Moral Particulars in Literature

MORAL PARTICULARS IN LITERATURE

By William Vaughan

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The Montréal Review, June 2025

I often share with my undergraduate philosophy students that the value of literature comes not from what it asserts or proposes in the form of propositions, but what it reveals about the humanity of human beings. At the risk of adding one more ‘ism’ to an already impressive list of theories, let’s call this approach particularism in ethics. The idea behind this view is that moral problems are incredibly complex, in fact some of the most complex problems that humans face. That complexity is written into the situations to such an extent, that every ethical problem is unique and can only be rationally adjudicated if the specifics of the context are fully spelled out. A one sentence definition of particularism might then read as follows: there is a right thing to do in every ethical circumstance, but every situation is unique, and must address the particulars involved (such as the individuals performing the actions, the individuals impacted by the actions, their unique histories, the historical and cultural contexts in play, etc.). Throughout the typical semester, in my courses we read thinkers who are generalists, for whom the main task of ethics is applying theories or principles to resolve the issue. Particularists however reject this presumption of theory. The flow of life cannot always be incorporated into rules or theories. For this reason moral particularity is difficult to get at conceptually, and to maintain or convey in teaching. It does not lend itself to portable concepts.

Today’s undergraduate comes to class with a head full of trolley-problems, basic thought-experiments in ethics designed to spell out contradictions in our moral intuitions. Such cookie-cutter approaches to ethics however create distortions. We know nothing of the stick-figure representations of human beings in the trolley examples. We know nothing of the existential dread that must come with any such decision to push an individual or pull a lever. Trolley-problems are profoundly divorced from the concrete particulars of any circumstance, including the histories of the individuals involved and the significance of the situation in question for them. In short they are cartoonish reductions of ethics. Particularism aims to be the opposite of this approach, a counter-weight to accelerated judgment: the right thing to do can only be established by a complete description of all that is ethically relevant in the situation. There is no absolutely good or right thing to do across all contexts; but there is a right-thing-to-do-here-and-how, with these people in this situation.

In teaching ethical theories we are to be reminded that possibilities exist in life that can be obscured by theory. Something is amiss in theory when a recognizable feature of moral experience becomes distorted, but exactly what that is can be hard to express: a certain depth and resonance, a lived-feature or ‘facticity’ as German philosophers might put it. Various particularists have argued that ethical problems are actually self-contained wholes, requiring knowledge of the ethical worlds within which people operate.1 They use different vocabularies to get at what they are after, such as moral perception with regard to these particulars, or moral imagination, in anticipating what might be involved in the various ethical contexts. This means having moral sensitivity, attention, or intuitive connection to the particulars of every situation. Straightforward moral identification is where the reader comes to connect with the textually created characters in a narrative. It relies on the grasping or comprehension of another’s real and represented experience as one’s own. This is especially powerful in the immersion experience of the work of art or literature. What happens in the act of reading is that the barriers between the self and the text fall away, when one is inside the text, as it were, and it is inside of oneself, to where there is no longer an inside or an outside. This seems to be part of aesthetic experience of reading, even if much of contemporary literary analysis is aimed toward the destruction of the comfortable sense of identification and the encouragement to identify that realism offers.

Perhaps no definition will do justice to the complexity of our experience of literature, for that interaction reveals patterns that do not yield to our demand for definitions that are coherent, or elegant. In this regard ethical judgments are more analogous to aesthetic judgments, requiring full-bodied interpretation of the events before rendering any judgments regarding what to do. What I am aiming to describe is an ethical interaction, more a coming-to-oneself than a losing-of-oneself. It may even take the form of an engagement that seizes one involuntarily, to the point where one holds that one is no more the author of the meaning that is presented than that we are the author of the situations themselves. The meaning is not added to the situations; on the contrary the situations are already immediately meaningful; they do not intervene between the reader and what is read. It is a sort of metaxu, a medium which does not intervene, but is the condition of a direct contact. Speaking very loosely, my guides in this endeavor have been bits and pieces from figures such as Winch and Gadamer, intellectual figures coming from very different traditions (although each can be described as hermeneuticists of a sort). Hans-Georg Gadamer was one of the central figures in German hermeneutics in the 20th century, and I have been influenced by the endeavor of hermeneutics as both an interpretive framework and a general orientation in ethics. My initial focus will be on Peter Winch, the British philosopher who wrote an article on the “Universalizability of Moral Judgments” in his work Ethics and Action in which he discusses Melville’s great novel Billy Budd.2

