The war on disease and the war on terror: A dangerous metaphorical nexus?

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics

Volumn 15, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 403-416

  Mongoven, Ann ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; GENERAL ASPECTS OF DISEASE; HUMAN; LITERATURE; NOMENCLATURE; TERRORISM; WAR;

DISEASE; HUMANS; METAPHOR; TERMINOLOGY; TERMINOLOGY AS TOPIC; TERRORISM; WAR;

EID: 33749318597     PISSN: 09631801     EISSN: 14692147     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0963180106060518     Document Type: Article

References (54)

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12. See note 1, Sontag 1990:64.
13. May repeatedly worries that the quest to "eliminate suffering" can devolve into the "elimination of the sufferer." The metaphorical framework of battling disease links his concerns about euthanasia (which he opposes) and iatrogenic illness (which he thinks inadequately opposed). See note 9, May 1983.
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20. In the United States, the contrast between the rhetoric of the first Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan is revealing. In the first Gulf War, President George H. Bush consistently decried the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as "an injustice," connected efforts to push back the Iraqi invasion to demands for justice, and invoked the just war tradition specifically. A decade later, George W. Bush framed the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan as a fight against evil.
21. See note 9, Annas 1995:746.
22. Therefore Annas, who criticizes market metaphors for medicine as well as military metaphors, urges the use of a new family of "ecological" metaphors emphasizing balance and sustainability. See note 9, Annas 1995:757-8.
23. I propose that consideration of selectivity be added to criteria elucidated by other authors who evaluate the coherence of moral appeals to symbolic frameworks. For a particularly explicit and systematic example, see Sytsma S. The moral authority of symbolic appeals in medical ethics. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2004;13:292-301. To Sytsma's list of criteria I would add: "Is the symbolic appeal invoked selectively among cases that seem significantly similar in terms of the internal logic of the appeal? Does the selectivity of the appeal undermine its moral authority, or is it explainable by legitimate differences?"
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