Narrative Ethics

Narrative Ethics

Robert Roberts*Baylor University

Abstract

This paper explores the relationships between philosophical ethics and literary narratives. Thefocus on virtues and vices in recent ethics has made narratives more integrally relevant to ethics.Some of the best literature displays moral (and immoral) character in richer ways than philosophyalone has resources to do, but philosophy brings to its description a schematic precision that narra-tive alone cannot supply. As traits of character, virtues differ from events like the actions,thoughts, emotions, and episodic desires that express the traits; traits are not episodes, but disposi-tions, and so require cumulative diachronic representation of such episodes. The paper illustratesthis point particularly with respect to emotions. It ends with reflections on the constitutive narra-tives by which the grammar of the virtues of some moral traditions, such as Judaism and Chris-tianity, is shaped.

1. Introduction

In both theological and non-theological ethics the concept of narrative has gained promi-nence in recent decades. This gain is due in part to a change of focus. In the first two-thirdsof the 20th century ethicists made little of character and the concepts of virtue and vice,being interested instead in the ethically ‘‘thin’’ concepts of rightness or wrongness, thegoodness or badness of actions and policies, and correspondingly in the rules and principlesgoverning actions. Since Elizabeth Anscombe’s ‘‘Modern Moral Philosophy’’ (1958) and itscall for attention to moral psychology, ethicists have increasingly focused on the concept ofcharacter and on virtues, such as courage, truthfulness, generosity, humility, and practicalwisdom, and their vice counterparts. Unlike actions, traits of character are not datableoccurrences in a person’s history, but dispositions: temporally extended qualities that areexhibited occurrently in action, intention, desire, thought, and emotion. One of the mostbasic and natural media for presenting such qualities is narrative, in which connectedsequences of actions, intentions, thoughts, and emotions are depicted in life-contexts thatare the natural settings of such occurrences. The psychologizing of ethics has meant thatnovels and biographies in which characters are narratively presented, sometimes with greatmoral psychological insight, have become important resources for thinkers about ethics.

Related to this first reason is a second. The revival of the ancient ideal of the goodperson as the healthy, fully functioning, self-realized person has caused the concerns ofethics to intersect with those of psychotherapy, some branches of which have longemployed narratives. Psychotherapeutic narrative characteristically tells the story of theperson whose improvement is chiefly in view, and so is reminiscent of the spiritual diaryand autobiography found in some parts and times of the Christian Church, famously withSt. Augustine and among the Puritans. In these cases vices and other defective disposi-tions and their historical antecedents and consequences are especially of interest, as areasof prospective moral improvement and clues to strategies for effecting it.

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With the erosion of the early modern ideal of universal Reason and culture-indepen-dent access to ethical norms, narratives reflecting particular ethical and religious traditionshave drawn greater interest. Some philosophers (for example, D. Z. Phillips 1992 andMartha Nussbaum 1990 in their very different ways) have used fictional narratives tocomplicate and enrich the overly tidy, simple, rationalistic, and psychologically and cul-turally thin accounts of morality that have been offered by modern philosophers.

When Christian and Jewish ethicists place the narratives constitutive of their moral tra-ditions at the center of their accounts of the moral life, they can declare a certain inde-pendence from reigning philosophical thought about ethics and exploit the richparticularities and distinctives of their traditions.

2. What is a Narrative?

A narrative is a verbal account (oral or written) of a temporally connected series ofevents, including mental events (for example, plans, assessments, emotions) and actions,including speech acts. It shows connections (continuities and changes, antecedents andconsequences) between the past, the present, and the future within and beyond thebounds of the narrative. It depicts characters, in their continuities and changes, throughdepiction of their actions, interactions, and reactions (for example, emotions), theirthoughts, desires and intentions at different points in time.

Narratives can be historically true, or fictional. If fictional, they can still be more or less‘‘true to life,’’ that is, represent real (human) possibilities or at any rate by their exaggera-tions and unreality, illuminate real human possibilities and actual human beings. They canhave the character of myth or allegory, in which case the characters are not in the lastanalysis individuals, but purportedly universal types of persons or of aspects of persons(e.g. virtues and vices, as in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress). Or the narrative maybe realistic (even if fictional), in that its characters are individuals. Oral and written his-tory (of which biography is of special interest here) and most novels are largely composedof realistic narratives. In the following discussion of the relations of ethics to narrative Ishall have realistic narratives, fictional and otherwise, chiefly in view.

