ABSTRACT
The debate now well underway in contemporary medical ethics between proponents of philosophical and interpretive approaches to moral reasoning about the relative merits and limits of these approaches recalls an exchange between David Burrell and Stanley Hauerwas, and Edmund Pellegrino that occurred twenty years ago. Burrell and Hauerwas made a case for narrative as a form of rationality particularly well suited to ethical reflection. Narrative, Burrell and Hauerwas claimed, is a form of rationality especially appropriate to ethics. Storytelling presupposes faith in the followability of experience not only the connectedness of events but their truthfulness as well. Hans-Georg Gadamer describes hermeneutics as coming into conversation with the text. The interpreter who is thus drawn in no longer stands in an assertorical position over against the text but rather engages it in dialogue. Hermeneutics transforms the habit of making statements about a text into the practice of having a conversation with it.
