Does fiction help us understand morality?

Philosophy professors like to use thought experiments to get their students to look at their assumptions in a new way, or to bring out their intuitions about conflicting principles.

“Could I be a brain in a vat?”

“Should I reroute the trolley so it hits one person rather than five?”

“Should Heintz steal the medicine for his wife from the greedy pharmacist?”

And always, “Why?”

Sometimes philosophers use situations from familiar books and movies to serve the same purpose: Sophie’s choice, McCoy’s aversion to the transporter on Star Trek, Huck Finn’s decision to go against what he believes is “right.”

Focusing on a vividly described situation makes for interesting discussion, but it’s important to remember how fiction differs from reality. In fiction, the author determines which details are relevant, what consequences ensue, and how the world works.

One such relevant detail is where the story “ends.” End the story too soon, and all the hero’s efforts seem have resulted in disaster. End it just after he succeeds, and it seems that he made the right choices after all. End it too late… well, it’s up to the author whether he really lives happily ever after as a result of his decisions. That brings us to the author’s control over what consequences ensue.

For instance, suppose you have a film in which the good guy and the bad guy end up shooting at each other. Which shots hit their mark? Which injuries are fatal or incapacitating? In westerns and the Marvel Universe, the results tend to favor the hero, because the author controls the consequences.

You can also see this as a fact about how these worlds work, something else the author controls. In these worlds, the good guys are more adept at fighting than the bad guys. It isn’t very plausible, unless maybe God is on their side. After all, surely the bad guys attack people more often. Even if the good guys have self-discipline and practice devotedly, they will have less battle experience. So why would they win so consistently?

(In the long run, the good guys have the advantage of working together and trusting each other, but that isn’t going to make their aim more accurate.)

In the world of Dr. Who, guns are not the answer. Dr Who also faces bad guys who are armed with all sorts of weapons, but he (or she) relies on finding alternate ways of dealing with them. And he succeeds. There is always another way to solve the problem.

I would like to believe that this is true of our actual world–that there is always another solution– but I don’t know how we could tell. The writers of Dr. Who can ensure that the good Doctor does find that other way. We don’t have a Doctor to call on.

In some worlds, this other solution involves the Power of Love. Star Trek Discovery, season 3, seems to exist in such a world. The bad guys are not really bad after all, just misguided, unhappy, or perhaps even right about having been mistreated. And there is something to this, as anyone who has been caught between two feuding friends can agree. In these worlds, with the right approach, the two sides can be reconciled and be friends.

I would like to think that this is also true of our world, but it seems clear that there are some people who really don’t care about others. There are even people who actively enjoy hurting others, and not because they believe the others have wronged them. The Power of Love seems inadequate here, at least without some sort of psychiatric fix that we don’t currently have.

Even when the enmity is between two basically decent people or groups of people, reconciliation is much, much harder than it appears in fiction. People tend to see all the ways in which they have been wronged, but only a small percentage of the ways in which they have wronged others. (I don’t remember the name for this bias.) So people feel that they are being asked to accept more cost and forgive more injury than the other side. Even when it’s clear that the dispute is hurting everyone, it is very hard for people to accept less than they feel they are owed. And if resentment continues to burn, the dispute is likely to flare up again at a moment’s notice. One can only hope that the next generation doesn’t inherit all the resentment of the past.

Does fiction help us understand morality? As an author, I can show a world in which it is sometimes necessary to kill, or a world in which there is always a better way. My characters may need to do bad things in order to prevent worse ones, or my characters may need to stick to their principles and refuse to do wrong, no matter what, lest they become part of the problem themselves. The bad guys may be misunderstood, or they may truly be bad.

How does this help with the real world? When I’m addressing some real world situation, I may have the Dr. Who universe in mind, while someone else is thinking about the Marvel Universe. No wonder we disagree about what to do! Which of the many fictional worlds is most like our own? Tony Stark’s New York? Dr. Who’s London? The Federation of the far, far future? Something else?

Yes.

One thing fiction does help us do is see the different ways that other people–and ourselves, at different times–perceive the world. It can help us understand why we draw such vastly different conclusions about how to react. It cannot, however, tell us what is right.

Till next post.

P.S. Though I used science fiction for my examples, the same contrasts exist in novels and films set in strictly realistic settings.