British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 41, No.

2, April 2001

NARRATIVE ART AND MORAL

KNOWLEDGE
Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

I
IN ART, Narrative, and Moral Understanding,1 Nol Carroll advances the thesis
of clarificationism, according to which narrative art has the power to clarify our
pre-existing moral knowledge, but not to provide us with interesting, new
propositional [moral] knowledge (ANMU, p. 142). In this paper, we would like
to examine critically Carrolls argument for clarificationism, as well as the thesis
itself. We do not deny that one of the ways in which narrative art can relate to
morality is by clarifying our knowledge of it. But we do deny that it is the only
way in which it relates to morality: our criticism of Carroll is thus allied to an
argument for the idea that narratives can indeed provide us with interesting
propositional moral knowledge.
Carrolls formulation and defence of clarificationism is set against the
background of his argument against autonomism, the thesis that art has nothing
to offer in terms of moral knowledge or education which can in any way add to
its artistic value. The autonomist position, as Carroll understands it, depends on
the assumption that the only way in which artworks might have moral value in a
way that would enhance their artistic value is by their somehow transmitting
interesting moral propositional knowledge. And since autonomism rejects this
idea, it reverts to the notion that artworks do not have a moral dimension that can
play a part in its value (ANMU, p. 130). But although Carroll agrees with the
autonomist that artworks cannot transmit interesting moral propositional
knowledge, he wants to suggest another way in which artworks may serve a
moral-educational function, through clarifying our already-held moral beliefs.
Although our main task in this paper will be to take issue with Carroll on the
adequacy of clarificationism as a theory, we would also like to see whether it
1

Nol Carroll, Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding, in J. Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics:
Essays at the Intersection, (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1998), pp. 126160. Hereafter ANMU.
Although we use Carrolls article as the basis for the distinctions we make, it is not necessary to
have read the article to understand our paper.

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fulfils the anti-autonomist purposes to which Carroll wants to put it. We shall
argue that it does not.
Some of Carrolls arguments for clarificationism may initially seem weak, and
we shall argue that, as they stand, they are indeed inadequate. We shall argue,
however, that they may be strengthened if modified in a way suggested to us by
Carrolls own use of examples, which are predominantly political in character.
On one interpretation, clarificationism makes better sense when applied to
political narratives rather than ones that engage with personal moral issues.
Carrolls argument is thus strengthened, though the scope of its conclusion is
narrowed down.
II
Carroll usually formulates clarificationism through a contrast with the rival view
that art can provide us with moral education in the form of interesting knowledge [that] can be distilled into propositional form (ANMU, p. 130)let us call
this view propositionalism. Note that propositionalism does not deny that we can
gain non-propositional knowledge through narratives; it merely denies that that
is all we gain. Clarificationism and propositionalism are thus mutually exclusive.
Why reject propositionalism? Carroll claims that the kind of art which has
something to say that can be put in the form of maximslike the punch lines to
Aesopian fables or the entries in captain Kirks log at the end of Star Trek
episodesusually delivers little more than threadbare truisms (ANMU, p. 130).
Only a small number of artworks express general moral precepts, then, and
those which do are typically so obvious and thin that it strains credulity to think
that we learn them from artworks. Instead, very often, it seems more likely that a
thoughtful preteeneager will have mastered them already (ANMU, p. 130). An
example of such a truism is murder is wrong, which is, according to Carroll, the
only moral proposition we may extract from Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishment.
This is neither a surprising nor a new moral proposition, and it seems unlikely, as
Carroll points out, that anyone would learn it from reading the novel. Carroll
then makes the point, crucial to his overall argument, that it is probably a precondition of actually comprehending Crime and Punishment that the readers
already grasp the moral precepts that motivate the narrative (ANMU, p. 130).
The idea is that to understand a narrative, the reader must have a stock of moral
knowledge already, and hence that narratives cannot give brand new moral
knowledge. Let us call this the argument from the morally laden nature of the
understanding of narrative, or the moral-ladenness argument for short.
The argument is spelt out on pp. 139140, where Carrolls unobjectionable
premises are that our understanding of narrative relies on our possession of
various kinds of knowledge, ranging from facts about human biology to facts
about geography, history, politics, religion, and so on (ANMU, p. 139), and most
important human psychology (ANMU, p. 139). If we had no knowledge of

