethics ( 1952 ) and the Nicomachean Ethics ( 2002 ), the second a revision of the first), he also implicitly assigned ethics an important role in the Poetics ( 1920 ). He defined tragedy with reference to its emotional effect on the audience: an imitation of an action that arouses pity and fear and culminates in catharsis, i.e. the purging of those emotions. Aristotle’s thinking about each part of tragedy follows from this conception of its overall nature, and that thinking often includes an understanding of the intertwining of aesthetics and ethics, especially the ethics of the told. His discussion of character offers a clear example. The optimal tragic protagonist is a man who is neither extraordinarily virtuous nor extraordinarily immoral and who comes to misfortune not through some major moral failing but as a result of misjudgment. Such a protagonist will evoke fear (because he is like us) and pity (because his misfortune is greater than his ethical character warrants). In this way, Aristotle indicates that the aesthetic quality of tragedy is dependent on the ethical character of the protagonist.

Literary Ethics before “The Theory Revolution” of the 1970s

After Plato and Aristotle and before the rise of formal criticism in the 20th century, treatises on literature most often focused on the relation of text to world, as commentators continually returned to the concept of imitation. But many treatises, beginning with Horace’s Ars Poetica ( 1998 ), and its dictum that the purpose of literature is to instruct and to delight, also found a place for ethics. By linking the two purposes, Horace emphasized the interaction of the ethics of the told (and its role in instruction) and the ethics of the telling (and its role in delight). To take just two more examples in this tradition, Sidney ( [1595] 1998 ) put ethics front and center, as he argued that literature is superior to both history and philosophy because it has the greater capacity to lead its audiences to virtuous action. And Arnold ( [1880] 1998 ) contended that poetry would one day take the place of religion and philosophy because the best poetry skillfully intertwines aesthetics and ethics.

During the first sixty-plus years of the 20th century, three of the four prominent formalisms—Russian formalism, the New Criticism, and French narratology—moved ethics into the background of literary theory/narrative theory, as they highlighted questions about either the distinctiveness of literature (Russian formalism and New Criticism) or about narrative as a system of signification. The fourth formalism, Chicago neo-Aristotelianism, is a notable exception, as will be discussed below. For the Russian formalists, the distinctiveness of literature resides in its ability to sharpen perceptions by defamiliarizing literature’s represented objects. As Šklovskij ( [1925] 1990 : 5) put it, “Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at fear of war. [I]n order to return sensation to our limbs, to make us feel objects, to make a stone stony, man has been given the tool of art.” Literature is the art that defamiliarizes through its distinctive uses of language and through other formal innovations.

The New Critics, whose program became the dominant paradigm in the Anglo-American context between the end of World War II and the late 1960s, identified literariness as inherent in literary language with its capacity for generating complex meanings. More generally, the New Critics conceived of the literary text as an autonomous structure of language, independent of authorial intention and reader response, and they regarded the successful work as a verbal icon whose beauty arises from the balance achieved by artful juxtapositions of linguistic ambiguities and ironies (cf. Wimsatt & Beardsley [1946a] 1954a , [1946b] 1954b ); Brooks 1947 ; Wellek & Warren [1949] 1956 ). Such balance, the New Critics argued, captures truths overlooked by the denotative language of the sciences.

Although neither school explicitly addressed questions of ethics, their programs imply some concern with the ethics of the told and the ethics of the telling—and another illustration of overlap between aesthetics and ethics. The effects of defamiliarization—moving readers from automatization to fresh perceptions of the world—clearly have an ethical dimension, and since those effects depend on techniques of various kinds, this aesthetic program also implies an interest in the ethics of the telling. The New Critics’ emphasis on the complex truths conveyed by literary language implies a similar double interest in the ethics of the told and the ethics of the telling.

The French narratologists of the 1960s and 1970s were concerned with neither aesthetics nor ethics, but, as heirs to the Russian formalists, with narrative “as an autonomous object of inquiry” (Ryan 2005 : 344). Working within the scope of Saussurean semiology and adopting structural linguistics as a “pilot-science,” they sought to explore the modes of signification of narrative in all its forms as an international, transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon (cf. Barthes [1966] 1977 : 20) (Meister → Narratology ).

Not surprisingly, the Chicago neo-Aristotelians followed Aristotle in making ethics an important implicit part of their approach. Dissatisfied with what they saw as the limitations of the New Critical conception of literature as a special kind of language, they looked back to the Poetics and asked how it would have to be revised in order to account for the very different kinds of literary works that had been written since Aristotle’s day. Retaining Aristotle’s interest in the affective components of form, they implicitly gave ethical judgments, arising from the ethics of the told and of the telling and how they positioned the audience in relation to characters, a significant role in the trajectory of emotional responses generated by plots. Thus, Crane ( 1952 ) shows how readers’ expectations and desires in Tom Jones are a function of multiple factors (including Fielding’s careful control of the disclosure of the truth about Tom’s parentage), the general pattern of the action (Tom repeatedly gets in and out of increasingly serious scrapes), and the ethical judgments Fielding builds into his representation of his characters. Through these means, Fielding generates the “comic analogue” of fear before fulfilling the audience’s desires and bringing the ethically admirable Tom to his happy union with the similarly admirable Sophia Western. Building on Crane’s work and putting even more emphasis on the positions of authors and readers in relation to each other, Booth ( [1961] 1983 ) began to make the ethical consequences of the neo-Aristotelian approach more explicit. In The Company We Keep ( 1988 ), Booth revisited and greatly expanded this early effort (cf. § 3.4).

The Theory Revolution as Preparation for the Ethical Turn

In the 1960s the hegemony of the New Criticism began to wane for both intradisciplinary and extradisciplinary reasons with the result that literary criticism became more interdisciplinary. Critics began to chafe under the limitations of the New Critical commitment to the autonomy of the text, a response reinforced by the political upheavals of the decade. As scholars began to connect literature with multiple aspects of the extratextual world, they brought relevant insights of theoretical work in other disciplines to the work of interpretation. Two aspects of these developments helped prepare the way for the ethical turn of the late 1980s.

(1) The rise of poststructuralism and its critique of what Derrida ( [1967] 1978 : 261) called the “metaphysics of presence,” or the effort to ground understanding of the world in solid foundational principles (e.g. God, Descartes’ cogito, various binary oppositions such as nature/civilization). Poststructuralism argued that such foundations were either illusory or dependent on erroneously privileging one side of the binary over the other (speech over writing; God over the human; men over women; white over black; mind over body, etc.). This critique gave support to many contextualist, politically-oriented approaches such as feminist criticism, critical race studies, postcolonial criticism, and New Historicism. Practitioners of these approaches argued that what appears to be natural about the status quo—and about literary works that support the status quo—is actually a function of skewed power dynamics that needs to be revised. This emphasis on politics opened the door for attention to ethics, especially the ethics of the told.

(2) The rise and fall of Anglo-American deconstruction, the movement spawned by the engagement of such figures as Hartman, Miller, and de Man with Derrida’s analysis of language as a system of signs devoid of any center (Derrida [1967] 1976 ). In this view, language is a system in which signifieds were determined not by any direct relation to objects or ideas in the world but by the play of signifiers. On the one hand, Anglo-American deconstruction contributed to the breakdown of the New Critical hegemony because its poststructuralist anti-foundationalism undid such valued New Critical concepts as coherence and unity. On the other hand, this development was the logical extension of New Criticism, because it perpetuated the view that literature could be equated with its language and its distinctive ways of signifying.

