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Introduction

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The apostles converted the heathen with miracles and the arguments of their lives. Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

DEFINING THE TOPIC

This thesis is an investigation of two related topics: strategies for practical moral reflection, thinking well about the overall shape of one’s life and about particular moral choices that are forced upon one, and strategies for teaching introductory ethics in a way that helps students to engage in practical moral reflection. I want to ask about the right place for the study of actual human lives in practical moral reflection and the teaching of introductory ethics.

This question is difficult to specify. The term “practical moral reflection” may create some particular difficulties. In one way, all moral reflection is practical; that is, all moral reflection is relevant in some way to the question, “How shall we live?” But clearly, moral discussions take place at various distances from this question. The disputes among meta-ethical positions have consequences for practical moral thinking at a very general level. They establish what the enterprise is about, what kind of attention it deserves. The disputes among general views in normative ethics, for example, the dispute between deontological and consequentialist approaches, are a level closer to practical concerns. Perhaps the analysis of central moral concepts like “person” or “need” is closer yet to the pressing decisions that people have to make and to everyday moral thinking.

But all of these controversies are at some substantial distance from particular cases. It is not likely that the central disputes in moral philosophy will come to any satisfactory resolution soon enough to adjudicate pressing moral problems. Moral philosophy consists largely of the development and articulation of various enterprises in moral theory, and there are powerful voices urging that all these enterprises have serious flaws. Bernard Williams’ book, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, does deep criticism of all the major alternatives in moral theory, and leaves the reader at the end floating in deep water, clinging to a very small raft. One may not agree with all of Williams’ points, but the fact that a major figure in moral philosophy could write such a book, after decades of intensive debate among advocates of the major theoretic positions, suggests that perplexity and disillusion shadow the steps of even the most committed adherent of a particular moral theory.

One’s reflection about how to handle oneself tomorrow or whether to attend law school cannot wait on the resolution of higher-level questions. In writing of “practical moral reflection,” I want to focus attention on the sort of reflection that might plausibly contribute to urgent moral decisions, to decisions that have to be made with the knowledge that the large general theses in ethics are importantly controversial and that many huge questions are unresolved.

Talk about the relevance of lives to moral thinking might seem comparably problematic. On one level, the relevance of lives to moral reflection is obvious. Any moral view that takes one’s past seriously gives one reason to reflect on one’s history. Moral views ask questions about one’s past. “What promises have been made?” “What debts have been incurred?” “What wrongs have been done to other people?” It would surely be of interest to think about the ways that moral views make space for the individual’s past, in moral reflection – how, for example, Kantian accounts take the moral agent’s past seriously in different ways than do utilitarian views. But this line of thought is not my central focus here.

Similarly, any moral view that values experience will have some place for reflection on the lives of others. The meaning and implications of moral concepts like bravery, truthfulness, and fairness are not immediately evident from definitions. To get a grasp of these notions, one must reflect on how people handle situations that come up: the soldier going into battle against overwhelming odds, the salesperson allowing a customer to retain a misconception about a product, the parents of a sick child allocating family resources among the children. It is hard to imagine how one could develop any usable moral vocabulary without telling stories and citing cases.

In the last thirty years, some moral philosophers have given substantial attention to short stories and novels as instances of moral reflection, as material for moral reflection, and as tools for teaching.[1] Any full treatment of the place of lives in moral reflection and teaching must take account of these discussions; much of what can be said about the relevance of fictional accounts for moral reflection will apply to lives as well. One of the reasons that people are interested in considering novels like Middlemarch and Hard Times in ethics classes – or in their own philosophic writing – is that they take George Eliot and Charles Dickens to have captured important features of real lives, presenting those features in a clear and memorable way. It is certainly tempting to assimilate a discussion of the relevance of lives to moral reflection to this broader discussion of the relevance of substantial narratives to moral reflection.