In this well-known article Winch defends a position that places a certain class of first-person moral judgments in a special position as not subject to universalization requirements. That ‘Kantian’ requirement of logical consistency suggests that in making a judgment of the form person X ought to do Y, I am committed to the claim that anyone in circumstances that do not differ in any morally relevant response ought to do the same. By contrast, Winch argues that there is a class of judgments of the form “This is what I ought to do” that does not logically commit anyone else in a similar situation to do the same.

Already this presents a classroom moment, as it conveys to students that the study of ethics, at least in part, is not the search for a traditional moral theory that covers all cases. Instead the task is attending to how moral language is actually used in life-contexts, which calls for entering into the forms-of-life in which such concepts are found. This is not then to speak of the novel or short story as a literary artefact, but as living instances of self-understandings of moral agents whose mutual engagements take place in the context of a variety of moral practices, each of which may involve distinct standards of meaning. The idea is not to teach to the exclusion of theory; but, again, understanding ethics as a subject for theory alone is to risk neglecting the vitality of the particular case or situation. Undergraduates manifest well the tendency of moral philosophers searching for universal answers to ethical questions in displaying a craving for generality that it is not in the nature of ethics to provide.

In Melville’s story, Billy Budd, a moral innocent, kills Claggert, his naval superior, who has goaded and provoked him out of malevolence. When Budd is charged falsely by Claggert with inciting the crew to mutiny he is rendered mute, and in frustrated moral outrage strikes Claggert and kills him. Vere, who as captain has responsibility for trying the offense, is confronted with conflicting moral considerations, namely the imperatives of the military law he is sworn to uphold and the demands of natural justice. On the one side Billy Budd has killed his naval superior; on the other, Claggert’s malignant and provocative falsehoods are directed against one innocent of the charge.

Along the lines of traditional theory, the conflict Vere is faced with is between two moral considerations, a choice between alternatives of administering the law impartially leading to the punishment that follows, and a compassion for the particular circumstances that leads to clemency. Both courses of action are universalizable, which centers the moral dilemma: Vere’s tragedy is that in fulfilling the one universal obligation he must violate the other. In his article, Winch places himself imaginatively into Vere’s position and argues that he could not have acted as Vere did, despite the fact that he believes Vere to have acted correctly. Winch emphasizes that this is not because he appeals to any consideration over and above those to which Vere himself appeals rather because Vere himself has illustrated that both decisions are equally valid.3 Thus the example displays that the universalizability principle is idle. Two diverging and incommensurable moral perspectives can be correct.

Again in customary Kantian terms, Winch’s position is rationally inconsistent. It is impossible to endorse two contradictory judgments: namely Vere’s that Budd ought to be hanged and Winch’s, that Budd ought not to be hanged. Both judgments cannot be correct. A judgment can only be correct if it is not only correct for me but so too for any rational agent. Winch’s position would only be rationally consistent if he were to argue that moral judgments are culturally and historically situated, but this is exactly the position Winch does not take. He wishes to argue that even if we find ourselves in an identical situation without appealing to considerations over and above those to which Vere himself appeals, it is possible to arrive at an opposite judgment.

Vere would be facing a moral dilemma only if he were unable to find a solution, if he felt there is a moral requirement to adopt two incommensurable alternatives. Yet Vere does arrive at a decision, moreover, he believes it to be the correct one. He is not simply saying this is the right thing for me to do but this is the right thing for anyone occupying my position to do, namely, to proceed under the imperial code. From his point of view there is no dilemma. The decision is universalizable. The situation demands of Vere, or anyone else occupying his position, to show allegiance to the authority of the King.

