Dramatic Vignettes in Moral Inquiry

Abstract

Abstract Anthropologists and philosophers have typically been skeptical about the use of dramatic vignettes in the study of ethics, in particular targeting three characteristic features of such devices—stylization, simplification, and selectivity—and arguing that they undermine ethical inquiry. I argue that this skepticism misconstrues the aims of arguments that incorporate such devices. Rather than seeing them as botched attempts at historical or scientific reporting, we should evaluate dramatic vignettes as a genre of ethically illuminating speculative fiction, useful for understanding the concepts and counterfactual commitments that are embedded in our ethical practices. So construed, they sit in a wider methodological context that vindicates them as a useful part of ethical inquiry.