Ethics, Evil, and Fiction

by Colin McGinn

McGinn's latest brings together moral philosophy and literary analysis in a way that illuminates both. Setting out to enrich the domain of moral reflection by showing the value of literary texts as sources of moral illumination, McGinn starts by setting out an uncompromisingly realist ethical theory, arguing that morality is an area of objective truth and genuine knowledge. He goes on to address such subjects as the nature of goodness, evil character, and the meaning of monstrosity in the context of an aesthetic theory of virtue, which maintains that goodness of character is the same thing as beauty of soul. Looking at such literary works as Billy Budd , Lolita , The Picture of Dorian Gray , and Frankenstein , as well as examples from film and painting, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction is an original and compelling book by a leading philosopher who is also a critic and novelist.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

196 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Colin McGinn is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. He is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, though he has written on topics across the breadth of modern philosophy. Chief among his works intended for a general audience is the intellectual memoir The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (2002).

Colin McGinn was born in Blackpool, England in 1950. He enrolled in Manchester University to study psychology. However, by the time he received his degree in psychology from Manchester in 1971 (by writing a thesis focusing on the ideas of Noam Chomsky), he wanted to study philosophy as a postgraduate. By 1972, McGinn was admitted into Oxford University's B.Litt postgraduate programme, in hopes of eventually gaining entrance into Oxford's postgraduate B.Phil. programme.

McGinn quickly made the transition from psychology to philosophy during his first term at Oxford. After working zealously to make the transition, he was soon admitted into the B.Phil programme under the recommendation of his advisor, Michael R. Ayers. Shortly after entering the philosophy programme, he won the John Locke Prize in 1972. By 1974, McGinn received the B.Phil degree from Oxford, writing a thesis under the supervision of P.F. Strawson, which focused on the semantics of Donald Davidson.

In 1974, McGinn took his first philosophy position at University College London. In January 1980, he spent two semesters at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a visiting professor. Then, shortly after declining a job at University of Southern California, he succeeded Gareth Evans as Wilde Reader at Oxford University. In 1988, shortly after a visiting term at City University of New York (CUNY), McGinn received a job offer from Rutgers University. He accepted the offer from Rutgers, joining ranks with, among others, Jerry Fodor in the philosophy department. McGinn stayed at Rutgers until 2006, when he accepted a job offer from University of Miami as full time professor.

Although McGinn has written dozens of articles in philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, he is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind. In his 1989 article "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?", McGinn speculates that the human mind is innately incapable of comprehending itself entirely, and that this incapacity spawns the puzzles of consciousness that have preoccupied Western philosophy since Descartes. Thus, McGinn's answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that humans cannot find the answer. This position has been nicknamed the "New Mysterianism". The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (2000) is a non-technical exposition of McGinn's theory.

Outside of philosophy, McGinn has written a novel entitled The Space Trap (1992). He was also featured prominently as an interviewee in Jonathon Miller's Brief History of Disbelief, a documentary miniseries about atheism's history. He discussed the philosophy of belief as well as his own beliefs as an atheist.

Reviews

[Carmilla Voiez · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second of McGinn's non-fiction books that I've read and I found it very easy to engage with. I've felt for many years the importance of fiction with regards to both empathy and connecting deeply with moral questions. This book articulated what I felt and backed it up with evidence.

The paragraphs and lines that really spoke to me and I felt encapsulated McGinn's arguments best are -

"The fictional work can make us see and feel good and evil in a way that no philosophical tract can."
"A tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling is done when reading novels (or watching plays and films, or reading poetry and short stories). In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attitudes, especially in contemporary culture."
"An effective work of fiction is precisely the refashioning of the obvious in such a way that we are enabled to experience it afresh."
"The monster is evil write palpable, and hence more easily grasped and detected. Monsters exist, in effect, because of the psychic entrenchment of the aesthetic theory of virtue. They are a reification of the soul made ugly through vice and innate depravity."
"For social animals like ourselves, there is pleasure in co-operation, in coordinating our actions with those of others. But this pleasure can exist even when what is done is evil ... doing evil things in groups is bound to set up an association between pleasure on the part of the members of the group and the suffering of the victim."
"The sadist's project can act as a radical antidote to deep existential envy, and even milder forms of cruelty can serve to alleviate the pangs of envy."

