The Cultural Context of Ethicists' Case Examples and Consumer Narratives of Decisions About Life Supporting Technology

Abstract

Ethicists and clinical decision-makers, in order to illustrate moral, legal, and cultural issues, commonly use constructed case studies. They convey a sense of immediacy, practicality, and concrete experience required for teaching ethical and clinical decision-making. Unfortunately, their relation to the events reported is also often problematic in the sense that they decontextualize and reconstruct accounts to sustain biomedical and ethical frameworks.