Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

Morality, Fiction and Possibility 24
The second puzzle concerns the relation between fiction and imagination. Following
Kendall Walton (1990), it is common to construe fictional works as invitations
to imagine. The author requests, or suggests, that we imagine a certain world.
In Death we can follow along with the author for most of the story. We can imagine
an argument taking place in peak hour on Highway 95. We can imagine this frustrating
the other drivers. And we can imagine one of those drivers retaliating with
a loaded gun. What we cannot, or at least do not, imagine is that this retaliation is
morally justified. There is a limit to our imaginative ability here. We refuse, fairly
systematically, to play along with the author here. Call this the imaginative puzzle.
Why don’t we play along in cases like Death? Again, I won’t say for now which cases
are like Death.
The third puzzle concerns the phenomenology of Death and stories like it. The
final sentence is striking, jarring in a way that the earlier sentences are not. Presumably
this is closely related to the earlier puzzles, though I’ll argue below that the cases
that generate this peculiar reaction are not identical with cases that generate alethic
or imaginative puzzles. So call this the phenomenological puzzle.
Finally, there is a puzzle that David Hume (1757) first noticed. Hume suggested
that artistic works that include morally deviant claims, moral claims that wouldn’t
be true were the descriptive aspects of the story true, are thereby aesthetically compromised.
Why is this so? Call that the aesthetic puzzle. I will have nothing to say
about that puzzle here, though hopefully what I have to say about the other puzzles
will assist in solving it.
I’m going to call sentences that raise the first three puzzles puzzling sentences.
Eventually I’ll look at the small differences between those three puzzles, but for now
we’ll focus on what they have in common. The puzzles, especially the imaginative
puzzle, have become quite a focus of debate in recent years. The aesthetic puzzle is
raised by David Hume (1757), and is discussed by Kendall Walton (1994) and Richard
Moran (1995). Walton and Moran also discuss the imaginative and alethic puzzles,
and they are the focus of attention in recent work by Tamar Szabó Gendler (2000),
Gregory Currie (2002) and Stephen Yablo (2002). My solution to the puzzles is best
thought of as a development of some of Walton’s ‘sketchy story’ (to use his description).
Gendler suggests one way to develop Walton’s views, and shows it leads to
an unacceptable solution, because it leads to mistaken predictions. I will argue that
there are more modest developments of Walton’s views that don’t lead to so many
predictions, and in particular don’t lead to mistaken predictions, but which still say
enough to solve the puzzles.
2 The Range of the Puzzles
As Walton and Yablo note, the puzzle does not only arise in connection with thin
moral concepts. But it has not been appreciated how widespread the puzzle is, and
getting a sense of this helps us narrow the range of possible solutions.
Sentences in stories attributing thick moral concepts can be puzzling. If my
prose retelling of Macbeth included the line “Then the cowardly Macduff called on
the brave Macbeth to fight him face to face,” the reader would not accept that in