Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

Morality, Fiction and Possibility 25
the story Macduff was a coward. If my retelling of Hamlet frequently described the
young prince as decisive, the reader would struggle to go along with me imaginatively.
Try imagining Hamlet doing exactly what he does, and saying exactly what he says,
and thinking what he thinks, but always decisively. For an actual example, it’s easy
to find the first line in Bob Dylan’s Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, that the
titular characters ‘were the best of friends’ puzzling in the context of how Frankie
Lee treats Judas Priest later in the song. It isn’t too surprising that the puzzle extends
to the thick moral concepts, and Walton at least doesn’t even regard these as a separate
category.
More interestingly, any kind of evaluative sentence can be puzzling. Walton and
Yablo both discuss sentences attributing aesthetic properties. (Yablo, 2002, 485) suggests
that a story in which the author talks about the sublime beauty of a monster
truck rally, while complaining about the lack of aesthetic value in sunsets, is in most
respects like our morally deviant story. The salient aesthetic claims will be puzzling.
Note that we are able to imagine a community that prefers the sight of a ‘blood bath
death match of doom’ (to use Yablo’s evocative description) to sunsets over Sydney
Harbour and it could certainly be true in a fiction that such attitudes were commonplace.
But that does not imply that those people could be right in thinking the trucks
are more beautiful. (Walton, 1994, 43-44) notes that sentences describing jokes that
are actually unfunny as being funny will be puzzling. We get to decide what is funny,
not the author.
Walton and Yablo’s point here can be extended to epistemic evaluations. Again
it isn’t too hard to find puzzling examples when we look at attributions of rationality
or irrationality.
Alien Robbery
Sam saw his friend Lee Remnick rushing out of a bank carrying in one
hand a large bag with money falling out of the top and in the other hand
a sawn-off shotgun. Lee Remnick recognised Sam across the street and
waved with her gun hand, which frightened Sam a little. Sam was a little
shocked to see Lee do this, because despite a few childish pranks involving
stolen cars, she’d been fairly law abiding. So Sam decided that
it wasn’t Lee, but really a shape-shifting alien that looked like Lee, that
robbed the bank. Although shape-shifting aliens didn’t exist, and until
that moment Sam had no evidence that they did, this was a rational
belief. False, but rational.
The last two sentences of Alien Robbery are fairly clearly puzzling.
So far all of our examples have involved normative concepts, so one might think
the solution to the puzzle will have something to do with the distinctive nature of
normative concepts, or with their distinctive role in fiction. Indeed, Gendler’s and
Currie’s solutions have just this feature. But sentences that seem somewhat removed
from the realm of the normative can still be puzzling. (It is of course contentious just
where the normative/non-normative barrier lies. Most of the following cases will be