Literature and Ethical Theory: Allies or Adversaries

Abstract

Nowadays, explicit discussion of literary authors as diverse as Sophocles and Coetzee, Wordsworth and Dostoyevsky, might easily be found on the program of any mainstream meeting in the area of philosophical ethics. What, however, is the contribution that literature makes to our understanding of ethical matters? On one account, certain works of literature are valuable allies of ethical theorizing, helping us understand issues having to do with moral perception and moral emotion in a way that we could not do well without turning to such texts. By now, however, some philosophers have adopted an anti-theoretical posture in ethics. To such anti-theorists, literature provides an alternative to ethical theory. In this article Martha Nussbaum examines the problematic relationship between literature and ethical theory. Inspired by reaction against the ascendancy of reductive theory, especially normative theory deriving from economics, she shows that literature is more than a handmaid of ethical theory, claiming that novels not simply represent ethical deliberation, but incite it. Nussbaum wishes to offer an account that goes beyond the narrow and excessively rationalistic accounts of what moral philosophy includes in claiming that the fluidity of the moral life is well captured in works of literature. The other way round, she sees literature as in need of a partnership with theory, so that we will read critically. In short, literature is needed as a supplement to the theoretical enterprise of ethics; literature and ethics are allies, not adversaries.