Like the New Criticism, Anglo-American deconstruction was initially more concerned with aesthetics (the glory of literary language is its polysemous undecidability) than it was with ethics. Nevertheless, Miller in The Ethics of Reading ( 1987 ) identified the important ethical consequences of deconstruction by offering its take on the position of the reader. In a characteristic deconstructive paradox, Miller argued that the reader’s ethical obligation is to respect the undecidability of the text’s language. In other words, the ethical reader will recognize that the nature of language inevitably undermines the search for a determinate ethics of the told.

But Miller’s case for deconstructive ethics was eclipsed by the revelation that his deconstructionist colleague at Yale, de Man, had, during World War II, written several anti-Semitic articles for Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper that collaborated with the Nazis. In light of the horrific consequences of Nazi anti-Semitism, the position that de Man’s wartime writings do not have a determinate ethics of the told appeared to many to be the outcome not of a disinterestedly rigorous reading but of an effort to absolve de Man of responsibility for his repugnant views. After the de Man affair, literary studies became much less interested in undecidability and much more open to other ways of analyzing the intersections of ethics and literature.

The Ethical Turn: Poststructuralist and Humanist Ethics

Since the late 1980’s, the ethical turn has taken two primary forms: poststructuralist ethics and humanist ethics. Because humanist ethics engages more directly with other work in narratology, it gets more attention here.

In the wake of the de Man affair, Derrida developed a greater ethico-political emphasis in his own work (Derrida [1993] 1994 ) and called attention to the philosophical ethics of Levinas ( [1961] 1969 , [1974] 1981 , [1979] 1987 ) (see Critchley [1999] for a discussion of deconstructive ethics, focusing on Derrida and Levinas). Levinas argues that the essence of ethical behavior is to respect the otherness of the Other. He uses the metaphor of “the face” and “facing” to convey this position. One shows respect for the Other by facing his/her otherness. This emphasis on the Other dovetails with the political concerns of feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theory as well with disability studies. As a result, the poststructuralist stream emphasizes the ethics of alterity with special attention to the ethics of the told (representations of the other) and the ethics of reading (obligations to face otherness). Different theorists offered variations on the central themes. Harpham ( 1999 : x) defined ethics as an “intimate and dynamic engagement with otherness,” while Attridge ( 1999 : 28) maintained that “ethics is […] the fundamental relation not just between subjects but also between the subject and its multiple others,” adding that this fundamental relation “is not a relation and [it] cannot be named, for it is logically prior to relations and names, prior to logic.” Hale ( 2007 , 2009 ), in her meta-analyses of the poststructuralist ethics of the novel, highlighted the recurrent attention to the ethics of reading and its injunctions to respect and to be responsible to the otherness of the text itself. Hale ( 2007 ) further noted that on this point poststructuralist and humanist ethics, including the rhetorical ethics of Booth, have much in common.

Humanist ethics acknowledges otherness as important for ethical engagements with narrative, but it emphasizes the benefits of connecting across difference. Booth’s The Company We Keep ( 1988 ) and Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge ( 1990 ) were foundational texts for humanist ethics. While neither earned universal acclaim, together they moved ethics to a prominent place in narrative theory and prepared the way for Newton’s claim in Narrative Ethics ( 1995 ) that the two domains are inseparable.

To appreciate Booth’s reflections on ethics and literature, it is helpful to start with his work on the rhetoric of fiction ( [1961] 1983 ) . Booth initially focused on the efficacy of overt authorial rhetoric in the novel, arguing that such rhetoric cannot be judged by a priori aesthetic dicta such as “true art ignores the audience.” Instead, it needs to be assessed according to its effectiveness in advancing the larger purposes of its author’s construction. In developing this case, Booth reached two broader conclusions. (1) Since an author’s use of any technique has effects on the novel’s audience, the author cannot choose whether or not to employ rhetoric but only which kind of rhetoric to employ. (2) The effects of rhetoric on the audience include cognitive, aesthetic, affective, and ethical ones, often in close interaction with one another. In a chapter on the ethics of the telling entitled “The Morality of Impersonal Narration” (Booth [1961] 1983 : 377–98), Booth noted that Jamesian center-of-consciousness narration and unreliable character narration tend to generate sympathy, even when used in the representation of ethically deficient characters. As a result, Booth pointed out, these rhetorical choices may lead readers to overlook those deficiencies. The upshot of the chapter is not to condemn these techniques, but rather to strike a cautionary note about their ethical effects.

In the Afterword to the second edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction ( [1961] 1983 ), Booth expressed some dissatisfaction with this argument, in part because he had let his personal moral commitments influence his rhetorical analyses. Later, Booth ( 1988 ) returned to his earlier conclusions and incorporated them into a more explicit discussion of ethics as an integral component of rhetoric. He employed the metaphor of books as friends to convey his view of the ethics of reading. Exploring this metaphor, Booth emphasized three key points: (1) friends are of different kinds—some are good for us and some aren’t—and their effects on the individual may vary depending on when, where, and why they are encountered; (2) many of these effects follow from the ways in which these friends guide one’s trajectory of desires; (3) one of the key functions of narrative fiction is to expand readers’ experiences as they follow these trajectories of desire. Booth offers numerous exemplifications of these principles, most notably in extended analyses of ethical virtues and deficiencies in the telling and told of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

Where Booth’s work arose out of a tradition of literary criticism, Nussbaum’s arose out of an effort to revise a tradition of philosophical inquiry into ethics. And where Booth was influenced by Aristotle’s way of thinking about parts in relation to wholes, Nussbaum, a classicist and a philosopher, was influenced by his discussions of ethics. She noted that ethics is that branch of philosophy concerned with Aristotle’s question of what the good life consists of, but she was dissatisfied with the ways analytic philosophy approached that question. Its style of reasoning, she argued, created a disconnect between its form and its content: how can one adequately discuss, say, an ethical struggle arising out of being in love through the abstractions of analytic philosophy? Novels, by contrast, seek to fit content to form (and vice versa), i.e. to set up mutually reinforcing relations between the ethics of the told and the ethics of the telling. As a result, novels conduct ethical inquiry in ways that are superior to those of analytic philosophy. More specifically, novels explore the concrete particularity of ethical dilemmas faced by fully realized characters, and those explorations harness the cognitive power of the emotions. Nussbaum ( 1997 , 2000 ) later went on to make a case for the value of the ethical engagements offered by novel reading when we turn to matters of public policy and to widen her scope to basic issues of human rights.

Newton departs from the Aristotelian emphases of Booth and Nussbaum as he stakes out a position that regards narrative and ethics as inseparable. He develops his own approach by sythesizing concepts from Baxtin, Cavell, and Levinas. From Baxtin ( [1986] 1993 ), he borrows the concept of ‘vživanie’, or ‘live-entering’ (empathy with the Other without loss of self); from Cavell ( 1979 ), the concept of acknowledging (being in a position of having to respond); and from Levinas ( [1974] 1981 , [1979] 1987 ) the concepts of the Said (the told), Saying (performing a telling) and Facing (looking at or looking away). Newton ( 1995 : 11) describes his project as the investigation of the “ethical consequences of narrating story and fictionalizing person, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that process.” He uses his triumvirate of thinkers to good effect as he offers thoughtful, nuanced analyses of the interrelations of the ethics of the telling and the ethics of the told in fiction by Dickens, Conrad, James, Ishiguro, and others. Like Nussbaum, Newton ( 1998 , 2001 , 2005 ) has gone on to expand and develop his approach in later books, and in an essay on teaching narrative theory ( 2010 ), he revisits his conception of narrative as ethics by developing the metaphor that narrative and ethics haunt each other.

