Moral Fiction Research Articles

Good medical ethics

This paper summarises the features of my paper, ‘Voluntary Active Euthanasia’, and a later jointly authored paper, ‘Moral Fictions’, which I believe are examples of good medical ethics.

Introduction to Focus: The ’60 at 50—Great Books, Great Readers

Introduction to Focus: The ’60 at 50—Great Books, Great Readers Charles B. Harris (bio) In our last issue, Part I of ABR’s “The ’60s at 50” focus featured essays by writers who helped pioneer and perpetuate what we have come to know as postmodernist fiction. Part II continues this discussion by featuring critics who helped us learn how to read in the new ways postmodernist literature demands. Literary history—indeed, the history of all serious art—is propelled by formal discontinuities. Strong poets, to borrow Harold Bloom’s iconic term for writers who matter, seem constitutionally averse to doing what’s already been done, so they thumb their noses at aesthetic propriety, chart new directions, in the process disturbing artistic boundaries as well as those “aesthetic policemen” (Richard Powers’s pithy term from his Part I focus essay) who safeguard those boundaries. The barrier policemen patrolled in the ’60s was called Realism, which, like Barthelme’s Dead Father, continues to walk among us, still dominant but no longer able to generate anything new because the 19th century scientific and philosophical worldview from which it sprung has been superseded. As Robert Scholes observes in his 1967 study The Fabulators, an important early attempt to teach us how to read the new fiction, “notions of fictional propriety [were] derived from a version of realism that had seen its best days and was being perpetuated in a trivial and often mechanical way.” Blinkered by realist orthodoxy, professional critics of the time “ignored, misinterpreted, or critically abused” the new fiction, in part, Scholes proposes, “because it lacked a name.” Great books, Whitman famously asserted, require great readers. Fortunately, the new fiction emerging in the ’60s quickly attracted a number of strong readers, whose first task, as Scholes suggested, was to name it. Some, like Scholes, associated this fiction with older traditions (Scholes borrows the term “fabulator” from William Caxton). Ray Federman, a practitioner of the stuff, dubbed it Surfiction because of its analogies to Surrealism (“it exposes the fictionality of reality”) and edited a 1975 collection with that title. Others, myself among them, linked it to the contemporaneous theater of the absurd, but “novel of the absurd” failed to resonate. Still others, generalizing from specific attributes of the new development, called it Metafiction or Black Humor. For awhile, it looked as if Black Humor had won the day, in part because of the popularity of Bruce Jay Friedman’s 1965 anthology by that name. But somewhere in the late 1970s, the term “postmodernist” began to emerge, due in part to a series of books and essays by Ihab Hassan. That name stuck. To be sure, “postmodernist” fiction is a critic’s term, shorthand we “specialists” use to group writers who are doing certain things in similar ways so that we can talk about them coherently. Writers, by contrast, tend to resist such categorization, for the sensible reason that most things they do are uniquely their own. “As a family,” William Gass says of fellow postmodernists in his Part I focus essay, “the bunch won’t water in the same vase with any comfort.” But the characteristics that link postmodernist writers—metafictive self-consciousness, a darkly mordant wit, a penchant for fabulation and play, a tendency toward baroque excess, and, perhaps most significantly, an insistence that human reality is not something received but, to a far greater extent than the tenets of realism allow, something constructed, always already mediated by our symbol systems—account for their cultural consequentiality as a group in addition to whatever consequentiality their substantial individual achievements accrue. As I argued in my Introduction to Part I of this focus, postmodernist innovations draw upon older traditions as venerable as the ones they displace. But to many, this fiction seemed and continues to seem eccentric, unnecessarily difficult, even, to some, menacing. From the beginning, it’s provoked powerful adversaries. From John Gardner’s notorious On Moral Fiction (1977) through Gerald Graff’s Literature Against Itself (1979) to the more recent fulminations of such critics and writers as James Wood, Lee Siegel, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace, opponents of postmodernist fiction have argued, often with more heat than logic, for the...

