The Moral Psychology of Fiction

A really spectacularly successful fiction (with success measured along the dimension I am currently considering) might get you to revise your value options: to reconsider the list of things which you do not currently value, but which you think of as likely candidates for valuing. Sometimes, after all, we begin to suspect that our values are wrong, and we may then desire to value differently. But fictions serve not only to help us assess options for valuing that are not our own current values; they can, more modestly, help us to reinforce or to test our commitment to our own values. Suppose that valuing is desiring to desire. We may not desire what we value, as the addict values abstaining from drugs but does not desire this, but the addict who so values at least desires that his desires be different from the way they are; he desires to desire abstaining from drugs. When we do not desire what we value, we are in conflict with our values-a conflict we naturally seek to eliminate. So an evaluative project might have as its aim that you end up desiring what you value: that you desire what you desire to desire. Or it might aim merely to increase the degree of your desiring for that which you value. Fictions can help here by inviting us to imagine ourselves more committed than we really are to our values and then to see ourselves, in imagination, flourishing as a result.

So: changes in our moral knowledge can bring about changes in our desires, and changes in our desires can bring about changes in our valuings; imagination can change our moral knowledge, and fiction can help imagination to effect that change. That is one way fiction can affect our valuings.

Notice that imaginative involvement with fiction does not seem to play any comparable role in developing our factual knowledge. I have granted that we can gain factual information from a fiction, if it is of the right kind, by a judicious discrimination between what is in it that is purely fictional and what is the authentic background of fact. But one does not choose what factual beliefs to acquire from the fiction on the basis of which of the fictions occurrences are made to seem most desirable-at least, anyone who did operate in that way would probably acquire a lot of false beliefs. Imaginative involvement plays a special role in developing our moral knowledge which it does not play in developing factual, descriptive knowledge.