Ethics, Stories and Reading

Can the reality of complex moral situations be represented by means other than those of imaginative literature?

— Williams, Morality xix

If we could readily agree with Martha Nussbaum that "certain novels are, irreplaceably, works of moral philosophy" (148), then we might already have an answer to the question of whether or not literature matters. It would matter to us to the exact extent that it might help to make our lives richer, better and fuller. Nussbaum, though, refers only to "certain novels" and not to literature in general. She readily admits that not all novels will suit her interests (45). For every novel that is a major work of moral philosophy, there may be more that are morally indifferent or even reprehensible and damaging. The works that matter to us may be merely the ones that support - or at best help us to formulate - our existing views about life and morality. So perhaps literature does not really matter after all, if we attend to it only insofar as it confirms what we already believe. I would risk the suggestion that, more often than not, ethical criticism has proved to be ethically unchallenging.

This article does not propose a historical or theoretical account of ethical criticism, nor does it contribute to the discussion of when and whether the "ethical turn" in literary studies took place. Important work on these questions has already been done, not least in a recent edition of SubStance.¹ Rather, I want to look at three cases where stories inform or obstruct ethical reflection. The first two are short, invented narratives discussed by the moral philosophers Immanuel Kant and Bernard Williams respectively. Nussbaum suggests that when philosophers use examples the result is "cooked" because what is ethically salient is already underscored (47).² But the example may also be "unruly," as the title of an important book on the subject puts it (see Gelley, ed., Unruly Examples). Rather than illustrating a particular point of view, examples may, in Alexander Gelley's words, "come to serve not as a confirmation of a rule but as an instrument of testing, of possible revision" (12). They may strain a philosophical argument to the point of making it untenable. The philosophers' use of stories also raises the question of how readers collaborate in the construction of a text's meaning. Kant takes an example that was designed to prove a particular point, and tries to make it demonstrate a quite different one. Williams, by contrast, does not try to force a moral conclusion from his example. Instead, he wants to instruct us about which factors should carry weight in an ethical deliberation. He is more content than Kant to let the story itself remain inconclusive. The third case I shall examine is Albert Camus's short story "L'Hôte" ("The Guest"), a work that stubbornly resists any expectation on the reader's part that it might provide explanations and solutions. It poses problems for understanding Camus's late ethics in particular and the ethics of literature in general.

Kant and the Philanthropic Lie

The first case comes from Kant's essay "On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns," first published in 1797. This is a response to an article by Benjamin Constant that argued against Kant's ethical rigorism. Without directly naming Kant, Constant refers to "a German philosopher [who] goes as far as to assert that it would be a crime to tell a lie to a murderer who asked whether our friend who is being pursued by the murderer had taken refuge in our house" (63). Constant agrees with Kant that it is a duty to tell the truth, but disagrees that this is always the case: "To tell the truth is thus a duty, but is a duty only with regard to one who has a right to the truth. But no one has a right to a truth that harms others" (64). The murderer has forfeited the right to the truth, so it is justifiable to lie to him. Moreover, telling a lie is a small moral compromise if it results in a...