Svenaeus: bioética fenomenológica

In this setup of the practice of bioethics as applying ethical principles to morally problematic situations in order to better understand the situations at hand and finding out what to do in them, one important role for phenomenological bioethics can be detected. Phenomenological bioethics, according to such an understanding, consists in carrying out investigations of the lived experiences – being-in-the-world – of the persons involved in morally problematic situations in order to better see how the main principles of bioethics will apply. It means very little to say that autonomy should be respected if you have not developed an understanding of a particular person’s situation and self-understanding. Likewise, it means very little to say that a patient should be helped and not harmed if you have not developed an understanding of the more precise ways this particular person (and possibly other people related to her) is suffering. Phenomenological bioethics in this form will be a close relative to what is known since the 1990s as narrative bioethics (Lindemann Nelson 1997). To provide the phenomenology of an ethically tricky situation in health care means to give voice to the stories of the participants in the drama, throwing light on the experiences and different points of view on the situation and problem at hand. Phenomenology done by way of stories will develop into a hermeneutical undertaking because the embedded character of every lived experience in culturally narrated patterns will lead to questions regarding interpretation. The phenomenological analysis will supplement and strengthen the narrative approach, since phenomenology is proceeding from the embodied lifeworld account which makes out the basis of every narrated life plot in which human life and even personhood itself can take on culturally constructed patterns (Wiggins and Allen 2011). (p. 2228-2229)