It Would Be A Miracle If We Knew What We Were Talking About...  
Addison Tenorio, PhD (c), Saint Louis University

In a 2018 target article in the American Journal of Bioethics, Trevor Bibler, Myrick Shinall, Jr., and Devan Stahl wrote “Responding to Those Who Hope for a Miracle: Practices for Clinical Bioethicists.”[1] In this article, they create a taxonomy of miracle invocations aimed to help clinical bioethicists address situations where patients or their family members/surrogates are invoking a miracle. Their paper focuses on Christian miracle invocations, bracketing out what I will refer to as “popular” miracle invocations and those miracle invocations of other faith traditions. Their taxonomy does an excellent job of laying the groundwork for how an ethicist ought to begin to engage with patient/surrogate miracle invocations by assessing what these invocations say about the invoker’s view of themselves, God, and their faith community. However, I want to expand upon the categories that they use to understand the different types of miracle invocations by exploring how these different invocations bring with them different understandings of nature and the role of medicine. This further distinction aims to help ethicists better understand what kind of support/intervention would be best suited in the given scenario. In this paper I will critique and expand upon Bibler, Shinall, and Stahl’s miracle taxonomy. My expansion aims to shed light on the potentially deeply metaphysical facets of miracle language and the conflict that this can have with the metaphysics of medicine. I suggest that in addition to Bibler, Shinall, and Stahl’s suggested task of empathetic imagining for the bioethicist, that it may also be necessary for her to act as a metaphysical interpreter for instances in which patients invoke a miracle.

[1] Trevor Bibler, Myrick C. Shinall, Jr., and Devan Stahl, “Responding to Those Who Hope for a Miracle: Practices for Clinical Bioethicists,” The American Journal of Bioethics, 18, no. 5 (2018): 40–51.