In this thesis, I resist that temptation, realizing that any complete discussion of my topic must eventually take advantage of these philosophic resources. There is an important difference, I think, between considering lives and considering extended works of fiction based on lives. Works of fiction are reflective products embodying interpretations. Memoirs are also interpretations, under a different discipline. To ask about the meaning and shape of a life is to push past interpretation in search of evidence, argument, meaningful reality. When I point to Dorothy Day and say, “She was a modern, successful woman in love with a man, and she ended her relationship with him because he had no sympathy for her religious interests,” I am providing evidence about a human possibility. Someone who wants to say “I could never do that” is forced to look at Day’s life and consider what differences between Day’s life and her own account for this alleged impossibility. The real lives of human beings present that kind of challenge to other human beings. When I say, “Dorothea Brooke (a character in Eliot’s Middlemarch) married an unappealing man much older than herself out of a sense of duty to promote his work,” I am giving a very different kind of example. With respect to Dorothea, one can question the possibility of such an action. She is, after all, a fictional character. Further, if I want to find out more about this decision and its context, I run up against walls. There are no answers to the questions like: “What did Dorothea read?” or “What was the quality of her physical relationship with her husband?” The story of Dorothea’s choice is provocative, and it is arguably a part of the real canon of Western moral philosophy, but it cannot serve as evidence about human possibility in the way that Dorothy Day’s life story provides such evidence.[2]

The focus of this thesis is, in particular, the place of lives in moral reflection. Lives are conceived as the ‘spaces’ or ‘containers’ within which particular, morally charged events like promises and crimes occur, within which particular, morally important qualities like virtues and attitudes emerge. One never has a complete life in view, only incidents and fragments and stories and bits of evidence. One can know someone well for 40 years and still not feel confident giving his or her funeral eulogy: the shape of the person’s life may still be a mystery. It is more satisfying to attend to shaped and delimited fragments of lives (“Whatever Grant’s life may have meant, he said this to a soldier on the eve of battle in 1864.”) or readings of parts of lives (“Suppose that John Adams was motivated by a concern for his historical reputation to reconcile with Jefferson late in life.”).

Without discounting a limited and focused moral interest, I want to address in this thesis the ways that practical moral thinking engages with lives as wholes, as complexly connected unities of disparate actions and events. Of course, any life one encounters is represented by only partial evidence, and one is always in the position of inferring things about the life as a whole. Yet, I want to say, some moral thinking consists in an effort to go beyond anecdotes and episodes to try to see one’s own life or that of another person whole and complete, and to weigh the relevance of the life thus seen (or reconstructed) for one’s moral decisions. We are sometimes satisfied with stories, and we sometimes want to go beyond stories to an appreciation of the connections and commitments within a complex life. In this thesis, I want to consider some reasons one may have for giving lives this more general and sustained attention.

The point of my investigations is to separate out, from among the many considerations that legitimately bear on moral decision and the shaping of our lives, one strand of reflection: the funeral eulogist’s strand, or the historian’s strand, if one’s life is grand or despicable enough to interest an historian. The eulogist and the historian stand beyond particular moral questions and ask how the life taken as a whole bears on other lives: what it has to say. This is, of course, an endless investigation. A good eulogy or a good history will start a process of reflection in its audience; this process may continue for the whole length of their lives, becoming perhaps an important constituent of audience members’ own biographies.

At my father’s funeral, the eulogist chose to quote at length from an oral history my father had recorded years earlier, in which he reflected on the lives of his neighbors in the little farming community around Forest City, Minnesota. The point of the eulogy was to say: this was a man who admired these kinds of people. I take this to be one natural way in which decency is talked about in ordinary contexts: by establishing lives as objects of reflection and placing them in a sequence of other lives. It is close kin to the repeated identification of the Israelites in the Hebrew scriptures as the descendents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The moral tradition is defined by a sequence of lives.

In the Hebrew scriptures, examples and lives both figure prominently. The scriptures model different levels of moral reflection. The second book of Samuel tells the story of King David’s pursuit of Bathsheba, the wife of one of his army officers. David seduces Bathsheba while her husband, Uriah, is away fighting. Bathsheba becomes pregnant during her husband’s long absence. To save himself embarrassment, David orders that Uriah should be abandoned in the midst of battle, so that he may be killed. David then takes Bathsheba as his wife. The prophet Nathan calls David to account for this:

And The Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him, and said to him, "There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his morsel, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him."

"Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb, and prepared it for the man who had come to him."

Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, "As The Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity."

Nathan said to David, "You are the man!"[3]

This story illustrates the power of example in moral thinking. David cannot see his own action clearly, but he easily understands and judges a similar action in the life of someone else. This is one important way that moral teaching and reflection can happen.