3. Narratives and the Concept of a Self

In the opinion of many recent ethicists, the idea of a self as something to which its his-tory is merely accidental does not do justice to the concept of a self with which we dailydo business. (Examples would be a Cartesian ‘‘thinking substance’’ which would be thesame regardless of what actions, undergoings, thoughts, and passions its past is composedof, or an existentialist ⁄emotivist ‘‘agent (which), thin as a needle, appears in the quickflash of the choosing will’’ (Murdoch 1971: 3).) A person’s identity is constituted, in sig-nificant part, of his or her history. Thus if someone says, ‘‘Tell me about yourself; whoare you, anyway?’’ we may begin by giving our name and physical appearance, but wewill go on to tell about our connections with other people, our relations with institu-tions, things we have done (some quite long ago), things that have happened to us, andso on. Much of this account will necessarily take narrative form; the richer and more aptthe narrative, the greater the understanding of the self it may convey. If the incidents sonarrated are not just epiphenomenal of the real self, but are constitutive of who we are,then we can speak of the narrative nature of the self. We are not just beings who have apast; our past makes up, in part, what we are. I am the one who was born to such-and-such parents, who married so-and-so 20 years ago. My identity has a ‘‘narrative

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ª 2012 The Author Philosophy Compass 7/3 (2012): 174–182, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2011.00472.xPhilosophy Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

structure,’’ not in the sense that it is itself a narrative, but in the sense that it is in part ahistory that can be properly displayed only in a narrative.

One of the kinds of things that would have to be given account of in answer to thequestion, ‘‘Tell me about yourself; who are you?’’ is your character. Character is of spe-cial interest to the ethicist. One’s character is an aspect of one’s identity. We mightexplain a person’s present character by reference to his or her past. For example, wemight think that if he had not chosen a certain courageous course of action at an earlierjuncture, he would not now be the courageous, self-confident person he has become; hischaracter is (partially) caused by his past. But we would not say that his courage is consti-tuted of his past. It is constituted, instead, of his present dispositions to do, think, desire,and feel in characteristic ways, given a context appropriate to the display of courage.(Certain kinds of situation elicit displays of courage from the courageous person; otherkinds elicit displays of compassion; yet others, of truthfulness, and so forth for all thevirtues.) But a person’s character, just because it is a set of dispositions, is most naturallydisplayed in a narrative. Novelists like Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and George Eliotare astute presenters of character, and they ply their craft largely by narrating, in situ, thecharacters’ actions, thoughts, emotions, and desires.

Jane Austen comments, ‘‘Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot’scharacter; vanity of person and of situation’’ (Persuasion, chapter 1: 36). This sentence,like any mere ascription of a trait to a person, is not itself a narrative presentation of SirWalter’s character, though it is embedded in the narrative which is the novel, and itinvites such a narrative as a clarification. Austen gives us narrative proper when sherecounts the actions, emotions, and thoughts of this man, as in the opening lines of thenovel. He was, she tells us,

a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there hefound occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties wereroused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents;there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity andcontempt, as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century… (chapter 1: 35).

Here Austen is telling us, even if in generalities, what Sir Walter did and thought andfelt. Such things are the indicators of his character, the events in which his traits areexemplified. His conceit about his good looks and rank come out further in his reactionto the proposal that he should economize to relieve his financial distresses (ch. 1), hisexpressions of contempt for the navy as ‘‘the means of bringing persons of obscure birthinto undue distinction’’ and as causing men to lose their good looks early (ch. 3), and histhinking it will look better to let his house to somebody with ‘‘Admiral’’ before his namethan to a mere ‘‘Mr’’ (ch. 3).

4. Narratives and the Ethics of Character

The concepts of person, character, self, and related concepts provide the most fundamen-tal connection between narratives and contemporary ethics. The influence is reciprocal:because contemporary ethics is more psychological than the ethics of the recent past, it ismore interested in narratives; and this interest tends to make it more richly and con-cretely psychological. We can imagine a kind of philosophical ethics that uses narrativeexamples to pose or illustrate problems of action and rules for action: What should onedo in such-and-such a situation, and how would one know what to do? Did so-and-soact rightly when she did thus and such? Why or why not? Consider the narratives with

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which Lawrence Kohlberg (1984) presents moral dilemmas to train in moral reasoningand test for it. But this is not, for the most part, the way virtue-oriented ethicists use nar-ratives.