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human psychology, it is clear that we could not understand the subtle psychological power games that underlie many of the dialogues in Jane Austens novels,
for instance. On a more mundane level, knowing nothing about history would
present a problem if one were to grasp why those characters travel with coach and
horses, and not by car. Carroll goes on to point out that someone who had no
moral knowledge would simply fail to understand certain narratives: anyone who
does not find Uriah Heep in David Copperfield repugnant would have missed
Dickenss point (ANMU, p. 139). One has, then, to perceive certain moral
properties of characters and situations in order to be said to have properly understood the narrative. One must, for instance, see the moral harmfulness of Emmas
proclivity for meddling in others personal lives in Jane Austens Emma, even if
one grants her the best of intentions.
If ones understanding of narrative is already laden with moral notions, then
so the argument goesno new propositional knowledge can be gained from
narratives. This is because our pre-existing moral knowledge has to be mobilised
(Carrolls term), along with other kinds of knowledge, in order for us to
understand narratives. This argument from the morally laden nature of the
understanding of narrative is, strictly speaking, distinct from the argument from
specific cases, of which Crime and Punishment is one, to which we shall return
in due course. The latter argument simply looks at particular narratives, often
important and influential ones, and points out that the only moral propositions
that can be gleaned from them are not going to be news to anyone with a preteenager stock of moral knowledge. The moral-ladenness argument is supposed
to back up the specific cases argument, and give a principled basis for what would
otherwise be a shaky inductive argument.
In view of its logical priority, let us examine the moral-ladenness argument
first. This is its structure:
(i) Understanding narrative depends on the possession of moral concepts.
(ii) In any form of communication depending on the possession of X-type
concepts, no interesting propositional X-type knowledge may be gained.
(iii) (from i and ii) No interesting propositional knowledge may be gained from
narratives.
We have already granted the first premise. The second is a good deal more
questionable. For it seems to lead to some absurd conclusions. It is obvious, for
example, that moral discussion generally is only possible if its participants possess
some moral knowledge. If one wanted, say, to persuade someone to accept a
socialist political standpoint, one would no doubt try to provide ones interlocutor with what one perceives to be factual knowledge about the state of the
world. One might also have to argue that the socialist conception of justice is the
correct one, that it is not unrealizable, and so on. It is clear that one could not do

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this unless ones interlocutor had a good grasp of the concept of justice, and
knowledge that justice is a good thing, for instance. The possession of the concept
and possession of the knowledge are concomitant: no one could be said to grasp
the concept of justice unless they saw it as a moral good.
The logical status of propositions such as murder is wrong and justice is
good is not clear; they seem to be close to being analytic, or true by definition.
Their epistemological status is also unclear, namely that of whether their truth is
knowable a priori or a posteriori. We need settle neither question for the purposes
of this paper. All we need to establish is that these moral propositions are basic
in the sense that grasping them is a prerequisite for grasping many other moral
propositions, and also in the sense that it is difficult to see how someone who
does not already accept them could be persuaded to do so. In order to bring out
their place in the hierarchy of moral discourse, let us call these basic propositions
Level 1 moral propositions. In addition to those already mentioned, Carroll
mentions concepts of vice and virtue and so on (ANMU, p. 142), and the
corresponding knowledge that vice has a negative and virtue a positive moral
value. Another level of moral proposition can be discerned, which fleshes out
some of the concepts that are merely positively or negatively valued at Level 1.
For instance, the concept of justice may be understood in a number of ways, such
as the Platonic conception, the rule-utilitarian conception, and the Rawlsian conception. These conceptions make connections between the concept of justice and
other moral concepts, such as those of social harmony, overall happiness, and
fairness. These kinds of propositionlet us call them Level 2 propositions
differ from Level 1 propositions not only in complexity, but also insofar as they
are subject to legitimate disagreement. Yet another level of moral proposition can
be discerned at which another kind of disagreement can occur. At this level
Level 3it is possible for two people to agree on a particular conception of
justice, say, but disagree on how to apply it, and what to classify under the
headings of the just and the unjust. For instance, two people may agree on
a conception of justice that incorporates a strong degree of egalitarianism, but
disagree on what constitutes fulfilling work, and hence on whether the relegation
of the majority of women to housekeeping roles in a given society counts as an
injustice or not.
It may seem that there is little to separate Levels 2 and 3, in that Level 3
judgements are more refined and specific than Level 2 ones, and more directly
sensitive to factual judgements. Quines picture of our stock of judgements
forming a kind of interrelated web of propositions, with analytic judgements at
the centre and synthetic ones at the periphery, is helpful in understanding the
leveled nature of moral judgement.2 This picture has the purely moral
2

Willard van Orman Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, in Quine, From a Logical Point of View
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1956).