The book of Samuel illustrates another level of reflection also. This individual story is part of a long narrative of David’s life, from his beginnings as a simple shepherd, through his battle with Saul, his rise to greatness, and the collapse of his kingdom into civil war as his sons battle for supremacy. In putting this long, complex, morally difficult story (and other equally complex stories) at the center of moral and religious reflection, the Jewish tradition makes a point about the nature of moral thinking that goes beyond the use of examples: those within that tradition locate ourselves and make sense of themselves as moral people by coming to terms with difficult and ambiguous lives. It is this kind of moral thinking, applied both to our own lives (as we construct our own ongoing history) and to the lives of significant people around us, that is the central topic of this thesis.

TREATMENT OF LIVES IN PHILOSOPHIC LITERATURE AND IN ORDINARY MORAL CONVERSATION

This discussion has a long history. In the two books that stand at the beginning of the western tradition of ethical thinking, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Plato’s Republic, philosophers are admonished to attend to complete lives. Aristotle says in the Ethics that eudaimonia – the happiness and value of a life – should be judged only with respect to the complete life. He quotes the proverb, “One swallow does not make a spring.”[4] Plato, in the last book of the Republic, presents a mythic story of Er, a man who travels to the realm of the dead and observes there how people who have died choose the lives into which they will be reborn.[5] Plato pictures one such chooser quickly committing himself to the luxurious life of a tyrant, and then realizing, too late, that that life involves doing horrible things, eating his own children. Plato suggests that philosophers will be better equipped than non-philosophers to make this mythic life choice well. This seems to mean: philosophers will wait to see lives whole and complete before evaluating them; they will not be dazzled by one feature of a life, to the exclusion of all others.

Talk about taking lives seriously has been eclipsed in the tradition by other lines of thought. These two suggestions are quite isolated, even within the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is mostly a discussion, one by one, of those qualities and ways of acting that make up an admirable life. A well-lived life displays moderation and courage and appropriate generosity. It contains friendships and civic engagement and non-practical thinking. One wonders how to take the cautionary note, that only a complete life should be judged to be happy. Is this merely a nod to the extreme case, in which someone who has lived well encounters such a terrible disaster at the end of life that the life must be read backward from this disaster? Or is Aristotle suggesting that there is something to be understood about an admirable life that goes beyond an appreciation of admirable qualities? Is he suggesting that one must come to understand also how these qualities fit together in some natural and coherent way, how they contribute to the biography of the admirable person, in order to really understand an admirable life?

Plato’s suggestion that the philosopher will be better than the non-philosopher at judging lives is likewise difficult to connect to other accounts of philosophic ethical inquiry in Plato’s writings. Over and over, Plato’s character Socrates shows his interlocutors to be incapable of giving a satisfactory account of those virtues that they judge to be central to their lives. These demonstrations likely contain quite pointed criticism, in veiled form, of the action and thinking of some of the interlocutors: the problems in principle that Socrates finds with Laches and Euthyphro may suggest deep and persistent flaws in their characters. Yet Socrates seems not to examine the value of lives as wholes, in any obvious or overt way, and it is hard to say how Socratic inquiry would help someone over-impressed by one feature of a life to see that feature in context and evaluate the over-all worth of that life. Perhaps Plato is merely suggesting, in the Myth of Er, that the philosopher will take his time about things, will ask questions, and so will not make precipitous and irrevocable judgments of any sort. But the Republic’s suggestion that the philosopher is a judge of lives as well as an evaluator of conceptual accounts opens an intriguing line of interpretation and inquiry with respect to Plato’s writings in general: does he give any account of this aspect of philosophic practice, or provide any clear bridge between conceptual investigations and this other, apparently different project? Also, quite independent of Platonic interpretation issues, this suggestion in the Republic introduces into the tradition the question: is there some value to taking the measure of complete lives that is not achievable if one simply evaluates individual opinions and individual actions?

Anyone who listens to casual ethical conversation is familiar with the idea that complete lives are a natural “unit” of moral thinking. When people have the conversations that guide and redirect their lives, when people undertake the personal and private questioning that is at the heart of ethical reflection, they mention names, they bring up lives. People are sobered by the lives of those whose resources are severely limited; they resolve to be content with what they have and to make good use of it. People are inspired by great achievements and want to emulate them. People are warned off by watching lives going wrong; they turn away from the weaknesses and failings that lead to bad ‘destinations.’ Being like some people, distancing oneself from other people, coming to terms with ambiguous or problematic people – that’s a lot of what people do when they think about the direction and meaning of their lives.

