How can we be morally concerned with fiction? What does our experience of literature contribute to our capacity for moral understanding? This study of the relation of art to morality presents a defence of the humane value of art and explores the moral dimension of culture.

How can we be morally concerned with fiction? What does our experience of literature contribute to our capacity for moral understanding? This study of the relation of art to morality presents a defence of the humane value of art and explores the moral dimension of culture.

In this remarkable blend of sophisticated philosophical analysis and close reading of literary texts, Richard Eldridge presents a convincing argument that literature is the most important and richest source of insights in favor of a historicized Kantian moral philosophy. He effectively demonstrates that only through the interpretation of narratives can we test our capacities as persons for acknowledging the moral laws as a formula of value and for acting according to it. Eldridge presents an extensive new interpretation of Kantian ethics that is deeply informed by Kant's aesthetics. He defends a revised version of Kantian universalism and a Kantian conception of the content of morality. Eldridge then turns to literature armed not with any a priori theory but with an interpretive stance inspired by Hegel's phenomenology of self-understanding, more or less naturalized, and by Wittgenstein's work on self-understanding as ongoing narrative-interpretive activity, a stance that yields Kantian results about the universal demands our nature places on itself. Eldridge goes on to present readings of novels by Conrad and Austen and poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge. In each text protagonists are seen to be struggling with moral conflicts and for self-understanding as moral persons. The route toward partial resolution of their conflicts is seen to involve multiple and ongoing activities of reading and interpreting. The result of this kind of interpretation is that such literature—literature that portrays protagonists as themselves readers and interpreters of human capacities for morality—is a primary source for the development of morally significant self-understanding. We see in the careers of these protagonists that there can be genuine and fruitful moral deliberation and valuable action, while also seeing how situated and partial any understanding and achievement of value must remain. On Moral Personhood at once delineates the moral nature of persons; shows various conditions of the ongoing, contextualized, partial acknowledgment of that nature and of the exercise of the capacities that define it; and enacts an important way of reading literature in relation to moral problems. Eldridge's work will be important reading for moral philosophers (especially those concerned with Kant, Hegel, and issues dividing moral particularists from moral universalists), literary theorists (especially those concerned with the value of literature and its relation to philosophy and to moral problems), and readers and critics of Conrad, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen.

Alice Crary offers a transformative account of moral thought about human beings and animals. Instead of assuming that the world places no demands on our moral imagination, she underscores the urgency of treating the exercise of moral imagination as necessary for arriving at an adequate world-guided understanding of human beings and animals.

Essays showing how environmental philosophy can have an impact on the world by integrating abstract reasoning with actual environmental practice.

Literature and Moral Theory investigates how literature, in the past 30 years, has been used as a means for transforming the Anglo-American moral philosophical landscape, which until recently was dominated by certain ways of ?doing theory?. It illuminates the unity of the overall agenda of the ethics/literature discussion in Anglo-American moral philosophy today, the affinities and differences between the separate strands discernible in the discussion, and the relationship of the ethics/literature discussion to other (complexly overlapping) trends in late-20th century Anglo-American moral philosophy: neo-Aristotelianism, post-Wittgensteinian ethics, particularism and anti-theory. It shows why contemporary philosophers have felt the need for literature, how they have come to use it for their own (philosophically radical) purposes of understanding and argument, and thus how this turn toward literature can be used for the benefit of a moral philosophy which is alive to the varieties of lived morality.

Technology permeates nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Cars enable us to travel long distances, mobile phones help us to communicate, and medical devices make it possible to detect and cure diseases. But these aids to existence are not simply neutral instruments: they give shape to what we do and how we experience the world. And because technology plays such an active role in shaping our daily actions and decisions, it is crucial, Peter-Paul Verbeek argues, that we consider the moral dimension of technology. Moralizing Technology offers exactly that: an in-depth study of the ethical dilemmas and moral issues surrounding the interaction of humans and technology. Drawing from Heidegger and Foucault, as well as from philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, Peter-Paul Verbeek locates morality not just in the human users of technology but in the interaction between us and our machines. Verbeek cites concrete examples, including some from his own life, and compellingly argues for the morality of things. Rich and multifaceted, and sure to be controversial, Moralizing Technology will force us all to consider the virtue of new inventions and to rethink the rightness of the products we use every day.

Stories with a Moral is the first comprehensive study of the effects of plantation society on literature and the influences of literature on social practices in nineteenth-century Georgia. During the years of frontier settlement, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, Georgia authors voiced their support for the slave system, the planter class, and the ideals of the Confederacy, presenting a humorous, passionate, and at times tragic view of a rapidly changing world. Michael E. Price examines works of fiction, travel accounts, diaries, and personal letters in this thorough survey of King Cotton's literary influence, showing how Georgia authors romanticized agrarian themes to present an appealing image of plantation economy and social structure. Stories with a Moral focuses on the importance of literature as a mode of ideological communication. Even more significant, the book shows how the writing of one century shaped the development of social practices and beliefs that persist, in legend and memory, to this day.

Reading for the Moral offers an innovative reassessment of the nature of moral representation and exemplarity in Chinese vernacular fiction. Maria Franca Sibau focuses on two little-studied story collections published at the end of the Ming dynasty, Exemplary Words for the World (Xingshi yan, 1632) and Bell in the Still Night (Qingye zhong, c. 1645). Far from being tediously moralistic tales, these stories of loyal ministers, filial children, chaste widows, and selfless friends provide a deeper understanding of the five cardinal relationships central to Confucian ethics. They explore the inherent tension between what we might call textbook morality, on the one hand, and untidy everyday life, on the other. The stories often take a critical view of mechanical notions of retribution, countering it with the logic of virtue as its own reward. Conflict between passion and duty is typically resolved in favor of duty, a duty redefined with a palpable sense of urgency. In constructing vernacular representations of moral exemplars from the recent historical past rather than from remote or fictitious antiquity, the story compilers show how these virtues are not abstract or monolithic norms, but play out within the contingencies of time and space.