Altieri ( 2003 ) has objected to what he sees as the excessively rational basis of Booth’s and especially of Nussbaum’s ethics. He has thus argued for a mode that can do better justice to what he calls the “particulars of rapture,” a mode of reading analogous to the sublime, in which affect overpowers rational judgment. Keen ( 2007 , 2011 ed.) has offered another important contribution to work on the relation between affect and ethics (Keen → Narrative Empathy ).

Phelan ( 2005 , 2007 , 2013 ) has sought to extend, clarify, and refine Booth’s work on the integral connection between rhetoric and ethics by highlighting the significance and centrality of ethical judgments in the experience of reading narrative. Phelan argued that, given the variety of ethical thought on display in the world’s narratives, it is valuable to do rhetorical ethics not only from the outside in, as Nussbaum and Newton do, but also from the inside out. That is, rather than privilege the ethical systems of one or more thinkers, the analyst can seek to uncover the ethical values underlying the specific rhetorical exchanges of a particular narrative. As part of his work on unreliable character narration, Phelan has put forth the idea that its ethical consequences can have effects ranging along a spectrum from bonding (Huck Finn’s naiveté leads him to be ethically unreliable in a way that increases the reader’s sympathy for him) to estranging (Jason Compson’s selfishness and pride lead to negative readerly judgments). Phelan ( 2011 ) has extended this work on the ethics of unreliability by examining the ethics of “deficient narration,” i.e. narration that authors signal as reliable but readers find “off-kilter,” such as Huck Finn’s narration in much of the Evasion section of Twain’s novel.

Ethics and the Narrative Identity Thesis

Questions about the ethics of writing/composing have extended beyond the domain of literary narrative to the domain of identity (Bamberg → Identity and Narration ). Many philosophers and psychologists (e.g., MacIntyre [1981] , Bruner [1987] , and Schechtman [1997] ) have advanced the view that conceiving of one’s life as a narrative is essential to having a self. As Strawson ( 2004 ) pointed out in an essay contesting this thesis about narrative identity, the view has both a descriptive psychological component (this is how human beings experience their lives) and a normative ethical component (having a narrative identity enables one to live a better life). Strawson rejected both components of the narrative identity thesis. Although he did not deny that some people experience their lives as narratives, he disputed that all (or even most) people do. Citing his own experience, he distinguished between Diachronics (those who do experience their lives as narratives) and Episodics (those who do not). He objected even more strongly to the ethical component of the narrative identity thesis, arguing that (1) having a narrative of one’s life often entails distorting the past and thus taking one further away from accurate self-understanding and (2) that one can live ethically without having a narrative of one’s life.

Strawson’s argument did not lead to a wholesale rejection of the narrative identity thesis, and indeed some commentators found fault with his reasoning (Battersby 2006 ). But both the thesis and Strawson’s effort to debunk it point to the high stakes of questions about narrative ethics.

Topics for Further Investigation

Altieri’s objections to Booth and Nussbaum indicate that the interrelations between the affective and ethical dimensions of reading deserve further examination. Hale’s ( 2007 , 2009 ) work indicates that those doing poststructuralist ethics and those doing humanist ethics could learn from each other without giving up their distinctive projects. The similarities and differences among the ethical dimensions of narrative in different media are also worthy of further study. (For some valuable initial work in this area on film narrative, see Richter 2005 , 2007 .) Ethics in lifewriting (Eakin 2004 ), in medical narrative (Charon 2006 ), in legal narrative (Brooks 2001 ), and in other domains involved in the narrative turn also deserve further investigation. More generally, as the recent collection Narrative Ethics (Lothe & Hawthorn 2013 ) indicates, because the domains of narrative and ethics are themselves so vast and their interactions so varied, we can expect that exploration of their intersections will continue to excite much debate and to yield rich results.

Bibliography

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How to write a narrative essay | Example & tips

How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A narrative essay tells a story. In most cases, this is a story about a personal experience you had. This type of essay , along with the descriptive essay , allows you to get personal and creative, unlike most academic writing .

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What is a narrative essay for, choosing a topic, interactive example of a narrative essay, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about narrative essays.

When assigned a narrative essay, you might find yourself wondering: Why does my teacher want to hear this story? Topics for narrative essays can range from the important to the trivial. Usually the point is not so much the story itself, but the way you tell it.

A narrative essay is a way of testing your ability to tell a story in a clear and interesting way. You’re expected to think about where your story begins and ends, and how to convey it with eye-catching language and a satisfying pace.

These skills are quite different from those needed for formal academic writing. For instance, in a narrative essay the use of the first person (“I”) is encouraged, as is the use of figurative language, dialogue, and suspense.

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Narrative essay assignments vary widely in the amount of direction you’re given about your topic. You may be assigned quite a specific topic or choice of topics to work with.

Write a story about your first day of school.
Write a story about your favorite holiday destination.

You may also be given prompts that leave you a much wider choice of topic.

Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself.
Write about an achievement you are proud of. What did you accomplish, and how?

In these cases, you might have to think harder to decide what story you want to tell. The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to talk about a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

For example, a trip where everything went according to plan makes for a less interesting story than one where something unexpected happened that you then had to respond to. Choose an experience that might surprise the reader or teach them something.

Narrative essays in college applications

When applying for college , you might be asked to write a narrative essay that expresses something about your personal qualities.

For example, this application prompt from Common App requires you to respond with a narrative essay.

In this context, choose a story that is not only interesting but also expresses the qualities the prompt is looking for—here, resilience and the ability to learn from failure—and frame the story in a way that emphasizes these qualities.

An example of a short narrative essay, responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” is shown below.

Hover over different parts of the text to see how the structure works.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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If you’re not given much guidance on what your narrative essay should be about, consider the context and scope of the assignment. What kind of story is relevant, interesting, and possible to tell within the word count?

The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to reflect on a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

Don’t worry too much if your topic seems unoriginal. The point of a narrative essay is how you tell the story and the point you make with it, not the subject of the story itself.

Narrative essays are usually assigned as writing exercises at high school or in university composition classes. They may also form part of a university application.

When you are prompted to tell a story about your own life or experiences, a narrative essay is usually the right response.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

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Everyday Moral Choices

We have already suggested that most ethical decisions in our daily lives and work are made instantly, often under pressure and without much room for forethought. They are instinctive, being the product of habits of a lifetime, as well as shaped by the culture of the places we work and by the peer groups and faith communities we belong to.

Such decisions are influenced by the extent to which Christian virtues and character have been molded into the core of our being. This is regular Christian discipleship.

However, the importance of being as the foundation for our doing does not mean we have no need for moral reasoning. Within the virtuous life there is still a place for understanding rules and calculating consequences — but here the rules and consequences are subordinated to the virtues. They’re viewed as servants rather than masters. For example, even a person with the virtue of honesty has to understand and obey the rules of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (International Financial Reporting Standards, outside the USA) in order to produce accurate financial statements. Terms such as “in our opinion” and “unforeseeable” have particular definitions that must be followed. But an honest person always uses the rules to increase the overall accuracy of the financial statement, never to find a way to obscure the truth without breaking any laws.

