Literature often deals with moral issues. It focuses on human dilemmas and awakens our imagination to new possibilities. It compels us to rethink and revise our everyday assumptions, enabling us to consider ethical questions in creative ways.
The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature brings together an extensive and varied collection of 87 classical and contemporary readings on ethical theory and practice. The book is divided into four sections covering the nature of morality, moral theories, moral issues, and applied ethics. Integrating literature with philosophy in an innovative way, editor Louis Pojman uses literary works to enliven and make concrete the ethical theory or applied issues addressed in each chapter. Literary works by Hugo, Hawthorne, Melville, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Huxley, Orwell, Camus, LeGuin, Styron, and many others lead students into philosophical concepts and issues such as relativism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, the meaning of life, freedom, sex, love and marriage, and environmental ethics. Once introduced, these topics are developed further through readings by philosophers including Aristotle, Sartre, Bernard Williams, Jane English, and Thomas E. Hill, Jr. This unique anthology emphasizes the personal dimension of ethics, which is often ignored or minimized in ethics texts.
Featuring insightful part and chapter introductions as well as biographical sketches, abstracts, and study questions for each reading selection, The Moral Life is ideal for introductory ethics courses. It also provides an engaging gateway into personal and social ethics for the general reader.