While present-day ethicists interested in character pursue many different goals in theirwork, some of which are narrowly ‘‘professional’’ or continuations of the ‘‘ethical the-ory’’ enterprise of discovering the universal conceptual foundations of ethical discourseand thought, it seems to me that an intrinsically central purpose of any ethics of charactermust be to understand better the moral life – in particular, to understand human virtuessuch as courage, compassion, humility, generosity, justice, truthfulness, practical wisdom,the sense of duty, and so forth, and their counterpart vices. A deep grasp of the nature ofthese traits is a significant part of what has been called ‘‘wisdom’’ in many traditions, andso character ethics is naturally a return to the ancient notion that the philosopher is inthe business of discovering, clarifying, and purveying ethical wisdom – an understandingof the good life for human beings.

I have said that narratives are a natural and powerful way to display virtues and vices.Great narrativists like Austen, Henry James, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Eliot are also, intheir own way, great moral psychologists. In their fashion they are what Aristotle callsphronimoi (people of practical wisdom) because they are able to present, with great deli-cacy and subtlety of nuance, the variants of human moral success and failure. But just asphilosophers are not very often good narrativists, so the best narrativists are not very oftenexcellent philosophers (the philosophical sections of Tolstoy’s War and Peace only mar thebook by injecting third-rate work into a great novel). It seems that a coordination betweenphilosophical and narrative presentations of the virtues and vices is needed. (Martha Nuss-baum, 1990, has argued for such a coordination.) What is a philosophical presentation ofa virtue or vice, and why is it needed, in addition to excellent narrative presentations?

The trait terms are regulated by what Wittgenstein (1953) would call a ‘‘grammar.’’(On the notion of the grammar of a trait, see Roberts 1991, 1994, 1995.) A term’s gram-mar consists in the ‘‘rules’’ for its application – where ‘‘rules’’ are not formulas, but pat-terns of usage. The grammar of a trait term, which may vary from one moral tradition toanother (Aristotelian liberality differs in grammar from Christian generosity, and both dif-fer from the Nietzschean schenkende Tugend (bestowing virtue), Roberts and Wood 2007,chapter 11), determines such things as the kind of actions and emotions (in situ), ofmotives and reasons, that characteristically exemplify the trait. For example, acts exempli-fying generosity belong in the category of ‘‘givings’’ and thus are performed in situationswhere a good (time, money, praise, attention) can benefit another or at least be perceivedby the agent as capable of doing so, and the motive for giving must include the wellbeingof the recipient. Certain versions of emotions such as regret that one has given the bene-fit or resentment about giving it are excluded by generosity, and certain versions of glad-ness at giving or regret at not being able to give, or give more, exemplify the virtue.

The grammar of a virtue is related in the following ways to the narrative display of thesame virtue. The narrated incidents that indicate the virtue (say, the acts, thoughts, andemotions exemplifying the generosity of John Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House) markgrammatical features of it; if they did not, they would not exemplify the virtue. Philo-sophical analysis of the virtue consists in identifying its grammatical features, and may beaided by, and based on, narrated incidents that exemplify the virtue. Provided that thenarrator has narrative practical wisdom, the narrative provides a basis for philosophicalanalysis superior in some ways to everyday life. The philosopher profits from the closeand sensitive observation of the other phronimos, from the fact that the incidents are set ina rich yet compactly presented lifelike setting, and even from the idealization that often



characterizes fictional characters. On this last point, one might think that the unrealism ofthe idealized character would be likely to mislead the philosopher, but this is not so, sincethe kind of ‘‘psychology’’ the philosopher engages in is itself ideal. He or she is engagedin the analysis of the concept of generosity, humility, or courage, concepts which are notoften exemplified in any very pure or perfect way in actual life. (As a colleague onceremarked to me, Dorothea Brooke of George Eliot’s Middlemarch is ‘‘too good to betrue.’’ Perhaps, but she is not too good to be true to the concept of moral goodness.) Thenarrativist might conceivably mislead the philosopher by getting the grammar of themoral life wrong in some way or other, but in that case the narrativist would be a defec-tive one and ought not to be employed as philosopher’s aide. Good narrativists are notlikely to get the grammar of the moral concepts wrong if they stick to writing narrativeand leave the philosophizing to the philosophers.

