richly responsible.”^57 As James himselfputsit,“the effort really tosee andreally
to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for
muddlement.”^58 I have described the importance of“attention to cases”and
“reading through particulars.”^59 In each case the emphasis falls on the interest
of exploring complex moral attitudes and emotions that are invited by wide
ranges of difficult, particular cases, not on didactic moralizing in the manner of
Aesop’s fables.
When narrative literature and other forms of art direct attention toward
the complex details of particular cases, then there is some danger of
arriving at moral particularism. Nussbaum suggested in earlier work that
there might be“irreconcilable visions”of human life put forward by par-
ticularist literature and generalizing moral philosophy.^60 The arts might be
taken to show that many different and divergent characters and actions are
appropriately pitied, envied, despised, admired, respected, and so on, in
many fine shades of feeling, at the expense of commitment to any settled
moral principles. Some literary art might aim at showing that many differ-
ent things might count as virtues and vices in different contexts, foregoing
any general account of the natures of virtue and vice. So-called virtue
ethics,^61 developed initially by Bernard Williams,^62 Philippa Foot,^63 and
(^57) Martha C. Nussbaum,“‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral
Imagination,”inLiterature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 169–91, reprinted in Martha Nussbaum,Love’s
Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature(Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 148–67 at
p. 148.
(^58) Henry James,The Art of the Novel(New York, 1907), p. 149, cited in Nussbaum,Love’s
Knowledge, p. 148.
(^59) Eldridge,On Moral Personhood, pp. 20, 21.
(^60) Martha C. Nussbaum,“Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,”in
Nussbaum,Love’s Knowledge, pp. 168–94 at p. 190.
(^61) For a general survey of the rise of virtue ethics, prefacing selection of major essays in this
area, seeVirtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (Oxford University Press, 1997).
For a survey of the influence of these theories on thinking about the value of art, see
Richard Eldridge,“Aesthetics and Ethics,”inThe Oxford Handbook to Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold
Levinson (Oxford University Press, 2003).
(^62) See Bernard Williams,Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973– 1980 (Cambridge University
Press, 1981), and Bernard Williams,Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985).
(^63) See Philippa Foot,Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy(Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1978).
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