Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

Morality, Fiction and Possibility 35
out three-headed frogs in fiction, and it is hard to see how to remedy this problem
without solving the original puzzle.
4 Some Ethical Solutions
If one focuses on cases like Death, it is natural to think the puzzle probably has something
to do with the special nature of ethical predicates, or perhaps of ethical concepts,
or perhaps of the role of either of these in fiction. I don’t think any such
solution can work because it can’t explain what goes wrong in Victory, and this will
recur as an objection in what follows.
The most detailed solution to the puzzles has been put forward by Tamar Szabó
Gendler. She focuses on the imaginative puzzle, but she also makes valuable points
about the other puzzles. My solution to the phenomenological puzzle is basically
hers plus a little epicycle.
She says that we do not imagine morally deviant fictional worlds because of our
“general desire to not be manipulated into taking on points of view that we would
not reflectively endorse as our own.” How could we take on a point of view by
accepting something in a fiction? Because of the phenomena noted above that some
things become true in a story because they are true in the world. If this is right,
its converse must be true as well. If what is true in the story must match what is
true in the world, then to accept that something is true in the story just is to accept
that it is true in the world. Arguably, the same kind of ‘import/export’ principles
hold for imagination as for truth in fiction. Some propositions become part of the
content of an imagining because they are true. So, in the right circumstances, they
will only be part of an imagining if they are true. Hence to imagine them (in the
right circumstances) is to commit oneself to their truth. Gendler holds that we are
sensitive to this phenomena, and that we refuse to accept stories that are morally
deviant because that would involve accepting that morally deviant claims are true in
the world.
That’s a relatively rough description of Gendler’s theory, but it says enough to
illustrate what she has in mind, and to show where two objections may slip in. First,
it is not clear that it generalises to all the cases. Gendler is aware of some of these
cases and just bites the relevant bullets. She holds, for instance, that we can imagine
that actually lame jokes are funny, and it could be true in a story that such a joke is
funny. It would be a serious cost to her theory if she had to say the same thing about
all the examples discussed above.
The second problem is more serious. The solution is only as good as the claim
that moral claims are more easily exported than descriptive claims, and more generally
that the types of claims we won’t imagine are more easily exported than those we
don’t resist. Gendler has two arguments for why the first of these should be true, but
neither of them sounds persuasive. First, she says that the moral claims are true in all
possible worlds if true at all. But this won’t do on its own, because as she proved, we
don’t resist some necessarily false claims. (This objection is also made by (Matravers,
2003, 94).)