![]() By discussing the shortcomings of one means of assessment, I must inevitably say, or imply, something about the kinds of conditions that would provide an adequate basis for measurement the conditions in respect of which I find thought experiments lacking. Such stories resist emotional engagement. Finally, thought experiments typically lack psychological insight, characters such as Thomson’s ‘Fat Man’ rarely speak and so they cannot communicate their hopes and fears (Thomson 1978). In telling stories this way, the author prejudges – erroneously – those things that are ethically relevant. Thought experiments purposefully lack detail the people that populate them are often nameless, ageless, and faceless the places they live and die are anonymous. In doing so the moral imagination is denied the possibility of finding a third way. Some deny a world in which many options are live, what remains is a stark bifurcation: do you shoot ‘the Indian’ or not? (Williams 1973). Ethical dilemmas are deliberately inflexible and polarising, as a consequence, they fail to convincingly capture the causality and contingency of everyday life. In doing so they prioritise cool intellectual reasoning. ![]() They are often minimally temporal: the time-critical moment of decision-making is often misrepresented, existing as an eternal pause in which the second person ‘you’, the implicated reader, may take all the time they need to deliberate: ‘do I pull the lever or not?’ (Foot 1967). Thought experiments in particular, fail to engage a range of ethically relevant narrative features. Other narratives – among them most thought experiments – are lacking they fail to fully engage the portfolio of capacities at work in real-life ethical perception. Some narratives exhibit this logic more fully, have been crafted more perceptively and demand greater perceptiveness from the audience. The logic of narrative represents human experience as temporal, causal, contingent, particular, singular, psychological, inter-subjective and consequently, imbued with ethical value. Narrative is one of the dominant structures we use to experience, order and understand everyday life. Together these capacities constitute the epistemological virtue of perceptiveness ‘seeing a complex, concrete reality in a highly lucid and richly responsive way taking in what is there with imagination and feeling’ (Nussbaum 1990 p 152). To greater, and lesser extents all of these kinds of stories embody ethical perspectives and require an ethical perspective and ethical capacities in order to engage fully with them capacities I understand as intellectual, emotional and imaginative. My thesis is that we live and learn by narrative bible stories, court cases, fairy-tales, novels, news, excuses, theatre, pornography, comics, diaries, films, soap operas, gossip, folk-songs, memories, ballet and thought experiments. I focus on defending the claim that thought experiments are not adequate for the job and begin with an account of the relationship between narrative and ethics that makes this seem plausible. I assume that it is theoretically possible to measure an individual’s virtue by eliciting responses to stories. But they won’t do for many reasons that I must sidestep in this paper. Such tests are simple, relatively risk-free and easily replicable on a large scale. ![]() The use of such experiments may seem attractive they neatly capture ethical ambiguity divide respondents by intuition and opinion, and demand careful deliberation and clear reasoning. ![]() ) or in professional training and testing in areas such business. But they are increasingly used to test individuals in projects to gather empirical data (e.g. Thought experiments have traditionally been used to strengthen or weaken particular ethical theories (Brown and Fehige 2011). My money would be on complex and convincing narratives on flesh and blood stories, and not on traditional skeletal ethical dilemmas of the kind that predominate in moral philosophy (Dennett 1984) and more recently in moral psychology (Doris and Stitch 2012). If such an approach were effective then I propose that not any old story would do. The respondent giving a virtuous response, however that is to be construed, is virtuous. Suppose we could measure virtue like this: We present a person with problematic story, then invite them to respond with an account of what they would do in such circumstances.
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