Perhaps most frequently, in moral conversation, people bring up their own lives. They look back over the course of their lives in much the same way one might look over the course of another’s life, asking questions. What are the dominant themes? What is the direction of this life? What major commitments and loyalties dominate its course? What are the roots of my current convictions? People say that college is partly a place to find out who you are, and that expression captures something of this process. People want to make a new beginning, rooted in something more than momentary impulse and desire, so they ask what impulses have been persistent and deep in their lives. The answer to that question, when it comes clear, may move the person asking to recoil from his or her life, to begin anew by making up for and repudiating the past, or it may move that person to reaffirm and endorse the direction the life has already started to take.

By contrast, in the contemporary literature in applied ethics, the unit of discussion is seldom: the life – or even a substantial stretch of life. The topic is sometimes a possible guiding rule for lives (a principle like “Never lie!”) or a quality of a life (courage or generosity) or a particular decision, a case (“Ronald wishes to marry, but his marriage will break the heart of his ailing mother.”). And it seems to those who do ethics that this state of affairs is perfectly proper and necessary.

As one might expect, when philosophers teach ethics to general college and university audiences, they mention cases and principles and virtues, but they seldom attempt to comment on rich pictures of individual lives or to make a space for their students to present such pictures. [6] Biographies are seldom on the reading lists of ethics courses, and students who try to tell their life story in class are encouraged to focus their remarks on some particular question or issue. This way of teaching is natural, given the way ethical thinking is undertaken in the profession, but it raises an ethical question: what does it mean that the preferred way of teaching in academic applied ethics differs importantly from ethical thinking in non-academic life, just in that lives are not particularly important to academic discussions but are quite important to non-academic discussions? Is this a fault of academic ethics teaching? A virtue? Perhaps both?

One might think that the neglect of lives in philosophic literature is appropriate, that the focus and precision of academic discussions is a clear virtue. One might say, “People in ordinary talk and ordinary thinking name individuals whom they admire or individuals whom they detest as a kind of lazy way of identifying the qualities and commitments they admire or detest. It is the job of philosophic discussion to get to the point of the examples, to name the qualities and commitments in question, and then to continue the discussion with only those qualities and commitments as the topic. The individual, the individual life, properly drops out.”

The neglect of lives in ethics teaching may be defended in a similar way: clear ethical thinking leaves particular lives behind, and good teaching encourages students to clarify their ethical thinking. Further, students often come to ethics classes with the purpose of finding some way to get distance from the overwhelming examples of their parents and friends. They want their ethics classes to carry them beyond conventional morality to something more authentic, and the influence of lives is felt to be conventional. A student who says, at the end of a semester of ethics, “I just want to live a life as good as my Uncle Harry lived” has opted to remain primitive, to remain undeveloped. He gets a “C.”

These approaches to reflection and teaching may be correct. The point of my discussion is to worry about whether some such dismissal of lives in serious ethical discussion is appropriate. Philosophers are leaving behind a very robust tradition of ethical discussion – naming people, referring to lives – and they are encouraging students who come to their courses seeking help in ordinary moral decisions to leave this tradition behind – or, at least, to regard it as preliminary to serious ethical reflection. This dual abandonment should not happen lightly. If something important is lost or misunderstood when principle-discussion or virtue-discussion replaces Uncle-Elmer discussion or Aunt-Flora discussion, that may be a loss both to academic progress in ethics and to the quality of decision-making among the students who pass through introductory ethics courses.

It is also possible that the requirements for academic progress in ethics are different from the requirements for good practical reflection in some important ways. It may be that teaching people to be good professional moral philosophers may not be the best way to the help them think well about the urgent decisions in their lives. An approach that works well for academic discussions may be ill suited to day-to-day moral thinking, and it may be that the best day-to-day practical approach is of limited value for investigating the kinds of questions that academic philosophers ask

Moral philosophers are obliged pay attention to the common strategies for navigating life under conditions of intellectual uncertainty, even if those strategies are of little use in resolving the traditional problems in moral theory. The main economic support for the work and livelihood of moral philosophers comes from the teaching of undergraduate introductory classes in ethics. Students come to those classes in a particular state of mind. They have already encountered alternatives to their habitual ways of thinking that challenge and confuse them. They have encountered different disciplines with different approaches to the important questions in their lives. And then, in any competent introductory ethics class, they learn that there are several different and independent traditions of moral thinking that have persisted, in lively debate with each other, for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. It is reasonable for such students to ask for advice, not about settling the huge questions raised by their recent experience and education, but about living with those questions or in spite of those questions – that is, about finding some reasonable way to navigate their lives, given the likelihood of long-term perplexity on fundamental matters. Teachers of moral philosophy have a professional responsibility to consider what tools are available for resolving this practical difficulty, even if such tools turn out to be of little use for theoretical investigations.