This emphasis on virtues does not eliminate moral dilemmas. In fact, competing virtues are also capable of pulling us in different directions. Examples of this are the tensions that sometimes exist between justice and peace, or loyalty and truth, or courage and prudence.

Making good moral decisions in these cases is less about seeing one right answer (because there probably is not just one) and more about striving for a balanced Christian response that recognizes all the competing priorities.

We are not just left striving earnestly all the time to discern and enact the perfect Christian response. In fact, recognizing that we live in a fallen world means realizing that often there is no perfect Christian response — that sometimes all courses of action include negative consequences. It is only by God’s grace that we can live forgiven and free as Christians. No longer desperately dependent on trying to do the right thing in order to earn God’s approval, but still committed to try to do the right thing as defined by the character of our Lord and Savior, the carpenter of Nazareth, in whose footsteps we follow as we go about our daily work.

Click here to return to the beginning of the Ethics and Work article Click here to go to the Systematic Presentation of Ethics Click here to go to the Bibliography

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Systematic Presentation of Ethics
Definitions
Different Approaches to Ethics
The Command Approach in Practice
What Are God’s Rules? Is There a Command for Every Occasion?
Looking for Guiding Principles
From Guiding Principles to One Clear Command
Three Balancing Principles
The Consequences Approach
The Bible and Consequences
The Character Approach
Which Virtues?
Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?
Putting it All Together
Solving Major Moral Dilemmas
Making Ethical Decisions in a Fallen World
Conclusions
Narrative (Case) Presentation of Ethics
The Command Approach
What Are Wayne’s Obligations According to Law?
A Rule for Every Occasion?
Larger Principles?
A Single Principle or Command?
Measuring the Good
What is Good?
Good for Whom?
Can the Good Be Calculated?
Good in What Context?
Determining What Is Virtuous
How Does Character Shape Wayne’s Decision?
How Does Character Develop and Grow in Our Lives?
Developing the Character of Jesus in the World of Work
Major Moral Dilemmas

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Contributors: Alistair Mackenzie and Wayne Kirkland Adopted by the Theology of Work Project Board July 29, 2010. Revised Dec. 1, 2010. Image by Used under license from Veer . Used by permission.

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Application of narrative in medical ethics

Introduction.

The Narrative Approach in Medicine

The use of narratives as narrative discourse is a tool used to express the experiences of individuals ( 1 ). In medical sciences, the use of the narrative approach has been emphasized by Rita Charon ( 2 ). Researchers who have used a narrative approach in medical education claim that practicing narrative writing can improve health care provision ( 3 - 6 ). In the health care system, narration is the usage of literature on patients' stories to facilitate clinical decision-making for physicians. Lately, the narrative has applied a healing potential as “narrative care”, a method that uses story to improve health care. This approach focuses on patients' stories ( 7 ). The narrative plays a very effective role in making difficult ethical decisions, and therefore it is important to keep considerations and consequences in mind ( 8 ).

With the growing use of narratives in medicine, its application as an educational tool in ethics has also increased ( 9 ). Narrative analysis is a way of examining ethical problems and the use of a narrative approach to ethical issues and values prevents ethical challenges ( 2 ). Fictional and factual narratives can be a prominent help to comprehension in medical ethics. Literary criticism can be used to analyze ethical texts, and this process enhances our understanding of different perspectives on ethical challenges ( 2 ). The issues of rights, errors, emotions, beliefs, and behaviors are related to ethical narratives ( 1 ).

Narrative ethics

Narrative ethics represents the postmodern critique of reason and emphasizes personal affective and creative interpretation. It originated in the domains of philosophy and theology. Narrative ethics is a component of effective ethics and deals with particular circumstances, supplying extreme consideration to the background that highlights the outcomes and concerns stated by a dilemma. Discursive representation is a narrative centering on a circumstance, and one that needs to be comprehended in a multidisciplinary way. These representations are stated in the form of narration, which offers an ethical approach ( 8 ). Narrative ethics is a term that contains a wide range of concepts presented as approaches; thus, narration can be a source of ethical theories or a method for studying ethics and can be a replacement for traditional methods. Hence, it is necessary to pay attention to the principles of narrative ethics. Firstly, ethical situations are unique and cannot be generalized to other issues, like rules. Secondly, narrative situations are decided based on the patient's status and his illness story ( 9 ). Usually, caregivers and doctors publish a case report. In reporting a patient's case, compliance with standards and principles is normally done, but the expression of the patient’s psychological features is neglected. While the narrative in the patient's file may seem to provide irrelevant information, it can also describe the patient's status to others. Therefore, the narrator presumes that in this way the ethical points will be better known ( 8 ). Narrative ethics is a current ethical view that has emerged lately and fosters effective interaction between patients and physicians; however, attention should be given to its application in the physician-patient communication ( 8 ).

Narrative as a teaching method

A review of several studies shows that medical students learn the most from clinical-role models, and the role of a clinical teacher as a model in the training of professional ethics is rather prominent ( 10 , 11 ). However, there is a challenge that makes this impact undesirable. Since students are exposed to both favorable and unfavorable role model behaviors, they may be affected adversely under the circumstances. Also, the use of reflection and integration of humanities in medicine are other ways of teaching ethics to medical students ( 10 , 12 - 14 ). Conducting discussions in small groups and role-playing or interacting with a patient as a teacher also plays an effective role in teaching medical ethics ( 10 , 15 ). The above-mentioned methods, some of which are still not widely used, can be effective in medical education, but it is necessary to pay attention to cultural issues as an important point in education. Hence there is a need for a medical education system based on humanities ( 10 , 16 , 17 ).

Over the past few decades, narratives have been used as a method for teaching medical professional ethics. They provide ethical guidance through case examples, and as narratives of witness, address the review of professional ethical principles in medical practice ( 2 , 18 ).

In medical ethics, narratives are used in the following three forms:

1. Examples of cases that have broad application in Western medical ethics:

Since the advent of humanities in medicine in the 1970s, a link was formed between literature and medicine, and literature was employed to teach medical ethics. Literary narratives were used to analyze the ethical challenges in short stories in a designated framework. Hence, "stories as cases" are the principal method for teaching the principles of medical ethics ( 2 ).

2. Moral guidance in all aspects of the lives of individuals:

From the perspective of Coles, complex literary texts such as novels are moral guides to making life better. Stories are not only used to solve moral challenges, but also to provide moral reflection on all of life's affairs, and as such, they are effective in medical ethics ( 2 , 19 ).

3. The “witness narratives” that are used to examine medical and ethical performance:

Analyses of ethical issues concerning patients or their relatives are important in terms of medical ethics. “Witness narratives” are related to issues such as independence, respect for patients’ rights, informed consent, and medical errors. Physicians and health care professionals share their experiences of such ethical issues and discuss the challenges. Therefore, the interpretation of "witness narratives" plays an important role in solving ethical problems ( 2 , 20 ).

In summary, narratives can present ethical lessons, or create awareness and empathy through the expression of ethical issues and experiences. Also, narratives can help us by providing relevant information on "ethical decision-making". On the other hand, narratives can be a way of understanding the moral reasoning that is created through contemplation and exploration of individuals’ narratives ( 7 ).

Acknowledgements

Citation to this article:

Daryazadeh S. Application of narrative in medical ethics. J Med Ethics Hist. 2019; 12: 13.