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judgements at the centre, and shades off into more specific judgements that
respond to changes in purely factual propositions. We place the phrases purely
moral and purely factual in inverted commas in order to remain neutral on the
meta-ethical question of the factvalue distinction. The hierarchy between levels
of moral discourse that we sketch above is acceptable to both naturalists and
non-naturalists about moral value.
Let us, keeping these distinctions in mind, return to Carrolls argument for
clarificationism. Premise (i) in the above syllogism is vulnerable to attack,
because though it may be true that no one can be taught that justice is good, that
murder is wrong, and so on, simply because a grasp of Level 1 moral propositions
is simply something one either does or does not haveat least at a certain stage
in ones upbringingit is not at all obvious that the same is true of Level 2 or 3;
indeed it is deeply implausible. It is an evident fact that ones Level 2 or 3 judgements may be altered in the light of moral arguments of various kinds (in the
wide sense that includes argument about relevant factual judgements). One could
refine (ii) in accordance with this observation as follows:
(ii) In any form of communication depending on possession of Level 1 X-type
concepts, no interesting propositional Level 1 X-type knowledge may be
gained.
Combining this with (i) rewritten as follows
(i) Understanding narrative depends on the possession of Level 1 moral
concepts.
we reach the following conclusion:
(iii) No interesting Level 1 propositional knowledge may be gained from
narratives.
This conclusion is considerably weaker than (iii), and, indeed, if it is construed as
the main thesis of clarificationism, it borders on the trivial. The triviality of the
conclusion is obvious when it is made clear that it is not peculiar to narratives that
they cannot teach Level 1 moral knowledge. There is nothing distinctive about
the inability of narrative to teach us in this way.
The rewritten argument is thus too weak to be of any interest. Although it
would be inaccurate to suggest that it is the only argument Carroll uses, it is
certainly one of them. This is evident from Carrolls stress on the triviality of
the moral propositions embodied in narratives, and from the fact that many of the
examples of moral propositions that he gives are classifiable as Level 1, such as the

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aforementioned concepts of vice and virtue (ANMU, p. 142) and All persons
ought to be given their due (ANMU, p. 144).
Carroll, however, also uses examples from Level 2 and 3 propositions, such as
specifically feminist conceptions of justice, which suggests that we could rewrite
the argument once again as follows:
(i) Understanding narrative depends on the possession of Levels 1, 2, and 3
moral concepts.
(ii) In any form of communication depending on possession of Levels 1, 2, and
3 moral knowledge, no interesting propositional knowledge may be gained.
(iii) No interesting new Level 1, 2, or 3 propositional knowledge may be gained
from narratives.
In stark contrast with the second version of the argument, this conclusion is, as
suggested above, far too strong. Carroll seems sometimes to hold it, however: he
states that it is not the case that the narrative teaches us something brand new, but
rather that it activates the knowledge and emotions, moral and otherwise, that we
already possess (ANMU, p. 141). That seems to rule out all levels of moral
propositional knowledge being learnt from narratives.

III
Carroll does not rule out the capacity of narratives to have any educational role
whatsoever. Instead he suggests that they may provide a moral education in other
ways, which may be divided under the following headings: (a) by prompting
us to apply already-held moral concepts to new (imaginary) situations; (b) by
prompting us to make connections between already-held moral beliefs; and (c)
by making already-known moral propositions more vivid than previously.3 The
division is somewhat misleading, as (a) is sometimes held by Carroll to be an
instrument that leads to (b) and (c), and hence as subsidiary to them. It is also
sometimes held to be a value in itself, insofar as fulfilling one of our potentialities
(activating our moral powers or using our muscles) may be thought inherently
valuable.
Not only can (a) lead to (b) and (c): it is only through (a) that (b) and (c) are
possible. Only, that is, by applying moral concepts to narratives can we make
connections between our already-held moral beliefs or clarify the ones we already
have. There are two ways, we contend, in which we may apply moral concepts,
each of which underpins (b) and (c) respectively. We shall argue that, whereas (c)
can be accommodated by clarificationism, (b) is, pace Carroll, best understood in
3

These conceptions are not clearly distinguished in AMNU. They feature most prominently, if
meshed together, in pp. 139146.

