Ethics Found in Rhetoricity: Toward a Levinasian Vision of Bioethics

Abstract Historically, bioethicists have focused analysis predominantly on “events,” particular disputes that are then labeled ethical encounters and taught as bioethics cases. What bioethicists often neglect to interrogate, however, is the rhetorical space that both shape and define these encounters. Synthesizing the works of Matthew Vest and Emmanuel Levinas, I outline an expanded vision of bioethics, one that is focused less strictly on propositional statements and principlist analysis and more on rhetorical spaces, the territories in which ideas become visible and invisible. The result, I argue, is a radically expansive understanding of bioethics, one that takes seriously Levinas’ claim that ethics is “preorginary,” antecedent to the “event” bioethicists generally label the ethical encounter. Ethics gets “lost in modernity” because modernity has neglected to interrogate its own assumptions. Before one can speak meaningfully of medical ethics, one must first confront the rhetorical processes that preclude ethical discourse.