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests.

Narrative Ethics

Adam Zachary Newton

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ISBN 9780674600881

Publication date: 09/15/1997

The ethics of literature, formalists have insisted, resides in the moral quality of a character, a story, perhaps the relation between author and reader. But in the wake of deconstruction and various forms of criticism focusing on difference, the ethical question has been freshly negotiated by literary studies, and to this approach Adam Newton brings a startling new thrust. His book makes a compelling case for understanding narrative as ethics. Assuming an intrinsic and necessary connection between the two, Newton explores the ethical consequences of telling stories and fictionalizing character, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in the process. He treats these relations as defining properties of prose fiction, of particular import in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts.

Newton's fresh and nuanced readings cover a wide range of authors and periods, from Charles Dickens to Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes, from Herman Melville to Richard Wright, from Joseph Conrad and Henry James to Sherwood Anderson and Stephen Crane. An original work of theory as well as a deft critical performance, Narrative Ethics also stakes a claim for itself as moral inquiry. To that end, Newton braids together the ethical-philosophical projects of Emmanuel Levinas, Stanley Cavell, and Mikhail Bakhtin as a kind of chorus for his textual analyses--an elegant bridge between philosophy's ear and literary criticism's voice. His work will generate enormous interest among scholars and students of English and American literature, as well as specialists in narrative and literary theory, hermeneutics, and contemporary philosophy.

Newton's book will become a pivotal text in our discussions of the ethical implications of reading. He has taken into account a great deal of prior work, and written with judgment and wisdom. —Daniel Schwartz, Narrative

Reading Narrative Ethics is a powerful experience, for it engages not just the intellect, but the emotions, and dare I say, the spirit. It stands apart from recent books on ethics in literature by virtue of its severe insistence o its allegiance to an alternative ethical tradition. This alternative way of thinking--and living--has its roots in the work of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and finds support in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and Stanley Cavell...Stories, Newton asserts, are not ethical because of their morals or because of their normative logic. They are ethical because of the work they perform, in the social world, of binding teller, listener, witness, and reader to one another...This is a work of passion, integrity, commitment, and mission. —Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University

Newton probes with admirable subtlety the key question: what do we gain--and what dangers do we run--when we fully enter the life of an 'other' through that 'other's' story? We have here a rare combination of deep and learned critical acumen with passionate love for literature and sensitivity to its nuances. —Wayne C. Booth, University of Chicago

Adam Zachary Newton writes with illuminating passion. Drawing on writers as diverse as Conrad and Henry James, Melville and Sherwood Anderson, Bakhtin and Levinas, he asks what it is to turn one's life into a story for another, and what it is to respond to, or avoid the claim of, another person's narration. He has written a wonderful, important book. —Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago

Newton offers elegant, provocative readings of texts ranging from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Winesburg, Ohio, The Remains of the Day, and Bleak House ...Newton's book is a rich vein of critical ore that can be mined profitably. —Choice

Adam Zachary Newton is Assistant Professor of English and teaches in the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin.

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The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998-2007

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This book brings together nearly all of the author's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, revealing a lesser-known side: that of the public intellectual. From modern patriotism and European identity to Hannah Arendt's writings on totalitarianism, from the idea of the historical museum and the theme of melancholy in art history to trenchant readings of Leo Tolstoy and Primo Levi, the first volume of the book shows the author at his most engaging, topical, and capacious. Introduced by the editor, who explains the major themes, sources, and frames of reference of the author's thought, the volume features five previously unpublished lectures, as well as more complete versions of several published essays, thereby giving the reader unique access to the author's late thought. In addition to historical theorists and intellectual historians, the book will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities in such fields as literary and cultural studies, art history and visual studies, and media studies.

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The Hastings Center

Narrative ethics: the role of stories in bioethics.

Editor: Martha Montello

What “narrative ethics” means and how it changes clinical ethics practice has been controversial. Its proponents are agreed, however, that it is an alternative approach to “doing ethics,” and indeed may reflect a different way of understanding moral thinking. In this special report, ten leading figures in narrative ethics offer their perspectives. To order the full report, please contact John Wiley & Sons customer support at 800-835-6770 or [email protected] .

“ It’s all in the stories ” Martha Montello

Narrative Ethics Martha Montello

Narrative Ethics: A Narrative Howard Brody and Mark Clark

Qualms of a Believer in Narrative Ethics Christine Mitchell

Narrative Ethics as Dialogical Story-Telling Arthur W. Frank

Narrative Reciprocity Rita Charon

Narratives Hold Open the Future Jodi Halpern

When Stories Go Wrong Hilde Lindemann

Narrative Ethics, Narrative Structure Anne Hudson Jones

Narrative Awareness in Ethics Consultations: The Ethics Consultant as Story-Maker Larry Churchill

What We talk about When We Talk about Ethics John D. Lantos

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Saint Mary's NewsCenter

Scholar at Work: Grant Rozeboom on Business Ethics and ‘Working as Equals’

Business faculty member Grant Rozeboom with screened-in image of campus behind him

If we're talking about workplace equality, Grant Rozeboom says, “The idea that accountability should go both ways is one of the key ideas.” / Photo courtesy Grant Rozeboom

He brought together scholars from around the world for a workshop and volume of essays looking at the importance of treating one another as moral equals in the workplace. That matters for sustaining democracy, too.

“At Work” is a series that highlights Saint Mary’s faculty and staff at work in the world. Artists, writers, scholars, scientists—we sit down and dive deep into their latest projects.

Grant Rozeboom arrived at Saint Mary’s in spring 2020—a tumultuous time in higher education and society more broadly, given the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as I learned, his recent and groundbreaking book project, which brought together scholars from around the world, has its roots in those difficult months.

That pioneering project began as a workshop titled Working as Equals, which addressed the ideal of relational equality in markets and firms and the connection between a workplace and a society of equals. Last year, Oxford University Press published scholarship from that workshop under the title Working as Equals: Relational Egalitarianism and the Workplace. Co-edited with Julian David Jonker, an assistant professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the book quickly garnered attention outside of academia as well.

The TransAmerica Professor and Associate Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility in the School of Economics and Business Administration (SEBA), Rozeboom earned his PhD in philosophy from Stanford University. He teaches in the Leadership, Ethics, and Law Department; his research and teaching encompass areas including business ethics, political philosophy, and moral psychology. In spring 2024, he was one of the SEBA faculty teaching Business Ethics who coached Saint Mary’s students to victory in the international Lasallian Business Ethics competition .

He is also a faculty affiliate with the Elfenworks Center for Responsible Business. A Midwestern native, before coming to California he studied and worked in Iowa and taught at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin.

Book cover for Working as Equals, co-edited by Grant Rozeboom

In the introduction to Working as Equals , you note, “A society of equals must be one in which we work as equals.” The million-dollar question: How do we actually do that—given the hierarchies that the workplace entails?

If I were to pinpoint one idea that emerges as a consensus— this is something we really need to see realized in workplaces —it’s the idea of mutual accountability. It's not just superiors holding subordinates accountable for doing their job. There also need to be mechanisms and norms for subordinates to hold superiors accountable for staying within bounds.

Exactly what that looks like is going to depend a lot on what kind of workplace: Is it a large corporation that has various governance structures, like a body of shareholders that are external to employees, and a board of directors? Or is it a small family-owned firm? Mutual accountability is going to look very differently in those different workplaces. But the idea that accountability should go both ways is one of the key ideas.

