The Moral Psychology of Fiction

Gregory Currie

Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals on facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Mr Gradgrind's opinion is and always was an eccentric one, and most of us think that fiction can be the source of knowledge, that we can learn from fiction. But most fiction is simply false. How can we learn from falsehoods? Not only is fiction mostly false, but readers generally know that it is; learning from fiction does not consist in credulously forming wrong opinions based on the false information that fiction provides. (Some say that statements in fictional contexts are truth valueless rather than false. I disagree, but it doesn't matter for present purposes. If it's puzzling that we can learn from falsehoods, it is equally puzzling that we can learn from sentences that lack truth value.

There is truth - literal truth-in fiction, since most fictional stories play out against a background of fact. We can learn from that background of fact, as the reader of Patrick O'Brien will learn a good deal about Nelson's navy, and the reader of Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety will learn about revolutionary France. But this sort of information is not what we think of as distinctive about fiction's capacity for teaching, and it would not be a good strategy to argue for the importance of fiction by citing it alone. Purely factual learning is more economically and reliably-if less entertainingly-derived from text-books.

Those who claim we can learn from fiction usually have in mind a distinctive kind of instruction for which fiction seems particularly useful: we might portentously call it moral instruction. In some way, fiction helps us better to detect and to make moral choices. That, at any rate, is the claim. It is a claim naturally subject to exaggeration, and there are versions of it I would not defend. But I believe there is some truth in it. What truth there might be in it is the subject of this paper

Value and Imagination

In her essay on literature and the moral imagination, Martha Nussbaum takes up what is for her "more than an analogy" and which she ascribes to Henry James: that "the work of the moral imagination is in some manner like the work of the creative imagination". I agree that there is more than an analogy here, though the underlying sameness I claim to find in these two functions of imagination might not be anything Nussbaum would endorse. I hold that, in so far as there is a role for imagination in helping us to see through a moral issue or to make a moral choice, that role is undertaken by the same mental mechanism that is deployed when we read or-if we have the right talents and inclinations-create fictional works. Indeed, I'm inclined to say that there are not two things here, a moral and a creative imagination, but rather one thing put to different purposes. And I will go further, and say that at least a good deal of the time, the purposes themselves are inextricably intermixed; sometimes, engaging imaginatively with fiction is deploying the imagination in the service of moral understanding. Let us see how.