Moral Sight
"Chop Suey," Edward Hopper If you've ever tried to explain a moral dilemma to a friend, you've likely struggled to fully articulate its complexity. There's so much more to difficult conversations or decisions than the basic "facts" we might use to describe them. Should you confront a coworker about their recent behavior? Well -- it may depend on the moment, the mood, the time of day, etc. In “Literature and the Moral Imagination,” Martha Nussbaum argues that these ambiguities and particularities are best explored in literature -- in her words, “the novel can be a paradigm of moral activity.” In Nussbaum’s view, fiction can give us a window into the complexity of moral judgment. This is both a claim about morality and a claim about literature. Knowledge of abstract universals is not sufficient to recognize what we ought to do, but even “intellectual knowledge of particular facts” will not suffice for virtue. Instead, she argues, virtue moves beyond bot