Question
What are narrative ethics?
Answer
Narrative ethics draw from, and have a lot of commonalities with narrative therapy. When we talk about narrative ethics, we are looking at how do we manage ethical issues, not how do we engage them in a therapeutic process to help them with psychological, social, or physical issues.
Two social workers, Michael White from Australia and David Epston from New Zealand are two of the founders of the narrative therapy movement. They suggest that "People live their lives by their stories."
If people live their lives by their stories, if we want to empower them, if we want them to be able to enhance their lives, to overcome some of the barriers or the things that are restricting them from fulfilling their destinations or their maximum potential, there are things that we can do through deconstructing and reconstructing the stories that they have.
Stories capture the lived experiences of individuals and families. We could even extend that to communities, organizations, and society as a whole. The stories that we tell about ourselves as Americans, or as people from a particular city, those are based on the principles that we aspire to. So if we see ourselves as a society that values truth and justice, the stories that we tell should relate to that and build on that and help us understand how we put that into our everyday practice.
Stories invite us to embrace a rich description, a detailed description of what is going on in a family. So rather than having rules like the 10 commandments, thou shall not steal, thou not covet and so on. We have to look at the stories and the stories will tell us, but in maybe a more complex and a richer and a more explanatory approach to understanding, what are the rules or the guidelines that we should abide by. And so, if we tell our supervisees, just as we might tell our children some stories about how we have lived of our professional lives, they may act as an ethical guide or a moral guide for the people that we are training as supervisees.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the webinar, Narrative Ethics: A Storied Approach to Ethical Decision Making With Clients, presented by Allan Barsky, JD, MSW, PhD