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terms of artworks conveying propositional knowledge, which cannot be so

accommodated.
We have already granted Carroll the point that understanding a narrative is
impossible without the mobilization of already-held concepts and knowledge. He
states, in being prompted to apply and engage our antecedent moral powers, we
may come to augment them (ANMU, p. 142). The point Carroll is getting at is
that having certain conceptual powers increasedflexing ones moral muscles, so
to speakis not identical to having ones stock of propositional moral knowledge
increased, and that narratives are conducive to the former rather than the latter.
According to Carroll, in encouraging us to apply our moral knowledge and
emotions to specific cases (ANMU, p. 142), narrative prompts us to do something we do in everyday life. There are, of course, differences: we are usually
granted more knowledge of the inner lives of fictional characters than those of
real people, and our distance as spectators from their lives may enable us to apply
moral concepts with greater ease.
We do not want to deny that the experience of narratives involves the
mobilization and application of already-held moral concepts to new cases. We
wish, however, to distinguish between two types of cases to which moral
concepts may be applied, the challenging and the non-challenging, which has, we
believe, important implications for Carrolls argument. An example of a
non-challenging application of a moral category would be one where we asked to
judge behaviour that obviously falls under well-understood categories. Judging
that rape is a bad thing is a straightforward matter, and judging one case after
another will not enhance our powers of moral discrimination, just as lifting very
light weights will not enhance ones musculature. This is because in both cases
ones powers are not challenged in any way. We take this to be an uncontroversial
point.
What about challenging cases? It may be the case that we have to think twice
before applying moral concepts, in virtue of the complexity of a situation and/or
our previous failure to have thought hard enough about previously held beliefs.
Carroll gives examples from literature in which a readers preconceptions may be
challenged. A feminist author may be able to show us injustice where before all
we saw was culture as usual. Thus, in Up the Sandbox, Anne Richardson Roiphe
juxtaposes adventure fantasies with the daily chores of a housewife in order to
highlight the inequality of the latters life when compared to her husbands
(ANMU, p. 142). One way of characterizing what is going on here is that the
reader may start with the beliefs that (1) men and women are equal; (2)
housework is just as fulfilling as other kinds of work; and consequently (3) there
is nothing unjust in a division of labour which consigns women to the home. In
undermining (2), the novel blocks the inference to (3), and indeed may lead to
the adoption of a contrary view. We are, in this case, reclassify[ing] barely acknowledged phenomena afresh (ANMU, p. 142). The crucial question that arises

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is that of whether this reclassification yields (potentially) new propositional

knowledge. If so, Carrolls argument would be undermined. To reclassify
something is, surely, to apply a concept to a situation to which it had not
previously been applied, and hence to create a new proposition. As Carroll
himself puts it, it seems to me that the work of many feminist novelists has been
to get people to reclassify a great many everyday practices under the category of
injustice (ANMU, p. 144). The propositional knowledge gained in this case
could be expressed as I previously considered phenomena X, Y, and Z to be just,
but now I consider them unjust. Carroll obscures the above point by using ambiguous metaphors, such as in the following passage:
audience members put together previously disconnected belief fragments in a new
gestalt in a way that changes their moral perception . . . they are prompted to make
connections between the beliefs they already possess . . . The characters and the
situations presented by the play [A Raisin in the Sun, an anti-racist play] afford an
occasion to reorganize and reshuffle the moral beliefs that the white audience already has
at its disposal. (ANMU, p. 143, our italics.)

Crucial here is the notion of making connections between beliefs: it can mean
either the making of logical connections that entail new beliefs, or simply the
juxtaposition of previously held beliefs with no change in their content or ones
belief-set generally. If the former is meant, then propositional knowledge clearly
follows. If the latter is meant, it is hard to see the point of bringing together
in ones mind two beliefs, unless logical connections are made between them.
Going back to the feminist novel discussed above, there would be little point in
the novel bringing (1) and the negation of (2) to our minds unless something
follows from that. The notion of a reorganisation or reshuffling of ones beliefs
is also misleading, since reshuffling a pack of cards does not change the cards
themselves. If reshuffling beliefs implies giving a new hierarchy to ones moral
beliefs, and granting some greater relative importance than one had in the past,
then that too can clearly be expressed in propositional terms.
Carroll goes some way towards conceding the above point when he tells us that
[By] talking of expansion or enlargement of our moral powers, I am not speaking
metaphorically, since the process of understanding that I have in mind concerns
making more connections between what we already know and believe, while by the
notion of exercising our moral understanding I mean to signify that successful
narrative artworks, as a condition of intelligibility, compel us to make moral
judgements. (ANMU, p. 145)

Note the use of the phrase moral powers instead of moral knowledge, followed
by reference to the making of connections between what we already know and
believe and the moral judgements that we are thereby compelled to make. The
expansion of moral powers, the refinement of ones moral conceptual scheme,