This was a long-term project for you, bringing together scholars from throughout the US, Canada, and Europe—not necessarily to agree, but in 11 essays to shed light on issues as big as workplace hierarchy, the value of social equality, problems of discrimination—and the relationship to democracy itself. How did this come together?

I had started to think about how we could understand some desirable character traits of leaders—traits that support relating to employees as moral equals: a certain kind of humility, and respect that keeps in check paternalistic or intrusive impulses that are otherwise pretty common in the corporate world. I was at the Society for Business Ethics conference, chatting with Julian Jonker, who's the co-editor. He was starting to think about how you support relational equality in workplaces, but coming from a different lens: how workplaces fit within democratic political societies. We knew of a couple of people interested in this general issue. The thought was, “It would be great if we could get all these people together and really try to get this train rolling.”

That spring I came to Saint Mary's to teach. When we first started talking about hosting a conference or workshop, it was February of 2020. We thought it would be in person. While the pandemic meant that wasn’t possible, we pulled the ideas together, and hosted the workshop online the following year.

We received great interest when we put out the call for papers. Then we were thinking: What should we do with these? An editor at Oxford University Press was really enthusiastic about the idea of a book.

Are there particular ideas that have already caught traction?

One is: When we evaluate the structure and the ethics of a workplace hierarchy, a question we have to ask is, Is it respecting the ideal of people relating as morally equals? It has also brought forward concrete issues such as employees' speech and expression, both at work and off work, and boundaries on employer regulation. It's also forcing people to think about the extent to which the ideal of people relating as equals in a democratic society is supposed to be supported by market institutions and firms.

It's been very common to understand market institutions as serving the aim of efficiency. But when you go back to early market thinkers such as Adam Smith, they also thought it was a part of the job of market institutions to dismantle feudal hierarchy. To what extent should we still see market institutions and firms as playing a similar kind of function? It's not as though we've gotten rid of insidious forms of hierarchy and oppression. Reminding people that this is a part of the heritage of economic thought is something else that I hope that the book does.

In your own essay, “Good Enough for Equality,” you talk about "relational egalitarianism" and "equal authority." Unpack what you mean by that.

Start with the contrast that a lot of early relational, egalitarian thinkers like Smith had in mind—which is feudal society—and then what they were envisioning as democratic and commercial societies. One of the important shifts that was supposed to take place is that everyone should have the same basic standing to conduct themselves and direct their own affairs. Then the institutional question is: In politics, how do you realize that? What are the right kinds of democratic mechanisms to respect that ideal? And then in the economy, how do you realize that?

There's a natural way in which market exchange does that. Firms introduce a wrinkle; now we have relations of direction and relations between superiors and subordinates. If the background ideal is that everyone entering a firm has the same basic standing to direct their lives, then what has to be respected within the firm is what they had in mind in choosing to enter the firm in the first place—basically, what they thought they were getting into—and the limited way they surrendered some of the discretion they had prior to entering the firm, in terms of how they would be directed at work. That's what I think is central when we think about respecting people as equals the context of a firm.

“It's not as though we've gotten rid of insidious forms of hierarchy and oppression. Reminding people that this is a part of the heritage of economic thought is something else that I hope that the book does.”

So let’s talk about boundaries and free speech in the workplace.

One way to divide these issues is to think about expression and speech at work versus expression in speech outside of work. We've seen cases of employers clamping down on both.

An easy example for at work comes from Starbucks, where, in some stores, employees were asked not to wear certain kinds of politically controversial hats or T-shirts—both Black Lives Matter and MAGA gear. When you think about expression being clamped down on at work, it's easy for people to come up with reasons why an employer might want to do that, especially in a customer-facing setting. We don't want to alienate customers.

Still, there are important questions to ask about the extent to which someone gets to show up to work as themself and the extent to which the form of expression is tied to who they are. It's relatively easy to take off a hat. What about a hairstyle, a piercing, a tattoo? Those typically start to be much more closely linked to someone's sense of themself. The burden starts to shift much more heavily to an employer having weighty reasons to want to restrict or cover up the expression.

Then there are cases outside of work. The most famous examples are what employees have gotten in trouble for posting on social media. If someone is posting in a way that clearly is not meant to signal that they're an employee of the organization, is it fair for the organization to treat them as acting as a representative of the organization? Or does that start to represent a form of intrusion that we would see as really oppressive?

Another issue that comes up: How far in someone's past can you go when you're considering what of their posting behavior might be relevant to how they're treated at work? Today it's common for people to come on social media at a pretty young age. We also all know that, even when we were growing up without social media, the kind of banter that would occur between friends would often involve statements that we would no longer want to identify with, and that we would certainly feel embarrassed to still have hanging over us. But now a lot of that banter happens on social media and is memorialized. So there's a question you could put as: How do you still allow people to grow up from being teenagers to adults, acknowledging the mistakes that inevitably involves, while still acknowledging that a lot of it is happening in the public eye, and for that reason is impacting other people? It's important for employers to have a sensitive view of this, so that we're not saying anytime someone makes a mistaken remark as a teenager, that's going to severely impact their employment prospects going forward.

Now, I don't think most employers have that sort of view. But there are tougher cases where we have seen pretty strong blanket responses by employers. For instance, last fall, when you had college students taking sides in protests related to Israel and its action in the Gaza Strip, you did see employers saying, “We're not going to hire any students who signed or were members of such-and-such club that issued such-and-such statement.” That's an example of the kind of issue that's not only outside of work, that's potentially one or two or three years before a student would be an employee.

“Democracy isn't just a set of formal institutions. It's also the kind of practices through which we engage with each other—including at work, but also at colleges and universities, in neighborhoods, in schools.”

One of the dimensions is the connection between the workplace and politics, and where equality fits in.

I hope one of the takeaways is that different kinds of companies play different roles in supporting a political society of equals. Think about the classic small family-run business; the function it plays is pretty limited in terms of providing a set of resources for people to interact more broadly as equals in our political society. The discretion they have to run the business in a way that reflects idiosyncratic preferences is going to be significantly greater.

But there are other corporations that, not just because of size, but because of the role they play in supporting political infrastructure, have a very different role. Think about what was Twitter and now, to a lesser extent, survives as X: That's a significant venue for speech, for how people make views known, represent themselves when they're running for office, or engage with each other. What comes with that are significantly more responsibilities for thinking about how to run the company—and that piece of our public infrastructure—in a way that respects the ideal of people relating as equals.

Scholar Debra Satz wraps up her essay by saying: “Democracy is a fragile achievement, and we need to take care in cultivating the psychological bases that are needed to support it. Workplaces are a good place to start.” For you, what does it mean for workplaces to cultivate the psychological bases for supporting democracy?

I think she and I have slightly different views about this. But we agree that if a workplace is domineering and indoctrinating in certain ways, we know, given the amount of time that people spend at work, that can kind of stifle and sap their ability to function—not just as good family members, but as good members of society. In fact, sometimes even by being well-intentioned in imposing workplace policies can have negative consequences. Carolyn Chen’s book Work, Pray, Code looks at how sometimes companies attempt to be one-stop shops for their employees’ lives: Come here for friends, for food, for meaning, for fulfillment. That can sap people's willingness to engage in other parts of their communities, which is corrosive to the project of creating a society of equals and to people's ability to be sharp, engaged citizens.