I have mentioned actions, intentions, thoughts, and emotions as narrative cues to thevirtues and vices of characters. These items are important for the narrative depiction ofcharacter because they ‘‘express’’ character more essentially than mere physical traits do(though authors sometimes use physical traits to symbolize character – think of UriahHeep in Dickens’s David Copperfield). One of the most central features of a person’s char-acter is what that person cares about, and actions, intentions, thoughts, and emotions areall intimately connected with, and thus expressive of, what a person cares about. I shallnow focus on emotion depiction as a narrative device for presenting a person’s character.

In the earlier quotation from Austen’s Persuasion, she sketches Sir Walter Elliot’s vanityby mentioning, within the scope of one sentence, several different emotions that heexperienced as he broused the Baronetage. It was the only book he read simply foramusement in an idle hour, or consolation in a distressed one. When contemplating the lim-ited, older patents, his faculties were roused to admiration and respect, while he could dispelhis domestic distresses with the pity and contempt he enjoyed in considering the almostendless creations of the last century. Reference to these emotions serves as a sketch of SirWalter’s vanity because they show what he cares (and doesn’t care) about. These emo-tions are all, in the end, about Sir Walter’s own social status as a baronet, in virtue, pre-sumably, of one of the older patents. In the abstract it might seem odd that such oppositeemotions as admiration and pity, respect and contempt, should function as both amuse-ment and consolation to a man. But the opposition is perfectly rational when we considertheir objects in light of what Sir Walter cares about: the social status conferred on him byhis being a baronet of an older patent. Admiration and respect are admiration and respectdue to himself; pity and contempt for what is socially inferior are emotions that he is in a‘‘position’’ to feel because of his superiority. Less vain people may read novels or biogra-phies in which, for their amusement or consolation, they can lose themselves, for themoment, in other people’s lives. They may feel admiration and respect for characters thatare actually admirable and honorable, or pity or contempt for characters that are genuinelypitiful or worthy of contempt.

The capacity to take an emotional interest in other people’s lives even when theiraffairs have nothing to do with oneself indicates a certain generosity of spirit that is quitelacking in Sir Walter. Such generosity is even more impressive when the others whoseinterests interest one pointedly take no interest in oneself. Anne Elliot, Sir Walter’sdaughter, played the piano

a great deal better than either of the Miss Musgroves.… She knew that when she played she wasgiving pleasure only to herself; but this was no new sensation: excepting one short period of herlife, she had never, since the age of fourteen, never since the loss of her dear mother, known the



happiness of being listened to, or encouraged by any just appreciation or real taste. In music shehad been always used to feel alone in the world; and Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove’s fond partiality fortheir own daughters’ performance, and total indifference to any other person’s, gave her muchmore pleasure for their sakes than mortification for her own (chapter 6: 73).

Anne’s moral interest in the elder Musgroves’ fondness for their daughters and the plea-sure they take in them gives rise to a joy that tends to blot away the ungenerous emo-tions that we would expect from a less virtuous character: resentment or envy of theattention undeservedly received by the Musgrove girls; self-pity at not receiving whatthey receive, or at not having the attention of her mother; contempt of the Musgrovegirls for their inferior playing (and other inferiorities). Like other great novelists of the19th century, Austen cultivated a kind of moral psychological expertise, which she prac-ticed and conveyed almost entirely in a narrative medium, thus providing a rich mine ofmaterial for moral philosophers.

The narrative display of a virtue is warmer, more immediately appealing, and morevivid than the philosophical display of it. For these reasons it enlivens the philosopher’simagination, speaks to his heart, and keeps him close to the earth, thus correcting hisoccupational tendency to lose himself in the dusty clouds of abstract inference. For thesame reason it can enliven his writing or oral teaching, if used by way of illustration. Alc-ibiades reports that Socrates did ethics by talking ‘‘about pack asses and blacksmiths andshoemakers and tanners’’ (Symposium 221e), and it was perhaps in part this concretenessthat gave his philosophizing the ethical immediacy that Alcibiades complains of and profitsfrom. One would think that wisdom (even if philosophical!) ought to affect people.