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is, we have argued, difficult to distinguish from an expansion of ones moral

knowledge. That Carroll needs to refer to the terminology of knowledge and
cognition after referring simply to conceptual powers only reinforces the point.
Carroll sketches one connection between narrative and moral beliefs, the
addition of new beliefs as we readjust internal relations in our web of beliefs in
response to imaginative stimulus. This strongly suggests the possibility of new
and interesting propositions being learnt from narratives. Because we find
Carrolls description of that connection convincing, we do not find his general
thesisclarificationismconvincing, since it excludes the idea of interesting
moral propositions being learnt from narratives.
Let us return briefly to the question of levels of moral judgement touched on
earlier. In the case of the feminist novel, changes in our belief-set were the result
of relations between levels of moral belief being disturbed. In the example
referred to above, (1) (equality between men and women) is clearly more basic
than (2) (housework is fulfilling). By keeping (1) in place and presenting (2) with
a powerful counter-example, one shifts what one classifies under (1), or what it
would take for (1) to be realized. For a narrative to alter moral beliefs, then, it has
to do so by having an impact on the less basic levels of moral belief, which then
reverberates to the more, but not the most, basic levels.
We now turn to (c), the second way that we may apply already-held moral
concepts to new situations. In these cases, in which the situation is morally
non-challenging, we merely apply our already-held moral concepts and knowledge without effecting any change in their content. Carroll sometimes implies
that this is what is meant by clarification, when he uses the notion of vividness
and narratives making our beliefs more vivid than previously (ANMU, pp. 142,
145). We accept that there is a sense in which a belief may be more vivid than
it was before, without necessarily being added to in any way. Shelly Kagans
distinction between vivid and pale beliefs is pertinent here:
We must distinguish between two ways that beliefs can be represented in the mind: a
belief can be vivid, or it may be pale. Pale beliefs are genuine beliefsbut they are
displayed to the mind in such a way that the individual does not fully appreciate their
import.4

An example: one has the belief that there are people in the world who live in
grinding poverty, and that there are children who have to discontinue their
education at an early age in order to help their families survive. A film about a
child who goes through such experiences could fulfil the purposes of transforming such a pale belief into a vivid one. Such a film is not therefore challenging our
beliefs, but may simply bring them to out minds in a vivid manner. This latter
conception of the relation between narrative and moral knowledge no doubt
4

Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 283.

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has a significant role to play in a full account of the relation. As our preceding
discussion of (a) has suggested, however, it is not the only significant relation, as
clarificationalism needs it to be.
Let us recap: we have found that there is a plausible account to be had of the
notion that a narrative may prompt us to make connections between alreadyheld moral beliefs, but that talk of propositional knowledge will inevitably
make its way into that account. This has not altogether obliterated the claims of
clarificationism, however, since the notion of narratives simply clarifyingin the
sense of making vividknowledge we already possess can also be recognized as
one way in which narratives may relate to moral knowledge.
IV
In this section we would like to argue that Carrolls argument for clarificationism
makes better sense if applied to political morality rather than personal morality.
There are, we argue, general features of political moral propositions that lend
themselves to model (c) rather than (b).
The plausibility of Carrolls arguments derives in part from his selection of
examples. In both kinds of cases mentioned above (the feminist and poverty
cases) the kinds of moral truths that have been clarified either in the sense of
made more vivid or in the sense of deduced from other beliefs have been of
a broadly political nature, concerned with the way that we refine or apply our
conception of justicethe central concept of political moralityin the light of
particular cases. There is, however, a class of moral issues that is best classified
not as political but as personal. It is our contention that when we gain personal
moral knowledge from narratives, it is generally through the mechanisms described in sense (b), the connection-making model. Political moral issues, by
contrast, are best thought of as being clarified in narratives in sense (c), the vividmaking model. The joint division between mechanisms and kinds of moral
knowledge is not a hard and fast one, however, partly because the distinction
between political and personal morality is not hard and fast. The remainder of
this section will defend it for the purposes of our argument.
Narratives typically focus on individuals and their relationships with one
another, rather than on entire societies or social movements. A distinct range of
moral questions arises when those fictional individuals are explored, up close and
personal, by a narrative. Among them are the conditions for personal flourishing
and fulfilment, as well as multiple ways in which people might deceive themselves and each other. That narratives have the capacity to explore the labyrinth
of the human heart is a commonplace of humanist criticism. Numerous critics
have argued that this personal domain is not reducible to the political, and Nol
Carroll gives no indication of being in disagreement with them.5 One such critic,
5