Democracy is fragile. And the social institutions and norms associated with it are equally if not more fragile. Democracy isn't just a set of formal institutions. It's also the kind of practices through which we engage with each other—including at work, but also at colleges and universities, in neighborhoods, in schools. So I agree with Satz: It's fragile and needs to be protected.

Teaching at Saint Mary's, are there insights or observations that you would make as you see people—especially traditionally-aged undergraduates—heading into the workplace?

I hope they don't give up on the possibility of productive political disagreement and engagement. Here I mean political in a broad sense; that can cover a number of kinds of conversations that happen at work. It could be a conversation amongst team members, or a whole segment of a working population. What do we think is appropriate workplace attire? What kinds of speakers are we willing to welcome, or not? These are the sorts of topics that generate sometimes heated—and appropriately heated—conversation. But I worry that the primary mode that people now have of seeing one another engage with these issues, especially on social media, is a short, one-sided snippet, where what's rewarded are people who can express their view with a certain kind of outrage or panache. What's funny, entertaining, or outrageous in that context is ill-suited to how those conversations need to go if they're going to be productive within organizations. So I hope we don't lose the possibility of learning how to engage in those conversations, which in part requires the recognition that while there is serious disagreement, I honestly don't think we disagree as much as people tend to believe that we disagree.

I think we need to ask ourselves: Who benefits from us believing that we disagree as much as we do? It makes it very difficult to enter into productive conversations if you start from the thought that someone is 1,000 miles away politically, and there's really no hope of reaching them with my point of view. Because really, the alternative is that issues can't get settled through any sort of dialogue or real engagement in a workplace setting—which means a simple majority vote is taken, which can be stifling if you don't happen to be on the side of the majority, or it's just decided by fiat, by someone who has power and is able to impose their own view.

And again, if we're thinking about workplaces as incubators for democratic dispositions, neither of those options is really promising.

What’s one impact that you hope this book has?

This might sound awfully ideas-focused. "Respect for the relational egalitarian ideal"—the ideal that in society, people ought to relate as equals—when you think about its heritage in the European Enlightenment, and the influence it has had, it has been around for a few hundred years now. Sometimes I worry that, through that span of time, we've kind of forgotten what the ideal was asserted against .

There's an essay in the book by Pierre-Yves Néron, where he does a nice job of reminding us what the opponent is: a way of thinking where hierarchical arrangements are desirable for their own sake, because they reveal the ways in which some people are naturally superior to others. Even saying that out loud, it sounds ugly—I think it is an ugly thing to say. We've forgotten that's the real opponent; we sometimes don't notice when it creeps back in. And I think it is creeping back in—certainly into political discourse. So, I hope that as we take this forward, it would be a reminder that this is not an ideal that’s just out there, free-floating as a nice thing to pursue. It's an ideal in tension with a certain kind of tendency that never goes away—which is a tendency to valorize hierarchy, and the idea that there's a natural ordering of persons from greater to lesser. We need to be on guard against that.

Steven Boyd Saum is Executive Director of Strategic Communications & Content at Saint Mary's. Write him.

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Five students who won the 2024 Lasallian Business Ethics Competition

Work Ethic Essay Sample

Essay on Work Ethic

Work ethics is believed to be an idea that work, hard work and diligence, has a positive outcome. They also believe that a person should prioritize work and work only in order to live a successful life. Some may disagree on this but there are people who really make their lives revolve around working. Being a workaholic is not bad but on some point, this trait can become a problem because too much work can lead to sickness. It is okay to work as long as you take good care of yourself. A strong work ethic is needed in order to survive a life that is centered in doing your job. The following are the top ten work ethics.

When you enter a job the first impressive move you will take is being always on time and never be absent. Attendance is one of the most important factors when an employer looks for an employee. When a person is late many things are wasted and it is not good for the business. You will never find a boss who wants his or her employee to be always late. This will impress and inspire your co-workers and your boss. Every company believes in the saying that the early bird catches the worm so an early employee will be the most productive. The second one is the character of an employee. The character of a person is important in the workplace because it will determine his or her connection with his colleagues.

It is so important that a person has a good attitude so that he can get along with his co-workers and the job will be done easily. The third one is team work; this is applicable to an individual or a group of people. Team work is definitely needed because some job requires coordination between more people. It will also show how a person will communicate to the other to finish a certain task. The fourth quality is the appearance; sometimes looks really matters. If you will notice, some job posts include pleasing personality as a requirement. People in the business world needs people who are presentable looking in order to persuade the clients and convince them that their company has real business because their employees look presentable enough to be believed. It does not necessarily mean that the person should pass the standard of beautiful; he or she just needs to be presentable.

Next one is an attitude, just like character it shows how a person acts towards the others. Tough times will also test someone’s attitude on how he or she will react in a problem. The sixth quality is productivity; it is something that makes an employer keeps his or her employee. A productive person always gets the job done even before the deadline. The kinds of people who are productive are good for the company because the salary given to them are all worth it. The other qualities include organizational skills, communication, cooperation, and respect . Organizational skills are needed because it will make a person do his or her job in the easiest way possible. Communication is needed in any field of the workplace because this is what makes people understand each other. If an employee does not know how to communicate, he or she will not be able to impart his or her ideas and that may cause the company a big loss. Cooperation is important because when an employee is not cooperating the job will not be done. Last but not the least is a respect for each other. Without respect, the job will not be done successfully. Everybody should respect each other regardless of their race, age, gender, and religion. Respect should be given and not demanded because it is something that is offered to a person without anything in return.

All of the mentioned qualities should be exhibited by a person who wants to work with strong ethics. If a person has all of those qualities, he or she will surely stay in the job he or she loves. The drive of a person to make something successful will make him or her goals come true. The strong work ethics is nothing without hard work and patience in doing the job.

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An Olympics Scene Draws Scorn. Did It Really Parody ‘The Last Supper’?

Some church leaders and politicians have condemned the performance from the opening ceremony for mocking Christianity. Art historians are divided.

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A screen depicting a person painted in blue near fruit. Behind is a rainy Paris street with part of the Eiffel Tower and Olympic rings visible.

By Yan Zhuang

A performance during the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony on Friday has drawn criticism from church leaders and conservative politicians for a perceived likeness to Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of a biblical scene in “The Last Supper,” with some calling it a “mockery” of Christianity.

The event’s planners and organizers have denied that the sequence was inspired by “The Last Supper,” or that it intended to mock or offend.

In the performance broadcast during the ceremony, a woman wearing a silver, halo-like headdress stood at the center of a long table, with drag queens posing on either side of her. Later, at the same table, a giant cloche lifted, revealing a man, nearly naked and painted blue, on a dinner plate surrounded by fruit. He broke into a song as, behind him, the drag queens danced.

The tableaux drew condemnation among people who saw the images as a parody of “The Last Supper,” the New Testament scene depicted in da Vinci’s painting by the same name. The French Bishops’ Conference, which represents the country’s Catholic bishops, said in a statement that the opening ceremony included “scenes of mockery and derision of Christianity,” and an influential American Catholic, Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota, called it a “gross mockery.”

The performance at the opening ceremony, which took place on and along the Seine on Friday, also prompted a Mississippi-based telecommunications provider, C Spire, to announce that it would pull its advertisements from Olympics broadcasts. Speaker Mike Johnson described the scene as “shocking and insulting to Christian people.”