Herein lies the strength of the particularist approach, that ethical issues are marked by radical singularity and uniqueness; every situation has a lived-quality such that one must be in the middle of it oneself in order to fully understand it. For Winch moments in literature manifest the particularity of the moral life, which are conveyed in an unmediated way, as opposed to the reductive misinterpretation of life seen in traditional theory. Unlike trolley-problems, literary instances do not artificially establish their purchase on our imagination. They give affordances, occasions to take a sort of moral stand of one’s own, or at least stake a claim to the beginnings of what might be called one’s own moral identity.

At this juncture, acknowledgement of the novel’s aesthetic character gives rise to an objection, (occasionally raised by my students), that such an approach is an invasion of art’s autonomy. That is, there is a sort of crudity in reading the novel for ethical particulars. A kind of harm is performed when the range of interest in the artwork is qualified. The novel, the short-story, whatever the aesthetic artifact, might think itself misused, possibly exploited, in being treated merely to illustrate a philosophical claim. Learning from devised examples remains contrived somehow; the fact that the examples originate from an artwork is incidental. Their authority derives from their place in an argument, separate from and despoiling the ‘world’ of the text. Culling moral examples is a form of reductionism not unlike trolley-problems themselves.

I might mention here a minor scholarly dispute I had with my colleague Russell Weaver in the English department of my university some years ago regarding this issue. A previous article of mine had sought to clarify the use to which Winch put this Melville text.Weaver responded to this point in his work The Moral World of Billy Budd.4 There Weaver takes Winch (and me) to ascribe genuine normative conclusions to Vere. However, Weaver argued that the particulars of the text indicate that the text’s views of Vere’s actions, and Vere’s views of his own actions, are different. According to Weaver, the novel manifests its own ‘world’ by which is meant the sum total of decisions, postures, criticisms, and behaviors of the individuals and characters within that world, including the narrative-view. Thus no single ethical claim will emerge as central; the ‘world’ is simply the panoply of different views and reactions to those views. If the moral world is the enabling condition for various ethical viewpoints, judgments, and reactions, then identifying some single ethical meaning to the text is as fruitless as identifying some single ethical meaning to any ‘world’.

Weaver’s argument went something like this: Winch wants to say (some moral propositional) X in relation to text y, but text y overall is fundamentally undecidable with regard to X. Therefore, whatever Winch wants to say is flawed because his doing so is “to use literary examples to bolster ethical arguments” and to “yoke literary texts to external venues.” Weaver takes the aesthetic stance and worries about philosophers making all-too-easy generalizations about the ethical significance of certain texts, (once again similar to the charge we made against trolley-problems). The point is that the world of Melville’s Billy Budd is fundamentally undecidable with regard to moral propositional conclusions. When an example from the novel enters an ethical argument it is isolating a certain component from the world of that novel. It cuts away a piece of it to be considered for purposes external to the work itself.

Another work, that of Peter Johnson, is more sympathetic to Winch but maintains a similar sort of stance.5 For Johnson, imagining that we are in the world of the aesthetic object is no doubt natural to the act of reading, but when the novel is read philosophically, as an example, an altogether more specialized and purposive activity takes place.6 Such a posture remains artificial, a categorical form of analysis rather than an encounter. Once again the charge is that this approach ‘quarries’ the novel for examples of moral concepts. Winch is not interpreting the novel. What he is asking is not what Melville asks, but asks instead what x can be extracted from the novel, diminishing its structure and point.7 Johnson’s take, similar to Weaver’s, is that to read or interpret something philosophically is to treat it like a body of evidence; and that rather the task should be to allow the novel to speak for itself, giving greater attention to the varied perspectives the novel contains, and drawing all possibilities from the novel rather than dismissing some. (Johnson notes, for instance, how Winch’s discussion leaves the religious dimensions of the novel behind). Thus, the posture of ‘philosophy’ is too assiduous in search of examples to illustrate its point, to the neglect of the aesthetic dimensions of the artwork; and there ought to be a way of reading that is more responsive both to the art of the novel and to its place in philosophy.8