Character as Moral Fiction by Mark Alfano, 2013 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 226 pp, £55.00 (hb)

Character as Moral Fiction by Mark Alfano, 2013 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 226 pp, £55.00 (hb)

Against Moral Fictionalism

Moral nihilists need an answer: if moral discourse is fatally flawed, how are we to proceed? A popular option is fictionalism, to uphold the flawed discourse in the mode of a fiction. My thesis is that fictionalism is not the best available answer to the nihilist; a better one is revisionism, the proposal to refashion the discourse so as to cure it of all flaws. Should it be possible to revise the discredited practice, by removing what is erroneous while keeping what is beneficial, the twisted allegiance to the original practice already recognized as flawed which characterizes fictionalism becomes entirely moot. Fictionalism fully worked out, I argue in this paper, is going to lead us to the very doorsteps of revisionism.

Contemporary metaethics: an introduction

* Preface * Chapter 1: Introduction * Chapter 2: Moore s Attack on Ethical Naturalism * Chapter 3: Emotivism and the Rejection of Non-Naturalism * Chapter 4: Blackburn s Quasi-Realism * Chapter 5: Gibbard s Norm-Expressivism * Chapter 6: Mackie s Error-theory , The Argument From Queerness and Moral Fictionalism * Chapter 7:Judgement-Dependent Accounts of Moral Qualities * Chapter 8: Naturalism I - Cornell Realism * Chapter 9: Naturalism II - Reductionism * Chapter 10: Contemporary Non-Naturalism - McDowell s Moral Realism * Appendix: Sense, Reference, Semantic Value, and Truth-Conditions * Bibliography

Character as moral fiction

Character as moral fiction

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and the Popularisation of Comte’s Positive Philosophy’

This guide accompanies the following article: Scholl, Lesa. ‘George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and the Popularisation of Comte’s Positive Philosophy’. Literature Compass 9/11 (2012): 764–773. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741‐4113.2012.00906.xFurther ReadingMary Pickering’s comprehensive Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, volume 1 (Cambridge UP 1993), has been followed by volumes 2 and 3 of the collection in 2009. In these later volumes, Pickering explores in further depth the influence of Comte’s philosophy upon European thought, as well as the dissemination of Comtist Positivism throughout many parts of the globe. The volumes focus more on the Religion of Humanity and Comte’s second masterpiece, Système de Politique Positive and Comte’s position within the second Napoleonic Empire. I would also recommend Charles D Cashdollar’s The Transformation of Theology, 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton 1989), which takes a useful transatlantic approach to Comte’s influence, as well as the influence of those who took an active part in the evolution and transformation of Positivism throughout the nineteenth century. Cashdollar examines the connections between Positivism, Darwinism and Religion in the development of Sociology, offering a historical foundation to modern and postmodern debates concerning the relationship between religion and science. Roger A Salerno’s Beyond the Enlightenment: Lives and Thoughts of Social Theorists (Praeger 2004) is also pertinent in this regard, with particular chapters on Auguste Comte and Harriet Martineau, as well as Thomas Dixon’s chapter “The Invention of Altruism: Auguste Comte’s Positive Polity and Respectable Unbelief in Victorian Britain” in David M Knight (ed) Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700–1900 (Ashgate 2005), which positions Positivism within the broader modernist and historical paradigms of religious and secular beliefs, and the influence of the scientific world upon modernity.Useful LinksComte and Positivism of the Web: A (Would‐Be) Complete Survey contains articles and essays, timelines and biographical information on Comte in French and English: http://membres.multimania.fr/clotilde/urls.xmlSyllabiThis article would be most effectively utilised in courses in Literary Culture and Cultural History, as well as the Culture of the Mind. It would play a significant role in the understanding of Victorian intellectual culture, and the dissemination of that culture through fiction, by being placed alongside Darwinist readings of texts. The interrelations between Darwinism and Positivism could be substantially explored to extend students’ understanding of the battles between religion and science that emerged within the nineteenth‐century European context. In this context, it could easily be incorporated into standing Victorian Literature courses, as well as courses on the development of the novel. The essay provokes questions as to the transformation and translation of truth through the fictional narrative, and the way these narratives, particularly in the realist novel, often have a greater potential to penetrate the readers’ understanding and core beliefs by reconstructing a verisimilitude of the world as they already know it. Useful nineteenth‐century articles that could be included in this regard are Edward Bulwer Lytton’s “On Moral Fictions” in New Monthly Magazine 37 (1833): 146–51 and George Eliot’s review “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister” in the Leader, 21 July, 1855. Both essays deal with the effectiveness of translating political and philosophical ideas through literature.

