Inventing the Truth: Fiction As Moral Philosophy

Clearly moral philosophy can be fiction. As William Gass wrote, “The novelist can learn more from the philosopher, who has been lying longer” (5). But can fiction be moral philosophy?

There is an argument within the witticism:

Fiction is (supposed to be) invented.

Moral philosophy (at least) aims at the truth.

So fiction cannot be moral philosophy.

In this essay I suggest that the conclusion does not follow.

If we are to say anything about the relation between moral philosophy and fiction—and I will be concerned with fiction that aspires to be literature—we must, as Martha Nussbaum claims, “have some rough story about what moral philosophy and the job of moral philosophy are” (40). We must also have some rough idea of what counts as literature, given the “postmodern” view that laundry lists, menus, and graffiti might qualify.

If we say that philosophy is and must be in the form of discursive argument, explicit conclusions proved with overt premises and deductively valid inferences, then it looks as if only the most didactic novel could be moral philosophy. But if we agree that there are other kinds of argument, such as plausibility arguments, as persuasive in narrative form as in numbered premises and conclusions, then the answer will be different.

In “Moral Understandings: Alternative ‘Epistemology’ for a Feminist Ethics,” Margaret Walker contrasts two paradigms of moral philosophy: the universalist/impersonalist model and the narrative/contextualist/particularist alternative, which she says has been “gleaned from the works of a variety of female and feminist writers” (22). The goal of the first model is systematization of moral understanding, conceived as “precise general knowledge of what ought to be,” encoded in “directive rules of conduct” which are “clear and decisive” and “in universal form” (19). The rationale for a “scientifically complete and systematically reflective form” in morals is that it helps us avoid “uncertainties and discrepancies” in moral judgment and “obvious sources of error” including “complexity of circumstances, personal interests, and habitual sympathies.” The picture is of individuals standing before “the bar of impersonal truth” (20).

The alternative emphasizes the need to pay close attention to particular individuals, and such attention requires “distinctive sorts of understanding,” which Carol Gilligan has described as “contextual and narrative” rather than “formal and abstract” (qtd. in Walker 17).

Two elements are at work here: context and concreteness of individuals with specific “history, identity, and affective-emotional constitution” . . . and the special context that is a relationship, with its history, identity, and affective definition. The two are linked by the notion of a narrative, of the location of human beings’ feelings, psychological states, needs, and understandings as nodes of a story (or of the intersection of stories) that has already begun, and will continue beyond a given juncture of moral urgency. . . .

If the others I need to understand really are actual others in a particular case at hand, and not repeatable instances or replaceable occupants of a general status, they will require of me an understanding of their/our story and its concrete detail. Without this I really cannot know how it is with others towards whom I will act, or what the meaning and consequence of any acts will be.

(18)

Walker claims, “From an epistemological angle, one might gloss [the traditional] view as: adequacy of moral understanding increases as this understanding approaches systematic generality.” In the alternative view, “adequacy of moral understanding decreases as its form approaches generality through abstraction” (20).

Which model is best? Or might both have a significant role to play in telling us how to live?

The question of which model is best cannot be answered without circularity because the judgments of importance necessary to select the phenomena of moral life required to define it are part of it as well.

Consider an argument recounted by Cora Diamond:

There is, [Iris Murdoch] argued, a peculiar difficulty in ethics (in contrast with other parts of philosophy) in specifying the phenomena to be studied. Our moral judgments themselves shape our conception of the field of study. We thus come up with a “narrow or partial” selection of phenomena; that selection then suggests...