STARTING POINTS FOR THIS DISCUSSION

It will be my goal in this thesis to examine ways in which lives have been taken to be important to moral reflection. I will take as my starting points three principal texts. The first of these, Mill’s On Liberty, presents a utilitarian view about social and legal restrictions on expressions of unpopular opinions and on the full development of eccentric ways of life. In the course of this political discussion, Mill introduces an ideal of human excellence that, in one way, warns people against taking lives seriously, while, in another way, it requires a close attention to one’s own life and the lives around one as a prerequisite for mature moral thinking. The questions and complexities arising out of this discussion will provide the framework for the following chapters.

Plato’s Crito and Descartes’ Discourse on Method will be the central texts for a discussion of two quite different suggestions about the relevance of lives to moral reflection and the guidance of a life: the view that Socrates represents to Crito that Socrates’ own prior loyalties, commitments, and patterns of action are properly decisive in governing his decision about fleeing prison, and Descartes’ suggestion that it is reasonable to respond to a condition of moral perplexity by attending to the conduct of modest and sensible persons. These texts will be the starting points for more general considerations of the ways in which one’s own life and the lives of others are relevant to one’s moral reflection.

In the final chapter of this thesis, I will explore how the various suggestions contained in the earlier chapters illuminate the moral importance of biographical material – and other rich ways of encountering lives -- for individual reflection and for teaching. Using three quite different examples as starting points, I will begin to answer the questions: how does one think about a life and, more specifically, how does one bring the information about a life to bear on serious moral questions?

It is important to see the limits of this enterprise. The discussion of the relevance of lives to moral reflection is present at many points in the history of philosophy, and surely considerations about lives can be relevant to moral thinking in many ways. This thesis attempts to open the discussion by examining a selection of interesting claims about the relevance of lives to moral reflection and to moral teaching. A complete treatment would be much longer.

To illustrate the practical implications of this work, I’d like to sketch briefly three strategies of moral reflection. These are, first of all, possible teaching strategies. They are also particular approaches to thinking about moral questions. To think clearly about the place of these strategies in the ethics curriculum, and in one’s own moral reflection, one needs to think clearly about how lives bear on moral thinking.

(1) Consider the use of the learning circle or story circle approach to the investigation of ethical notions like friendship. This strategy is very simple. Students are asked to tell a story from their own lives in which a notion under discussion figures prominently.[7] For example, they may be asked to tell a story about a friendship that was valuable in their lives. Each student is encouraged to speak at some length, without interruption; each is given the option of passing. Commentary after the circle of stories is minimal: the facilitator or the participants may make some comments about common features of the various stories or differences among them, but there is no attempt to subsume the stories under some large conceptual net. The assumption is that people will learn, in various and different ways, by respectfully hearing these stories, one after another. The respect one gives to this activity, the place one gives it in the mix of reflective or teaching strategies one uses, depends crucially on whether one thinks that such stories have value in a way that isn’t exhausted by deriving from them a set of principles or concepts or common qualities. If one thinks that friendship is a fairly simple moral matter, governed by straightforward, obvious, easily articulated principles, then one will find the whole storytelling enterprise to be, at best, a simple-minded introduction to the topic, at worst a waste of valuable time. If one takes friendship to be complex and difficult in a way that only this sort of storytelling can helpfully illuminate, one will be very much more tolerant of this practice.