So far I have talked about the importance of narratives to philosophical ethicists. Butwhy philosophize about the virtues at all? If we have narrative displays, what good arephilosophical ones to us? Why not just read Sophocles and leave Aristotle on the shelf?Why read After Virtue when we have Middlemarch? The answer, I think, is that we humanbeings come to understand in a variety of complementary ways. We would never get anyvery adequate understanding of Paris by sitting in our hotel room exploring the PlanTaride. But without such a map (or at least one that we construct for ourselves from agreat deal of ground-level exploring) we would not know as well where we are in ourramblings about Paris. The map is a more abstract, schematic representation of the verysame Paris that we see and hear and smell as we walk along the Seine or wander the mar-kets and neighborhood streets of some out-of-the-way arrondissement. Philosophers fromPlato to Wittgenstein have felt that to understand is somehow to grasp the essence ofwhatever it is they were trying to understand. The representation of a virtue in terms ofits grammar presents its outline, its schema, its structural features. As Wittgenstein says,‘‘Essence is expressed by grammar’’ (1953, Part I, §371, his italics). We all have a more orless inarticulate conception of the grammar of the virtues, acquired by living and speakingthe language of morals, just as a resident of Paris, even without a paper map, has somesense for where things are relative to one another. But just as the map makes that implicitunderstanding much more definite and clear, so the philosophical display of a virtue con-cept orients one to the virtue in a way that common experience, including the readingof excellent narratives in which the virtues are displayed, cannot by itself do.

5. Constitutive Narratives

So far I have focused on realistic narratives in which persons – and thus their virtues andvices – are exhibited. Such narratives not only display virtues and vices concretely, but



do so in the matrix of some cultural understanding – either that of the various charactersin the novel or history, or that of the narrator, which may or may not be the outlook ofthe characters. Thus in the narrative we have concreteness in at least two dimensions thatare important for moral philosophy: an account of particular moral persons, given in thematrix of one or another particular moral outlook. In so far as the narratives are composedby astute observers of persons and deep understanders of their moral tradition, narrativesare a great source of wisdom and an indispensable resource for moral philosophy. But insome moral traditions some narratives play a role that goes beyond that of displaying vir-tues. They make up a part of what is culturally distinctive about a set of virtues, by enter-ing into the very grammar of those virtues.

The narrative of the Hebrew people’s exodus from Egypt displays virtues and vices ofthe people and their leaders, but that is far from its most basic moral function. The storyrecounts the divine actions in owning the people of Israel as God’s own. God is shownidentifying in a special way with the people of Israel and blessing and disciplining themby his actions. The story is thus about Israel’s formation as a people; about their identityas God’s. It is led up to by the stories of the patriarchs and succeeded by narratives ofjudges, kings, and prophets, all of which are about God’s faithfulness to and judgment ofhis chosen people. If an ordinary narrative displays the self-understanding of its characters,this one structures a self-understanding in its believing reader or hearer. This narrativedoes not just exemplify a moral tradition, in the way that, say, the characters of Alyoshaand Father Zossima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov exemplify Russian OrthodoxChristianity and the virtues of its most exemplary adherents; it founds one or at least con-stitutes a crucial stage in its founding.

But the founding has a special status here, which affects the function of the narrativein the community. Stories of foundings are not all constitutive of the founded outlooksin the way this one is. The story of the career, trial, and death of Socrates is a story of afounding, yet is not constitutive of the Socratic morality in the way the Exodus narrativeis of the Hebrew. For it is an essential part of Jewish faithfulness to God to remember thisevent, while it is not essential to Socratic morality, but only helpfully edifying, toremember the story of Socrates. The identity of the God in whom the Jew hopes, andwhose worship is the highest virtue, is provided (revealed) in the events here narrated.Jewish gratitude is in significant part gratitude for the very acts of God recounted in thisnarrative. The Hebrew sense of self that is involved in one way or another in all the Jew-ish virtues – hospitality to the foreigner, generosity, trust and humility, the praise of God,just treatment of fellows, contrition, truthfulness, marital fidelity, honoring of parents,and so forth – is in essential part the sense of belonging to the people whom God madehis own in this special way.