I find this notion of aesthetic autonomy interesting, but ultimately problematic. It casts every artwork as embodying a singular complex of meanings brought into unity. Since its form is unique, so the argument goes, its content too is a singularity, inseparable from its form. Neither can be ranked in priority or importance, and thus nothing can be removed from an aesthetic piece without either distorting or altering the original whole. To substitute any other expression for the one already inhabiting an aesthetic piece would be to deny the world of that piece, disrupt its unique happening. All one can do is describe it without resolution. This reminds me of a famous short story by Borges in which the character (Funes) only experiences immediate particulars in life, to such an extent he is overwhelmed by the richness of every situation and cannot function. The concern is that particularism as an ethical orientation would need some sort of mechanism by which to provide a stopping point for the description of each situation, lest it bog down in a mire of endless descriptions.9

Such an approach however risks the impossibility of actually reading or reacting to literature. On such a view, Billy Budd is a complex of associations, values, and meanings which cannot be transported into paraphrase. Aesthetic autonomy rests on a conception of the radical uniqueness of literary works as peculiar verbal structures, as concrete universals unto themselves. Ethical actions, however, while perhaps not universalizable, are repeatable, and without their repeatability ethical norms would have no value in life; but in a literary work such as a poem or novel, under conditions of aesthetic autonomy, there are no aesthetic norms, other than the work’s own justification. A work of art as a unique entity does not allow for a general interaction, except presumably for the inquiry that argues for the radical uniqueness of it as a work of art. Such a posture would render impossible the activity of criticism since critics at best could experience rapturous wonder and be silent in the presence of the worlding of the work. Less a moral encounter, the notion of the unique world of an aesthetic object elicits only speechless admiration.10

By way of fashioning a further response to these points, here I will make brief reference to the work of Gadamer, as I think placing his name alongside that of Winch here is revealing, and introducing the idea of hermeneutics to students facilitates our ethical pursuits, as it illustrates a proximity between interpreting ethical situations and interpreting texts. Ethical life requires that we make reasonable decisions about what to do, and that we try to do the right thing, in each of the specific situations we find ourselves in. Yet ‘general orientations’ about good and evil do not of themselves offer enough to prescribe actions. It is not enough simply to determine in advance and then adhere to generalities about good and evil. Rather, in order really to make good on our responsibility, what counts is to understand and interpret the particulars in a way that does not merely treat them as portable examples. What is opened up is a portal to humanity in its entirety as an interpreting being, a world-with-others equally caught up in moral interpretation as a constitutive dimension of the human condition.

There is no world of the text or artwork over and above the horizon of sense we bring to those contexts. The very idea of there being a ‘world’ to a work of literature is a recent undertaking, not an a-historical phenomenon. Any framing of it requires a regard for the common world. One can only ever understand it in regard to oneself and the situation one finds oneself in, but in good hermeneutic fashion one must be reciprocally open to being changed by the encounter. This openness is such that the various issues are recognized not only as other but also as having something to tell me, as being able to call me into question. Hence hermeneutical experience assimilates a moment of negativity that can enlarge the experience of the one who has it.

The sort of understanding is a broader phenomenon, captured by Gadamer’s marvelous phrase as a fusion of horizons, which for our purposes here means that a student always understands starting from their own horizon and that what she understands itself constitutes another horizon than her own. Whenever there is such understanding, there is thus a more or less conscious fusion between horizons and that of the reality understood. But the understanding subject is caught up in still further questions than those the text asks her: her horizon fuses with still other horizons when she understands others, other cultures, and herself. She is unceasingly led to broaden her experience in new directions.

An ethical interaction with the text embodies a hermeneutic orientation. Knowing an object is different from coming to an understanding with an interlocutor. In coming to know some chemical structure, I do not have to deal with it’s knowing me or my knowing activity. One can achieve some finally-adequate explanatory language toward the chemical compound, making sense of it to the exclusion of all future surprise. Coming to an understanding with a dialogue-partner is different. That is an interpretive gesture that will never have a finality. Nor do the agents remain the same through the interaction. We seek to control this but unconstrained mutual understanding at one time may no longer hold good later.

