Moral capacities and other constraints

Cristina Mejia

pp. 212-228

in: Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, Tim Woods (eds), The ethics in literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

If the loss of Eden is indeed signalled by the shedding of certain naive and self-important illusions about the nature and place of humanity, then it is surely odd that it has come to serve, in the Western literary tradition, as a metaphor not for virtue, but for a fatal moral lapse. Evidently, however, intellectual virtue is its own reward, for the prospect of losing the last of the old comforting certainties about our species has not dissuaded today's literary theorists from completing the task of deconstructing "the moral subject" that was in a sense begun by the last century's men of science. Our possession of a moral sense, once widely held to be a uniquely human trait, has become a dubious distinction, not so much because other creatures have turned out to possess something like it, as because the idea of moral truth, and the idea that moral knowledge is possible, have gone the way of other ideas of reason, and fallen into critical disfavour.