The opening ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, said at the Games’ daily news conference on Saturday that the event was not meant to “be subversive, or shock people, or mock people.” On Sunday, Anne Descamps, the Paris 2024 spokeswoman, said at the daily news conference, “If people have taken any offense, we are, of course, really, really sorry.”

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Importance Of Work Ethic: [Essay Example], 566 words
Impact on Individual Performance. A strong work ethic directly influences individual performance by fostering qualities such as diligence, perseverance, and reliability. Employees with a solid work ethic tend to approach their tasks with a sense of purpose and commitment. This dedication often translates to higher productivity and quality of work.
The Ethical Force of Stories: Narrative Ethics and Beyond
Brody H, Clark M. Narrative ethics: a narrative. Hastings Cent Rep. 2014;44(1):S7-S11. Don't be fooled by the first four words—"Once upon a time"—in Howard Brody's and Mark Clark's challenging 2014 article "Narrative Ethics: A Narrative" [1]. You would be mistaken to think you were in for a simple tale with a clear-cut lesson.
Work Ethics: Narrative Essay with Corrections
Length: 1 page. Formatting: APA. Requirements: Write a narrative essay based on Marsh's article, as well as the Module Notes, the Funk and. Wagnalls ethics reading, and the Kant presentation. Identify one ethical issue in Marsh's article. (do not use poverty and education) and write this as an ethical statement. Running head: WORK ETHICS 1.
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Another essential part of building good work ethic is adopting a "do it like you own it" attitude. You can do this by being proactive in small, but powerful, ways. Where your work meets your ...
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Narrative ethics is an approach to exploring ethical issues by engaging people in storytelling. Narrative ethics has a similar theoretical foundation as narrative therapy in that both are based on social constructionism. According to social constructionism, there is no singular objective truth. Our identities, values, and belief systems are ...
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Narrative ethics explores the intersections between the domain of stories and storytelling and that of moral values. ... has extended this work on the ethics of unreliability by examining the ethics of "deficient narration," i.e. narration that authors signal as ... pointed out in an essay contesting this thesis about narrative identity ...
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Interactive example of a narrative essay. An example of a short narrative essay, responding to the prompt "Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself," is shown below. Hover over different parts of the text to see how the structure works. Narrative essay example.
Social Work and Narrative Ethics
Narrative approaches to ethics have been widely adopted in medicine. This paper explores their applicability to social work practice, particularly in the light of an increasing interest in narrative as a basis for practice intervention. ethics, narrative, values. We are a story-telling lot, we social workers.
Narrative Ethics
Abstract. Narrative ethics is an approach to moral inquiry that assumes the central importance of stories in understanding ethical dilemmas and in recognizing and assessing possible responses. Unlike the focus of moral philosophy on seeking and examining abstract theories to address problems in ethics, narrative ethics acknowledges the central ...
Narrative Ethics as Dialogical Story‐Telling
WOODS NASH, Narrative Ethics, Authentic Integrity, and an Intrapersonal Medical Encounter in David Foster Wallace's "Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR", Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 10.1017/S0963180114000346, 24, 1, (96-106), (2014).
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Everyday Moral Choices. We have already suggested that most ethical decisions in our daily lives and work are made instantly, often under pressure and without much room for forethought. They are instinctive, being the product of habits of a lifetime, as well as shaped by the culture of the places we work and by the peer groups and faith ...
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A narrative approach to ethics focuses on how stories that are told, written, or otherwise expressed by individuals and groups help to define and structure our moral universe. Specifically, narrative ethicists take the practices of storytelling, listening, and bearing empathetic, careful witness to these stories to be central to understanding ...
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Narrative analysis is a way of examining ethical problems and the use of a narrative approach to ethical issues and values prevents ethical challenges ( 2 ). Fictional and factual narratives can be a prominent help to comprehension in medical ethics. Literary criticism can be used to analyze ethical texts, and this process enhances our ...
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The ethics of literature, formalists have insisted, resides in the moral quality of a character, a story, perhaps the relation between author and reader. But in the wake of deconstruction and various forms of criticism focusing on difference, the ethical question has been freshly negotiated by literary studies, and to this approach Adam Newton brings a startling new thrust. His book makes a ...
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Multiple Perspectives and Narrative Sharing Sarup R. Mathur 1 & Kathleen M. Corley 1 Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University ... (2004) noticed that most of the published work in the ethics literature focusing on educational leadership paid little attention to "the communal processes that are necessary to achieve the moral ...
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A career in Social Work requires conviction to personal values that reflect and uphold the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics. Professional ethics are the foundation of social work, as the trade has an innate obligation to endorse ethical principles and basic values to advocate for the wellness of others.
Personal Narrative: My Work Ethic
However, I believe the variety in the vocations I have spent my time in has given me a unique perspective and work ethic. I started my work-life as the third generation of my family in the funeral industry. I spent nights and weekends assisting with after-hours visitations and wakes, making sure the families who had recently lost a loved one ...
The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory
Social Work Social Work and Crime and Justice. Sociology Economic Sociology. Gender and Sexuality. Health, Illness, and Medicine. Marriage and the Family ... White, Hayden, Robert Doran, and Mieke Bal, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998-2007 ...
Narrative Ethics: The Role of Stories in Bioethics
Its proponents are agreed, however, that it is an alternative approach to "doing ethics," and indeed may reflect a different way of understanding moral thinking. In this special report, ten leading figures in narrative ethics offer their perspectives. To order the full report, please contact John Wiley & Sons customer support at 800-835 ...
Personal Narrative: My Strong Work Ethic
Personal Narrative: My Strong Work Ethic. 466 Words2 Pages. One of the things that sets me apart from other students is my strong work ethic and my determination to succeed. I have always be taught that the only way to success is through hard work and persistence. Whenever I am working on something I do it to the best of my ability and I take ...
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This article shows that narrative ethics is inextricably entwined with epistemological issues--namely, issues of narrative ownership and the multiplicity of narrative meaning. Finally, practical recommendations are made for the ethical treatment of research participants in narrative research. The article concludes by situating our approach with ...
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Working as Equals: Published by Oxford University Press, the volume brings together 11 essays examining the connection between the workplace and a society of equals. / Image courtesy Oxford University Press. In the introduction to Working as Equals, you note, "A society of equals must be one in which we work as equals." The million-dollar ...
Work Ethic Essay Sample
It is okay to work as long as you take good care of yourself. A strong work ethic is needed in order to survive a life that is centered in doing your job. The following are the top ten work ethics. When you enter a job the first impressive move you will take is being always on time and never be absent. Attendance is one of the most important ...
Social Work Ethics Paper
Kirst-Ashman (2015) states 6 different core values provided via (NASW, 2008). One of which is the value and ethics of "Service". This is a professional core ethic that every accredited program must integrate into their student social workers in order for them to achieve competence when applying "frameworks of ethical decision-making" to "practice, research, and policy arenas" (CSWE, 2015, p.3).
My Work Ethics Essay
Submitted By theturtle269. Words: 504. Pages: 3. Open Document. Crystal Briscoe Sept. 13, 2013 Management My Work Ethics My work ethics are to me about the same way I live in general. I live fast, work hard, and play right. I strive to do the best I can in general with everything that I do. In the work place, trust among workers mean a lot to ...
An Olympics Scene Draws Scorn. Did It Really Parody 'The Last Supper
Some church leaders and politicians have condemned the performance from the opening ceremony for mocking Christianity. Art historians are divided.

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