Introduction

In How Fiction Works, literary critic James Wood compares literary fiction with moral philosophy. As Wood explains, while fiction and especially novels are concerned with the reality of human existence, there is a certain persuasive criticism of much modern moral philosophy that it ‘essentially wrote the messiness of the self out of moral discussion’. The critique is shared by philosopher Bernard Williams who argues that modern Kantian philosophers tend to view moral dilemmas as easily solved by identifying then elevating the correct ‘universal’ moral principle while in reality life may involve more than one possible moral stance and people who respond differently to moral choices, their decisions influenced by a range of factors – genetics, upbringing, society and so on. Similarly, philosopher and law academic Cass Sunstein notes that:

As Sunstein points out, in Anglo-American jurisprudence the judge's traditional response to such problems is to avoid confronting them head on, adopting instead a process of incremental reasoning in which previous decisions of judges on like questions are taken as the starting point for resolving the case at hand, the focus is on the particulars of disputes, and legal positions are incompletely theorized in advance.