See e.g. Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca: Cornell U.P.,

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David Parker, offers a reading of George Eliots Middlemarch that illustrates what
kind of moral truths come under the rubric of the personal. As Parker reads the
novel, we are indeed, as Carroll puts it, invited to make connections between
certain character traits and certain possibilities of living and relating to others and
oneself. For instance, the character Casaubon is intent throughout the novel on
pursuing his lifework, Key to All Mythologies, a quest for theoretical mastery
traced by George Eliot to a recoil from spontaneity and life that has its source
ultimately in fear, but which finally leads to a stiflingly closed view of the world,
in which everything, including his relationship with his wife, has to be subsumed
under abstract categories of duty in order to be legitimated. Eliot shows how
certain of Casaubons character-traits are connected: his fear of life with a recoil
into theory; the recoil into theory with the suppression of spontaneity; the
suppression of spontaneity with the inability to relate to his wife; and so on.6 In
making these connections, we arrive at more sophisticated beliefs about moral
psychology and character, not just Casaubons character but the general type he
represents, and the continuities and discontinuities with other types. As Parker
emphasizes, the continuities between Casaubon and the other characters in the
novel are such that whatever our moral judgement on Casaubon, it must be
complex, more so than Carrolls, who tells us that the reader must ultimately
find Casaubon despicable in order to get Middlemarch (ANMU, p. 139). As
George Eliot famously puts it, We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the
world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.7
The above insights provided by Middlemarch into moral psychology are not
political but personal. It is hard to see how they could be put to any use in either
an abstract theory of justice or a concrete political proposal about how a society
ought to be governed. No doubt they might be made relevant to it in some
indirect way. They certainly suggest that some moral problems are beyond the
reach of politics, such as those that Casaubon exemplifies. (He is not, of course,
alone in the novel in facing a difficult personal predicament, though it is clearly
more acute than theirs.) Insofar as those problems are seen as beyond the reach
of political solutions, a negative thesis follows about the scope of the political,
according to which it is not the case that political changes, be they reformist
or revolutionary, can transform the personal in a way that would eradicate all
conceivable personal problems. Only a Marxist of a fervently utopian cast would
reject this negative thesis: all human problems, for this character, come down to
1996); Kenneth R. Johnston, Self-consciousness, Social Guilt, and Romantic Poetry: Coleridges
Ancient Mariner and Wordsworths Old Pedlar, in Richard Eldridge (ed.) Beyond Representation
(Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1996), pp. 216248; and Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an
Ideological Age (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989).
6

See David Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1994), ch. 6, for an
extraordinarily subtle reading of the novel.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 243, our italics.

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the political. We shall not argue against this view here, prevalent though it is in
contemporary literature departments, if nowhere else.
Apart from the difference in scope between personal and political moral issues,
there is a difference in their obviousness. In the example of the film about
poverty, the obviousness of the political messagethat such things happenis
counterbalanced by the fact that it is made more vivid for the spectator. W ith
cases in which certain forms of self-deception, their causes, and consequences are
explored in narrative, the connections they invite us to make are less obvious than
the political ones. Since the vivid-making model applies to propositions that we
know already, those propositions are more likely to be obvious than the more
subtle propositional knowledge we might gain from Middlemarch, say. It follows
that the vivid-making model applies more readily to the political examples that
Carroll uses.
This is not to deny that, as some of Carrolls examples seem to us to show,
some political narratives can be read in such a way as to generate propositional
knowledge and classifications. We wish, however, to qualify this with the following three points. The first is that the moral knowledge to be gained from the
feminist novel Up the Sandbox isif not altogether obviousthen more obvious
than the kind of depth-psychological insight offered by George Eliot. Second,
feminist themes seem to straddle the divide between the personal and the
political, and thus borrow some of the characteristic techniques of both, the
making vivid of propositions and the inducement to substantive cogitation.
Third, although a feminist novel such as Up the Sandbox may change our
political perspective, it will do so through persuasively bringing to our attention
the inner life of a bored housewife. Although, as we have argued, this may lead
to new propositional knowledge, the way in which it does so differs in a crucial
way from that granted by other kinds of political tracts. A comparison with
non-fictional feminist work, such as the Shere Hite reports, which consists in
large part of statistical and empirical data, is instructive here.8 The Hite reports
are based on numerous interviews with men and women about their attitudes
towards relationships and sexuality. The reports had a strong impact in part
because of their extensive empirical documentation. Going back to our discussion
of the levelled nature of moral judgement, Level 3 judgements are classified as
such because of their sensitivity to change in belief about facts. As we point out
above, political disagreement is often settled with reference to facts only, as there
is often agreement about moral political concepts such as the nature of justice. By
giving a convincing statistical account of certain kinds of facts, the Hite reports
may feed into ones moral beliefs and change them accordingly. However, a
fiction such as a narrative artwork cannot point to the state of the world in the
8

See Shere Hite, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (New York: Macmillan,
1976) and The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (New York: Knopf, 1981).