Projection and Pretence in Ethics

Suppose one is persuaded of the merits of noncognitivism in ethics but not those of expressivism: in such a case, a form of moral fictionalism, combining a descriptivist account of moral sentences with a noncognitivist account of the attitudes involved in their acceptance or rejection, might seem an attractive alternative. This paper argues against the use of moral fictionalism as a strategy for defending noncognitivism in ethics. It argues, first, that the view is implausible as it stands and, second, that it does not enjoy the benefits over standard—expressivist—noncognitivism both that it claims to enjoy and that make up the principal rationale for the view. The paper then turns to the grounds for noncognitivism itself before showing how far the criticisms developed extend to alternative forms of moral fictionalism and developing independent objections to each.

MORAL FICTION OR MORAL FACT? THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN DOING AND ALLOWING IN MEDICAL ETHICS

Opponents of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) maintain that physician withdrawal-of-life-sustaining-treatment cannot be morally equated to voluntary active euthanasia. PAS opponents generally distinguish these two kinds of act by positing a possible moral distinction between killing and allowing-to-die, ceteris paribus. While that distinction continues to be widely accepted in the public discourse, it has been more controversial among philosophers. Some ethicist PAS advocates are so certain that the distinction is invalid that they describe PAS opponents who hold to the distinction as in the grip of 'moral fictions'. The author contends that such a diagnosis is too hasty. The possibility of a moral distinction between active euthanasia and allowing-to-die has not been closed off by the argumentative strategies employed by these PAS advocates, including the contrasting cases strategy and the assimilation of doing and allowing to a common sense notion of causation. The philosophical debate over the doing/allowing distinction remains inconclusive, but physicians and others who rely upon that distinction in thinking about the ethics of end-of-life care need not give up on it in response to these arguments.

“Some Beastlike Fungus”: The Natural and Animal in John Gardner's Grendel

That John Gardner conceives of the novel as an art form with an ethical obligation to document and detail the vagaries of human nature should come as no surprise to readers of his work. In her Intr...

Review of Kalderon, M.E., Moral Fictionalism

Philosophy and Phenomenological ResearchVolume 85, Issue 1 p. 161-173 Review of Kalderon, M.E., Moral Fictionalism RICHARD JOYCE, RICHARD JOYCE Victoria University of WellingtonSearch for more papers by this author RICHARD JOYCE, RICHARD JOYCE Victoria University of WellingtonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 January 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00465.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume85, Issue1July 2012Pages 161-173 RelatedInformation

The dead donor rule: can it withstand critical scrutiny?

Transplantation of vital organs has been premised ethically and legally on "the dead donor rule" (DDR)-the requirement that donors are determined to be dead before these organs are procured. Nevertheless, scholars have argued cogently that donors of vital organs, including those diagnosed as "brain dead" and those declared dead according to cardiopulmonary criteria, are not in fact dead at the time that vital organs are being procured. In this article, we challenge the normative rationale for the DDR by rejecting the underlying premise that it is necessarily wrong for physicians to cause the death of patients and the claim that abandoning this rule would exploit vulnerable patients. We contend that it is ethical to procure vital organs from living patients sustained on life support prior to treatment withdrawal, provided that there is valid consent for both withdrawing treatment and organ donation. However, the conservatism of medical ethics and practical concerns make it doubtful that the DDR will be abandoned in the near future. This leaves the current practice of organ transplantation based on the "moral fiction" that donors are dead when vital organs are procured.

MORAL FICTIONS AND MEDICAL ETHICS

Conventional medical ethics and the law draw a bright line distinguishing the permitted practice of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from the forbidden practice of active euthanasia by means of a lethal injection. When clinicians justifiably withdraw life-sustaining treatment, they allow patients to die but do not cause, intend, or have moral responsibility for, the patient's death. In contrast, physicians unjustifiably kill patients whenever they intentionally administer a lethal dose of medication. We argue that the differential moral assessment of these two practices is based on a series of moral fictions - motivated false beliefs that erroneously characterize withdrawing life-sustaining treatment in order to bring accepted end-of-life practices in line with the prevailing moral norm that doctors must never kill patients. When these moral fictions are exposed, it becomes apparent that conventional medical ethics relating to end-of-life decisions is radically mistaken.

