PHIL 271 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Confidence Trick
7 Apr 2014
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Nussbaum"s exactly and responsibly : no class next thursday! (13th) Posner vs. nussbaum: first, posner says (pg. 9) that one thing that nussbaum claims novels enable us to do is to enable us to play at moral theories through the characters in the novel. Posner mentions nussbaum"s discussion of dickens" hard times, in which the novel portrays what it would be like to try and live a totally utilitarian life. Nussbaum says (and posner agrees) that this lifestyle isn"t a proper one by which anyone should live, and anyone raised in this way would be negatively affected. This follows nussbaum"s theory that novels can work as moral instruction because it forces us to conduct an experiment on the morality of this upbringing. However, posner says that nussbaum is writing her analysis of this novel biasedly still, because she writes it as if contemporary people today would go along with the utilitarian morals of the gradgrind character in the novel.
