Abstract
This is a book about ethics and stories. Ethics (or morality) encompasses what is right or good, what we ought to do, and how laws and institutions should be organized. I argue that a good way to make ethical judgments and decisions is to describe reality in the form of a true narrative. Fictional stories also support moral conclusions that can translate into real life. I argue that when the moral judgments supported by a good story conflict with general principles, we ought to follow the story and amend or suspend our principles, rather than the reverse. What makes a story “;good” for this purpose is not its conformity to correct moral principles, but its merits as a narrative—for instance, its perceptiveness and coherence and its avoidance of cliché, sentimentality, and euphemism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Simon Blackburn introduces this analogy but rejects it. See Simon Blackburn, “Securing the Nots,” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons, eds., Moral Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 97.
Jonathan Dancy, “The Particularisms Progress,” in Brad Hooker and Margaret Little, eds., Moral Particularism: Wrong and Bad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 131.
John Rawls, “Reply to Habermas,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 92, no. 3 (March 1995), pp. 140–141.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1994)
Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (New York: HarperCollins, 2006)
Martha C. Nussbaum, “Beatrice’s ‘Dante’: Loving the Individual?” Apeiron, vol. 26, nos. 3 and 4 (September/ December 1993), pp. 170–171.
Martha C. Nussbaum makes precisely this point. See, for example, Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 30.
David Parker observes “the virtual absence of explicit ethical interest in contemporary literary discourse” during the 1970s and early 1980s. David Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 3.
Daniel Schwartz, “A Humanistic Ethic in Reading,” in Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, eds., Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (Charlottesville, Va: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p. 9.
Eskin, “Introduction: The Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and Literature?” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no 4 (2004), pp. 557–572.
An influential depiction of critical reading (albeit without a definition) is Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” in Jane Gallop, ed., Polemic: Critical or Uncritical (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 13–38.
Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 6
Copyright information
© 2009 Peter Levine
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Levine, P. (2009). Introduction. In: Reforming the Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104693_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104693_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38336-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10469-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)