Thus Gadamer’s points can be set beside those of Winch’s to good effect.11 Both construe the aesthetic experience as affording self-understanding. As Gadamer puts it, “inasmuch as we encounter the work of art in the world, and a world in the individual work of art, aesthetic experience does not remain a strange universe into which we are magically transported.” Rather the work has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience changing the person experiencing it.12 This is not then to abstract aesthetic experience from the rest of a human being’s moral experiences. In aesthetic experience there occurs a recognition of oneself, since to be absorbed into an experience of a work is to be absorbed into what is, into the way things are. This experience of what is, of reality, rather than a removal from it, is the essential feature of aesthetic experience.

For these thinkers, clarifying these implicit understandings and orientations reveals the tacit background of what it is to be a human being. One cannot suspend or operate outside of such ‘facticities’ – to suspend them would understand nothing about human beings at all. It might be possible to bracket out all human meaning from the languages of mathematics or natural science, but bracketing out human meanings from ethics would understand nothing at all. Understanding others in the hermeneutic sense means remaining open to the other or to the text, to be interpellated by it, acknowledge its differences from us, all things a live interlocutor in a situation of equal power would require us to do.

I think this is all by way of saying that more is going on than Winch reading Vere’s predicament merely as an example of the possibility that is ignored by those who regard the universalizability thesis as an exhaustive account of moral judgment. The reader is called to look and see just what they want to say about it. There is nothing that can entirely determine in advance what is to be said. But a sort of affordance manifests. Treating an instance as a mere example adopts a spectator-posture on the moment. The student studying Melville’s Billy Budd is involved in a direct and immediate relatedness. It displays how others often do not have time to run away or take a contemplative distance from the concrete situation of its immediate involvement. Their situation also discloses the truth of their own acting here and now. This disclosure is bound to the finite temporality of the moment, it is not a general truth already accessible in principle to any independent or supposedly neutral observer.

This approach often takes different tries, with different texts, in any one semester class. Values are perhaps best understood as a response to some aspect of the world. The world is not there independent of our sensibilities. We have to learn how to see such things. A sort of facility slowly emerges through repeated encounters.13 The study of literature in relation to ethics is not a culling of examples but an apprenticeship with certain sorts of happenings, within which a refinement of ethical response occurs. Thus what I try to cultivate is not a student identifying with a character in a text, but with someone’s coming to their own conclusions with regard to ethical concerns, as the situation requires. Subsequent readings replay this dynamic. The reader shapes the meaning of their moral perceptions through this apprenticeship. When confronted with particulars an agent with an appropriately formed character will be free from deliberating in a way that is analogous to the freedom of the expert musician or athlete. The practicing ethical apprentice must deliberate before acting, but the more experienced responds spontaneously. What the experienced one perceives is really there, but training is needed to perceive it. Accordingly there is more than one story that can be told to explain actions: the story we tell about the apprentice’s action may well be different from that of the more experienced veteran reader or student.

If every novel were unique then the idea of cultivating sensibility by sustained commerce with literature would have little purchase upon us, since some readers would be unequipped for responding to each unique work. Teaching ethics along these particularist lines yields subtle outcomes only over time and repetition, analogous to a sort of character development. The advanced student comes to see more clearly the ethical particularity reflected in the details of successive works. My point of course depends a good deal on the choice of literature: not much refinement is needed in instances of what might be understood as ethical obviousness, such as the genre of the literary grotesque, with Saunders’s references to human beings used as lawn ornaments, and the young girl who comes to reject the practice.14 The harder work comes in those instances of greater moral ambiguity, with the work representing the lived contexts of significance from which moral concepts gain their sense. Just as the English major builds up a proficiency with regard to the interpretation of texts, so too the ethics-student develops in their abilities to read such particulars. Her character is the result of a process of practice and habituation in these conditions. To read a text is to perceive meanings, which both modify and interact with the situation. The interaction of circumstances and character in the determination of action. Different readers will derive different ethical insights.

When Winch states that he could not have acted as did Vere, he is not merely reporting on subjective reactions but signaling a call for a similar authentication in the student.15 He is saying: one is similarly to decide for oneself. In this coming-to-decision one is coming to understand what it is possible for one to do. I think the situation is related to recognizing being called upon to help someone in need in everyday life. It is probably wrong to think that an answer could be presented in such a way that it could be compulsory for someone who did not already find themselves within a certain form of ethical life. Confronted with a lump of matter an apprentice cannot just choose to transform it into whatever product she wishes. Similarly with an ethical agent: confronted with a particular set of circumstances, the agent cannot just choose, in that moment, to read these circumstances however they might wish. But in both cases they can prepare themselves for future confrontations.