The story that is recorded in the four Gospels is similarly constitutive for the Christianoutlook and virtues. It too tells of an act of God, not now for a selected population butfor the entire world. It too tells of the founding of a community and a new way of life,yet is more than just the story of a founding. The narrative of the incarnation, death, andresurrection of the Son of God does not just dramatically display a set of virtues with aspecial grammar, but is itself taken up in the grammar of the virtues of those who acceptthe story and become members of the community. Compassion is seeing in the faces ofthe sufferers one ministers to the face of the incarnate Son who died for them; contritionis both sadness for sins committed against the God whose Son is the main character inthe story and comfort that this man’s death is one’s own righteousness; gratitude is first ofall for the act of God recounted in the story; hope is first of all for the resurrection ofwhich the risen Jesus is the first fruits. Jesus does exemplify some of the Christian virtues



– say, forgivingness, humility, compassion, courage, and longsuffering – but the mainfunction of the narrative in the Christian community (a function strongly suggested bythe content of the narrative) is not to display the Christian virtues, but to take its place inthe grammar of those virtues.

The distinctiveness of the Christian virtues, as compared with their counterparts inother moral outlooks, is largely provided by the gospel narrative. Jonathan Edwards’sCharity and its Fruits is a good example of a grammatical display of several virtues (forexample, longsuffering, humility, generosity) in their distinctively Christian lineaments.The humility whose grammar he exhibits is a special one that is implied by and derivesfrom a love of God. This love is a response to the gospel narrative, and Edwards describesit in several connections using the locution ‘‘love … as ….’’ The Christian’s humility isimplied by his loving ‘‘God as an infinitely condescending God’’ (149), loving ‘‘Christ asan humble person’’ (150), ‘‘Christ as one that was crucified for our sakes’’ (152). The‘‘as’’ in each case is followed by a reference to some feature of the gospel narrative. It is‘‘in terms of’’ these features that the Christianly humble person counts himself as nogreater than any of his human fellows (even if he is wealthier and smarter than any ofthem) and infinitely inferior to God. To be humble in this way is to see oneself and one’sworld in the light of that particular story.

Short Biography

Robert Roberts is Distinguished Professor of Ethics at Baylor University. In recent yearshis research has focused on moral psychology, with particular interest in the interactionbetween emotions and virtues and vices. He has published papers in this area in the Philo-sophical Review, Philosophical Studies, American Philosophical Quarterly, Inquiry, Philosophy andPhenomenological Research, History of Philosophy Quarterly, the Journal of Religious Ethics, andFaith and Philosophy, as well as in many collections. He is the author of Emotions: AnEssay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge UP, 2003), Intellectual Virtues (with JayWood, Oxford UP, 2007), and Spiritual Emotions (Eerdmans, 2007). He is currently onsabbatical at the University of Notre Dame, where he is the Plantinga Fellow in the Cen-ter for Philosophy of Religion, working on Emotions and Virtues (to be published byCambridge UP). He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Human-ities and the Pew Charitable Trusts and will be Senior Research Fellow for the projectTheological Inquiry on Religious Experience and Moral Identity (2013–2014) at the Center ofTheological Inquiry, Princeton, New Jersey. Before going to Baylor, Roberts taught atWestern Kentucky University (1973–1984) and Wheaton College (1984–2000). He holdsthe BA and MA in philosophy from Wichita State University, and the BD and PhD fromYale University (Department of Religious Studies).

Note

* Correspondence: 97273, One Bear Place, Waco, TX 76798, USA. Email: [email protected].

Works Cited

Anscombe, E. ‘Modern Moral Philosophy.’ Philosophy 33 (1958): 1–19.Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Introduction by D. W. Harding. London: Penguin Books, 1965.Edwards, J. Charity and its Fruits. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969.Kohlberg, L. The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages. San Francisco: Harper &

Row, 1984.



Murdoch, I. The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Schocken Books, 1971.Nussbaum, M. C. Love’s Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.Phillips, D. Z. Interventions in Ethics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.Plato. ‘Symposium.’ Trans. M. Joyce. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Eds. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. New York:

Random House, 1961. 526–74.Roberts, R. C. ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and a Method of ‘‘Virtue Ethics’’.’ Kierkegaard Post ⁄ Modernity. Eds. M.

Matustic and M. Westphal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 142–66.——. ‘The Philosopher as Sage.’ Journal of Religious Ethics 22 (1994): 409–31.——. ‘Virtues and Rules.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (1991): 325–43.—— and W. J. Wood. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1953.



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Narrative Ethics