Moral Fictionalism

Moral Fictionalism

Moral fictionalism, the Frege-Geach problem, and reasonable inference

CHANGESLIDE Go through outline of talk CHANGESLIDE It is my sincerest hope that if there is one thing that people take away from Moral Fictionalism, it is the recognition that standard noncognitivism involves a syndrome of three, logically distinct claims. Standard noncognitivists claim that moral judgment is not belief or any other cognitive attitude but is, rather, a noncognitive attitude more akin to desire; that this noncognitive attitude is expressed by our public moral utterances; and, hence, that our public moral utterances lack a distinctively moral subject matter and so are not answerable to the moral facts. Notice, however, that these are logically distinct claimsthe rst is a psychological claim, the second and third, positive and negative semantic claims, respectively. We can regiment the familiar technical vocabulary as follow: CHANGE SLIDE

Moral fictionalism, the Frege-Geach problem, and reasonable inference

One advantage of a fictionalist noncognitivism is that is not subject to the same semantic difficulties that the Frege–Geach problem poses for standard noncognitivism. But some, Matti Eklund prominent among them, have argued that the Frege–Geach problem arises in a new form for moral fictionalism. I argue that this is less of a problem than a reasonable query—a query that the account in Moral Fictionalism has the resources to answer.Lecture

John Barth’s The Floating Opera and Southern Modernism of the 1950s

Despite hailing and frequently setting his fiction on Eastern Shore of Maryland--a region whose history includes slavery, plantation agriculture, widespread support for Confederate cause during Civil War, and de jure racial segregation into 1960s--John Barth is rarely considered southern writer. His fiction displays little interest in what were once considered orthodox preoccupations of southern renascence, such as, in Cleanth Brooks's words, the pervading sense of community, the sense of religious wholeness, or a sense of tragic dimension of life, all of which were held to exist more robustly in rural societies (217). (1) Nor is Barth much given to railing against industrialization or abstractions of life under finance capitalism. His work does not dwell on racial matters, representing neither worst horrors of southern racism nor quests for freedom and collective redemption that they have provoked. His sensibility is primarily comic, his fiction largely free of tragic and gothic monumentalism, and his public persona that of nice guy who likes to write, wants readers to like his work, and smiles bemusedly when accused of lack of gravitas. On few occasions when critics have considered Barth's possible southernness, they have done so under rubric of for as Martyn Bone observes, It is truth universally acknowledged among Southern literary scholars that 'the South' and 'southern literature' have been characterized by 'sense of place.' (vii). This phrase, evoking both what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls production of presence (xiii--xiv) and dense historical resonance, still serves in quarters as shorthand for southern authenticity, and critics who apply it to Barth ask whether his work possesses it sufficiently, usually answering in negative. Lewis A. Lawson, for instance, in brief entry on Barth in History of Southern Literature, opines that Barth's early work still shows some regard for ability of to particularize an existence, so that hot, dense flattened-out land/sea scape of Maryland's Eastern Shore is not merely employed as background or as reflection of mood, but is factor that circumscribes. ... In time, though, Lawson continues, place simply becomes trifle, like Muzak in dentist's office--an external which bores, but in no other way impinges upon consciousness (517). Even Barth's re-creation of Maryland's colonial history in Sot-Weed Factor (1960) proceeds not a close attention to landmark or artifact but from culture, talk and culminates in (heretical) sense that all values are relative. John M. Bradbury, writing in 1969, goes further and castigates both Barth and Walker Percy for betraying southern literary heritage, presenting modern South, which is no longer cultural entity (321) but tragicomic absurdity (329). Barth, for his part, has provoked such critique through his repeated assertions that social history, politics, and ethics have no claim on his fictive practice. Muse, spare me (at desk, I mean) social-historical responsibility, and in last analysis every other kind as well, except artistic, he wrote in 1965 (Muse 55). (2) Fourteen years later, he would assert simultaneously humanist faith in timelessness and placelessness of great literature and an aesthete's belief in its essential self-reflexivity: The literature that finally matters in any is almost never principally about that culture but rather about the passions of human breast ... possibilities of human language ... [and] almost always also about itself (Historical Fiction 190, 191; Barth's italics). former statement anticipates John Gardner's notorious attack on Barth in On Moral Fiction; latter one invites critique left for its ahistoricality and its naive or irresponsible politics.(3) And both statements stand in contrast to prescriptive conservatism, committed both to artistic moral responsibility and to centrality of place, that informs judgments of Lawson and Bradbury. …