After all, experts perceive things that apprentices do not. There are realities not immediately perceivable or only after a process of training or habituation. The agent is not the actor but the medium through which the circumstances, clearly perceived, express themselves in action. The behavior of the apprentice, as an agent whose character has not yet formed, who must deliberate, at each moment, about where to place her hand on the tennis racket or how to respond to someone’s need. The ‘experienced reader’ is already primed to respond to a situation. Her action is not the result of deliberation, but the result of an interaction between her character and the circumstances. If asked to explain her action she may simply point to the facts that motivated her. Our capacity to accept such pointing as an explanation will no doubt be proportional to our capacity to share her perspective. Our understanding of her action, and of the circumstances which motivate it, will be a function of our own similar apprenticeships. 16

Moral particulars in literature, if not dismissed outright as forms of illegitimate persuasion, have been too often reduced to drive-by exemplars or fodder for this or that theory. Instead they form what Raimond Gaita has referred to as a way of thinking about the realm of meaning in our lives, what it means to do something truthfully and why it matters to someone, and why it is a deeper human need.17 What counts as thinking well in such a realm of meaning is, in part, determined by concepts that are usually more associated with the assessment of literature than philosophy. Thinking about the ethical meaning of things is necessarily answerable to such concepts because they partly determine their character. The concepts that determine the character of such thinking create the conceptual space in which thought and feeling, style and content, are inseparable. The critical categories that determine its character are also the critical categories deployed in our interactions with literature, and cannot be distanced from the natural moments that nourish them. This should be accepted as central to the nature of ethics, rather than regretted as an impediment to its perfection. Only within this realm can meanings be where the right thing to do can be found, where the humanity of another human being resides.

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William Vaughan is a professor of philosophy at Ashland University.

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This essay is part of the "Teaching..." series launched by The Montreal Review in 2024 and edited by Stephen Haven and Laura Ann Reed. The series publishes essays by scholars, writers, and artists on teaching and interpreting the work, ideas, and lives of prominent authors, philosophers, artists, and political figures.

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1 Major theorists along these lines include Martha Nussbaum, Jonathan Dancy, and theorists in the Wittgensteinian tradition such as Peter Winch, D.Z. Phillips, and Raimond Gaita.

2 Peter Winch, “Universalizability of Moral Judgments” in Ethics and Action. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.

3 Winch, op.cit., p. 163.

4 William Vaughan, Detours in Philosophy, Peter Lang Press, 2008; Russell Weaver, The Moral World of Billy Budd. Peter Lang Press, 2014. Weaver has continued in this vein in a subsequent work: The Moral World of The Sun Also Rises. Peter Lang Press, 2023.

5 Peter Johnson, Moral Philosophers and the Novel: A Study of Winch, Nussbaum, and Rorty. Palgrave, MacMillan, 2004.

6 Johnson, p. 49.

7 Johnson, p. 45.

8 Johnson, p. 53.

9 Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Press, 1998, pp. 131-137. Cited in Daniel DeNicola, Moral Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction. Broadview Press, 2019, p. 248.

10 This line of argument spelled out in Suresh Ravel, Metacriticism. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981).

11 Their proximity has long been recognized: see Roy J. Howard, Three Faces of Hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1082.

12 Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second revised edition. Translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. Crossroad Publishing, 1989, p. 97, 102.

13 No wonder Gadamer saw deep connections between hermeneutics and the gradual development of character required in Aristotelian phronesis.

14 George Saunders, “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” in Tenth of December. Random House, 2013.

15 Winch, op.cit., p. 163.

16 Warren Heiti makes this point with regards to Simone Weil, in “Reading and Character: Weil and McDowell on Naïve Realism and Second Nature,” in Philosophical Investigations 41:3 (July, 2018) pp. 267-290.