(2) The question of the uses of online journals, weblogs, in moral reflection and moral teaching is also importantly connected to these general questions about lives. It has recently become easy to produce a kind of public journal online; new internet software makes it possible to conveniently and quickly upload text and pictures to a public weblog, accessible worldwide via the internet. This sophisticated new tool allows for a new kind of informal publication: a daily or weekly chronicle of thoughts, responses, points of view, interests. Such publications provide, over time, a record of the thinking, response, and action of the writer. They provide a glimpse of the person’s intellectual and emotional life. One might ask: how is this tool relevant to ethical investigation and to the teaching of ethics? For example, does a teacher of ethics enrich his or her class in any substantial way by maintaining a weblog and alerting students to its existence? If the life of the instructor in a course on ethics matters as an exemplary life, if students would profit from surveying that life in thinking about how to live, then this kind of publication could be useful, providing a window onto one individual’s habitual pattern of thought, response, and action. If the life of the instructor in an ethics course is irrelevant to the matters under discussion, then the weblog technology is much less interesting; abstract discussions of principles and concepts are well conducted within formal publications, and lectures are appropriate formats for less rigorous presentations of that kind of material. The weblog is interesting because it allows readers to place thinking in time and to build up a picture of a life that is involved with particular trains of thought. One’s assessment of its place in individual moral reflection and in ethics instruction depends on the importance one gives to that kind of picture.

(3) The question about the value of personal involvement in situations one judges morally is important to moral reflection and to the teaching of ethics. Some courses in ethics contain community involvement or community service components. Other courses discuss cases and issues from the local community without offering students any direct experience with the people affected by those moral issues. In either case, it matters substantially for teaching how one imagines the importance of involvement, of being there, of meeting the people concerned, to an understanding of an issue. One can take actual experience in the situation as supplementary to rich descriptions, possibly alerting people to some consideration they might not have noticed, or one can take that experience to be necessary to an adequate assessment of the problem.

The question about the place of field experience in the teaching of ethics is similar to a difficult question about moral reflection in general. It is a common experience, across a broad range of morally charged circumstances, that one is unable to maintain within the circumstance itself those attitudes and perspectives that one develops, thinking about it in advance. One cannot say to someone “in the flesh” what one has practiced saying in front of one’s mirror. One of the most basic problems about moral reflection is to understand what this phenomenon means and what it implies for moral thinking. One can make a case that involvement in real circumstances, confrontation with participants in real moral crises, obscures moral judgment: the only reasonable place from which to judge is at a distance from the case. One might also hold that one can only judge rightly when one has been in the middle of the situation one is judging, talking to the people and experiencing the pressures that come to bear on them. One might also make some complex distinctions among cases: in some cases, involvement is necessary; in others, it impairs judgment. One’s decision on this point will mark one’s approach to moral thinking in profound ways.

In this thesis, I will defend a very common and popular approach to ethical thinking: the biographical and evaluative consideration of complete lives. This approach is often slighted in academic discussions, in favor of other valuable approaches that have a narrower scope. I will argue that this strategy of moral reflection is well established in the tradition of moral philosophy and should be included in the repertoire of individual moral thinkers and in the curriculum of introductory ethics.

[1] See Martha Nussbaum Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), Alice Crary, “Does the Study of Literature Belong Within Moral Philosophy? Reflections in the Light of Ryle’s Thought,” Philosophic Investigations, 23:4 (2000), and Robert Coles The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).

[2] It seems important to me to distinguish these two kinds of resources for philosophic inquiry partly because, if they are not distinguished, the literary resources are likely to dominate the discussion and eclipse the narrative of actual lives. In particular, in teaching, the elegantly crafted literary stories can crowd out the messy and complex stories of students’ own lives. Only a reflective and teaching practice that acknowledges the particular contributions of both literary examples and of the investigation of lives can strike the right balance in using these resources.

[6] The standard approach to the use of cases in applied ethics courses can be seen in popular texts like Beauchamp and Childress’ Principles of Biomedical Ethics (New York and Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1994) or Wasserstrom’s Today’s Moral Problems. The standard of competent work in the area is particularly clear in Wasserstrom’s two contributions to his anthology, “Privacy,” and “Is Adultery Immoral?” Carol Bly’s anthology, Changing the Bully Who Rules the World: Reading and Thinking About Ethics (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1996) and Alain DeBotton’s The Consolations of Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 2000) explore an alternative approach that takes better account of the complexity of lives.

[7] A discussion of the learning circle approach is found in John Wallace’s article “The Use of a Philosopher: Socrates and Myles Horton,” in Irene E. Harvey and C. David Lisman, eds., Beyond the Tower: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Philosophy (Washington, D.C., American Association of Higher Education, 2000), pp. 69-90.