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way that a sociological report can. It seems therefore that it cannot lead to at least
one kind of change in ones political outlookthat which depends on the
recognition of certain facts in the world.
Going back to Carrolls moral-ladenness argument, we can now see that it
has more weight in the political case than in the personal moral case. Why? In
political argument, changes in ones beliefs oftenif not alwaysdepend on
changes in our factual beliefs. And since a fictional narrative cannot point to the
world in the manner requisite for such changes to take place, it cannot, it seems,
effect such changes in our political beliefs. Of course, many political narratives,
such as satires, depend on the audiences possession of a significant stock of
factual information for their very comprehension. The understanding of some
narratives may not only be morally laden, then, but factually laden. That is not to
say, however, that they can provide us with new factual knowledge, which in turn
could have an impact on our political beliefs. On the other hand, as we have
stressed, the inability of narratives to furnish us with new factual information of
the brute empirical kind does not altogether wipe out their ability to change our
political views. For they may force us to draw conclusions from our previous
beliefs by forcing us to take up a new perspective on them. That is why Carroll
refers to barely acknowledged phenomena, such as the inner life of the housewife, which we have to classify in one way or another when they are brought to
our consciousness as a result of a narratives insistence that we take up a new
perspective on them. In this case, something that we already know, that housewives typically spend their time going through uninspiring routines, with time
off for daydreaming, is made vivid for us. Once that is done, however, certain
changes in our beliefs follow, which we may have failed to make. We may be
brought to see how appallingly vacuous and futile such a life can be, a conclusion
we had not previously arrived at. Note that the way we have described the
example depends on the making vivid of something we already knew; it goes
beyond simply doing that and effects a subsequent change in our set of beliefs,
unlike the poverty film example used above. It follows that sometimes the
vividness model, (c), can be incorporated into the connection-making model, (b).
The opposite can never, of course, be the case.
One last point on this question. We state above that narratives generally do not
present us with new facts, and that this is more of a liability for political narratives
than personal ones. Why is it the case that personal narratives are less dependent
on brute factual information? We note above, in agreement with Carroll, that in
order to understand a narrative we need to possess at least some knowledge of
psychology. As we have seen, much of what comes under the rubric of personal
morality is closely related to psychology. It seems that our beliefs about moral
psychology can be refined and changed in abstraction from knowledge of brute
empirical facts, as our use of the Middlemarch example indicates. The personal
moral message that the novel conveys is independent of knowledge of time or

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place. The fact that it is set in the early nineteenth century is not of great
significance, because the issues it deals withthe barriers between man and man
(or man and woman), or our moral stupidity, and how it might be overcome
are perennial. The same cannot be said of the housewife example, for the simple
reason that the lot of the housewife is variable, contingent, and possibly a
circumscribed historical and social phenomenon.
V
Let us return to Carrolls argument. We have argued that it fails to exclude new
and interesting propositional knowledge being communicated by artworks, and
indeed gives some useful clues as to how such knowledge may be communicated.
Some loose ends remain. First, we would like to take a closer look at Carrolls use
of specific examples. Second, we would like to examine the argument from
irreplaceability, which Carroll attributes to the autonomist.
Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishment is one of the examples Carroll uses, the
propositional upshot of which, according to Carroll, is that murder is wrong
neither new nor very interesting. We dispute Carrolls assertion that it is the
only moral proposition that the novel offers. Murder is wrong because murder is
defined as unjustified killing. The question around which the novel revolves,
however, is that of whether the killing of an old and evil money-lender by a
young, gifted but impecunious student is justified or not. Or at least the question
is, is it the case that Raskolnikovin many ways a representative and sympathetic
figurecan live with having committed what he knows to be an immoral act,
however much he may rationalize it after, and indeed before, the event? The
moral thrust of the novel clearly points to a negative answer to this question. This
propositional knowledge, if it is knowledge, is not trivial.
On to the irreplaceability argument. Carrolls argument for clarificationism, let
us recall, is conceived in part as a response to the autonomist argument that no
moral education can be had from narratives. Carrolls main line of argument is
that the autonomists notion of moral education is too narrow, and that if it is
expanded in a suitable way, an educational role can indeed be ascribed to narrative
artworks. Among the arguments that Carroll ascribes to the autonomist is the
following irreplaceability argument.
[If] an artwork pretends to such a role [of teaching or discovering moral truths], such
truths it disseminatesunderstood as propositionscould unquestionably be
acquired just as readily by other means, such as sermons, philosophical tracts,
catechisms, parental advice, and so on. Art, in other words, is an unlikely means of
moral education, and even where it professes to have some interesting moral maxims
to impart, it is hardly a uniquely indispensable vehicle for conveying such messages.
(ANMU, p. 130)