[Tiago Filipe Clariano · Rating 5 out of 5]

A questão do bem e do mal que sempre me pareceu ultrapassada é apresentada por Colin McGinn de vários modos. O autor começa por abordar a ética e as suas perspectivas acerca do bem e do mal, de bom e mau carácter e o que define cada um deles. Nesta obra, ético e estético surgem de mãos dadas para procurar entender os conceitos em questão, que são postos em perspectiva epistemológica, será o bem ou o fazer bem como uma cor? Terá um correlato palpável a que acedemos quando o referimos linguisticamente? E qual é a relação para com a ideia de dever?
No quarto capítulo, de modo a explicar o "mau carácter", faz-se um exercício de imaginação do mundo dividio entre uns seres que encontram prazer no prazer dos outros e dor na dor dos outros e outros que encontram dor no prazer dos outros e prazer na dor dos outros. Assim os conceitos são parabolizados de um modo minimalista, de fácil entendimento, mas também para dar a entender que é de puro mal que se fala e não de mal instrumental (um mal feito com finalidades para o praticante).
Os últimos dois capítulos situam-se entre o ético e o estético por excelência na ficção do «Retrato de Dorian Gray» e «Frankenstein», onde aparência e essência são eximiamente postas em tensão sobre o denominador da "Alma Bela". Surge também uma "Teoria Estética da Virtude" onde a virtude se faz coincidir com a beleza da alma e o vício com o feio. Dorian Gray vê os seus pecados surtir um efeito estético no seu retrato, mas não no seu corpo (e a abordagem do último capítulo é um plottwist excelente), enquanto que o Monstro de Frankenstein, apesar de conter as melhores intenções, tem um invólucro que surte efeitos repelentes nos que o encontram (a excepção do pai de família cego).
A conclusão retoma a linguagem e os modos de moralização antigos: os mandamentos e as parábolas, preferindo as parábolas, mas concedendo a iluminação dada pelos mandamentos à moral.

"To be thrust into the world of hunger and fear and death and then to be treated as a burden by the perpetrators - that must seem the very height of injustice."

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book puts forth the somewhat novel thesis for a philosopher that we can learn something about ethics by looking at fiction. The first half of the book reads like typical Oxford philosophy: discussions of Goodness, Ethics, Morality and how we know them. He then gives a quite original analysis of the Evil Character, laying waste to a number of prominent theories, and touching on Billy Budd and Shakespeare's Iago in the process. Ultimately though, he weds evil with pleasure, stressing that any theory that doesn't acknowledge "how good it feels" will make no headway towards eradicating evil. Next he takes on a sliver of aesthetics by looking at the "Beauty of Soul," using Nabakov's views on aesthetics, and Nabakov's character Humbert Humbert from Lolita as a foil for Thomas Reid's theory of aesthetic value. McGinn's basic point is that we view the world through aesthetic eyes, can't otherwise do so, and that it does make sense to describe people's (and character's) inner lives as beautiful or ugly. With all the groundwork in place, McGinn then launches into an analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Frankenstein, showing how ethical analysis can be applied directly to fictional characters. In his concluding chapter, McGinn argues that philosophers of ethics have focused too much on commandments and not enough on narratives when it comes to looking at moral instruction. He argues that fiction (as well as other narratives) is a great place to see how ethical ideas "play out" because you have specific characters within specific contexts. A notch below discussing real people in real situations, perhaps, but certainly a notch above discussing the abstractions of "is" and "ought" and the application of commandments without context.