Moral Fictionalism

Moral Fictionalism

<span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells</span> (review)

Reviewed by: The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells Sarah B. Daugherty Rob Davidson . The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2005. 298. $44.95 (hardcover). Rob Davidson’s book usefully complements Michael Anesko’s Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. As Davidson notes, the authors’ responses to each other’s ideas were often indirect, appearing not only in the letters and reviews compiled by Anesko but in essays dealing with larger issues. “The Art of Fiction,” for example, tactfully addresses combatants in the realism war triggered by Howells’s “Henry James, Jr.,” while “The Science of Criticism,” with its argument for selectivity, takes aim at the democratic values articulated in Howells’s “Editor’s Study” columns. Davidson also identifies the points of convergence and divergence that make realism a necessary yet elusive concept. As pragmatists, both writers sought accommodation with the mass market, which favored engaging plots; but as idealists, they argued for moral fiction dependent on subtlety of characterization and perspective, the practice of Turgenev serving as a touchstone. In retrospect, the authors’ disagreements are even more significant, especially in the context of their roles as critics. The aesthetic of Howells, explains Davidson, was “outwardly directed” (22) toward a civic and educative mission. Thus the young Howells, unlike the early James, could appreciate Dickens’s novels and Whitman’s poetry, while the mature Howells welcomed new authors ignored by James despite the latter’s belated recognition of “opportunities.” James’s key objective was to create an audience for his own specialized fiction, a project culminating in the prefaces. In the next century James influenced his academic successors, the New Critics, whereas Howells’s efforts prefigured those of activists seeking to broaden the canon. Davidson’s account of this contest will be of interest both to historians of fiction and to teachers still trying to explicate the competing goals of literary study. [End Page 208] At times James’s antipathy to Howells’s program was so pronounced that Davidson’s commentary seems too bland. James’s treatment of Howells as an author of “light” literature signaled his intolerance of the marriage plot and of vernacular characters, while his boredom with Tolstoy’s appearance in the “Editor’s Study” revealed his lack of sympathy with Howells’s political and ethical commitments. Even “A Letter to Mr. Howells” (1912), treated by Davidson as a straightforward tribute, illustrates James’s penchant for barbed metaphor: “you have had the advantage . . . of sitting up to your neck, as I may say—or at least up to your waist—amid the sources of your inspiration” (Anesko 451–52). Such irony should warn those tempted to overvalue James as an American social critic. Also worthy of stronger analysis is Howells’s growing sophistication as a reader of James. Instead of reacting to his rival’s barbs, Howells learned from “the master” without relinquishing his own point of view. Whereas the young editor worried over James’s elitism, the mature critic’s review of The Tragic Muse suggests his awareness of the novel’s homosocial themes, and the dialogue in “Mr. Henry James’s Later Work” (1903) is artfully designed to foster appreciation of indeterminacy and painterly technique. (“You cannot get behind the figures in any picture. They are always merged in their background” [Anesko 386]). A problem for interpreters, however, is that the quality of Howells’s later criticism—and that of James as well—is notably uneven. Davidson devotes too much space to such forgettable texts as Howells’s Heroines of Fiction and James’s “The New Novel,” efforts undermined by their authors’ disengagement from their subjects. More deserving of attention are the conflicts within James’s critical canon, most clearly discernible in his ambivalent reviews. To assert, as Davidson does, that for James morality was “primarily an aesthetic question” (33) is to ignore the critic’s struggle with values that resisted conflation. Consider in particular James’s attempts to justify his preference for the fiction of George Eliot (morally profound though aesthetically flawed) to that of Flaubert (aesthetically superior but...

Scene Composition and Justice for Women

This article examines the ways in which the visuals of the British made-for-television series Prime Suspect portray the main character, Detective Chief Superintendent (DCS) Jane Tennison, and her struggles to produce justice in the male-dominated field of policing. The authors demonstrate how the film's visuals convey sensitivity to the socially marginalized by placing Tennison's body in the locations of the victims whose deaths she investigates. The authors also argue that the often-graphic Prime Suspect visuals offer the possibility of sensitizing viewers to the plight of marginalized populations and the victimization of women. Tennison's connection to the victims and relentless pursuit of justice despite official discouragement provide an example of a progressive moral fiction; the program exposes the structural conditions that promote violence and victimization and offers encouragement to battle these obstacles.