Carroll does not reply to the argument, but, given its prominence in autonomist

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literature, it seems that it needs to be answered. The first part of our answer will
look at whether clarificationism provides an answer to it. For if the attack on
propositionalism focuses on the fact that moral propositions can be acquired
from other sources than a given narrative, then Carrolls clarificationism must,
one takes it, show how the knowledge clarified through narratives can only be
clarified through narratives, and nowhere else. But that is clearly false. Ones
knowledge of the extent of poverty in the world may be made more vivid
through a narrative film, but it can also be made more vivid through looking
at photographs of real people enduring extreme poverty. Propositionalism and
clarificationalism are both in the same boat in this respect.
The second part of our answer is that even though imparting moral propositions is not something that only narratives do, and hence that such propositions
can be got at through other means, this fact does not present a problem for
propositionalism. The autonomist claims that if the moral knowledge conveyed
by narrative artworks can be conveyed through other means, at least in principle,
then those artworks would no longer be uniquely indispensable vehicle[s] for
conveying such messages. We fail to see, however, why the alternative envisaged
by the autonomist is unacceptable. The thought seems to be that if the knowledge
that narratives give us can be obtained elsewhere, then the works themselves will
be replaceable, and hence dispensable in favour of other forms of communication. That is indeed an unacceptable conclusion, but it does not follow merely
from the premise that the knowledge artworks convey can be arrived at through
other means. Artworks themselves will not be dispensable so long as their
combined values are irreplaceable, and nothing about propositionalism negates
that view. There is good reason to think that the artistic value of narratives is
made up of other values in addition to that of dispensing moral knowledge, such
as the beauty and power of the use of language, the cleverness of plotconstruction, and so on. Such formal and hedonic values are bound up with its
moral and cognitive values to make up its artistic value. The distinctiveness of the
combination of those values that constitutes artistic value is not threatened by
the fact that moral knowledge can be acquired through any of the forms Carroll
mentions above, and indeed simply from experience, just as it does not collapse
the values of each of those forms into each other.
Carrolls argument for clarificationism serves a subsidiary function in his
article, that of refuting autonomism, the view that moral value neither contributes anything to nor subtracts anything from the overall value of the artwork
(ANMU, p. 127). Although Carrolls demonstration that the usual arguments for
autonomism are inadequate (AMNU, pp. 129131) strikes us as persuasive, it
is not clear to us that his argument against it is successful as it stands. For the
9

See e.g. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature: A Philosophical
Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), ch. 13.

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clarificationist argument, although it may show that it is legitimate to apply moral

terminology to artworkswe cannot understand them without a stock of moral
conceptsdoes not show that the moral value of a work necessarily plays a role
in its aesthetic evaluation, that is, its evaluation as art. It does not show why
a works failure to clarify a moral proposition, or to clarify the right moral
proposition, might count against it as a work of art. The argument only refutes
the radical autonomist, who denies the intelligibility of the application of moral
terminology to artworks, and leaves unscathed the moderate autonomist, who
denies the direct relevance of such moral criteria to aesthetic evaluation.
VI
We have argued that clarificationism, if understood as the thesis that the only
thing a narrative can do with moral notions is clarify them, is false. It is, however,
one of the relations that a narrative might bear to morality, the main other one
being the communication of interesting moral propositions. We have argued for
this conclusion on the basis of a distinction between different levels of moral
thought, and a related picture of how a narrative might induce us to change our
moral beliefs. We have also suggested that Nol Carrolls examples, being mainly
concerned with political rather than personal morality, slant the issue in his
favour. We have also taken issue with some of his readings of the moral
significance of narrative works. In doing so, we hope to have clarified not only
clarificationism, but also some of the ways that art may relate to morality. That
there is more than one way is important, and Carroll himself, seemingly
inadvertently, suggests a number of them.
Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar, Philosophy Department, American University of Beirut, PO Box 11-0236, Beirut, Lebanon. Email: osconolly@hotmail.com,
bahji@aub.edu.lb