- Yeruham Frank Leavitt, Ph.D.
Chairman, The Centre for Asian and International Bioethics
Faculty of Health Sciences
Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel
Fax: + 972-7-6477633
Email: yeruham@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 9 (1999), 134-135.

When I started reading Yasemin's paper, and before I got very much into it, I began to wonder whether any discussion of academic biomedical ethics can have any significance in the light of the recent tragedy in Turkey. Don't all our fine words become hollow and crippled at a time when the world literally turns upside down? Certainly the idea of offering: "a theory that would provide a basis for the principles guiding us in our moral behaviour", which Yasemin quotes from de Wachter, doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything any more, when one finds oneself in the midst of catastrophe..

But then I came to Yasemin"s quotes from Camus' The Plague, and I couldn't help saying: "Right On!" In fact although she wrote the paper before then, we could wonder whether Yasemin wrote the paper after the earthquake. Maybe it is one of those strange insights into the future which so many of my friends seem to be getting so often lately. But I shan't dwell on this point, because that would be more appropriate to our Mystical Bioethics column than to an associate editor's commentary on a scholarly paper.

The lesson to be learned is that a plague or an earthquake can teach more ethics than can an academic lecture. The Middle East is supposedly a place where everybody is always fighting everybody. But suddenly we forgot that, if only for a few weeks. A recent BMJ news item said that the Turks were surprised by the number of countries which helped them. One of the most surprising things was that the Iraqis and the Israelis, who were supposed to be enemies, were both pitching in for a common cause: to help the earthquake victims. Of course the cynics will say that both of these countries -- maybe all the countries who got involved -- helped for their own political advantage. And in Israel we have a saying that in every lie there is some truth, and in every truth there is some lie. But it is obvious that individuals on rescue teams give of themselves for genuine motives of ethics and love, or because they are driven to do things by causes beyond our understanding.

I teach ethical principles, beneficence and all that, but only as a convenient framework for discussion and not because they have any sanctity. I agree that narrative beats principles, especially if it is real narrative. And the best narratives are the unsolved problems which physicians and nurses -- sometimes quite emotionally -- bring to the classroom from the wards. Perhaps much greater biomedical ethics, in the sense of situations where people really have to face the meaning of life, and find out to what extent we are really capable of love, happens in plagues, earthquakes and other situations where life suddenly becomes totally different from that which we had previously known, and where all our previous assumptions have disappeared.