Ethics, Evil, and Fiction.

Fleming, Ed

McGINN, Colin. Ethics, Evil, and Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. x + 186 pp. Cloth, $24.95--In eight short chapters, McGinn touches on Ethics, Evil, and Fiction from an analytical point of view. First, he approaches the nature of ethics. Here McGinn confronts the issue of moral psychologism and resists the temptation to reduce morality to something that it is not and to what cannot really account for it. His conclusion is that "goodness is a moral property ... a separate type of property" (p. 31). He cites G. E. Moore's insight into the simplicity of goodness and defends "a strong objectivist or cognitivist" position of moral truth.

In chapter 3 "Knowledge of Goodness" McGinn develops this idea by contrasting ethics and science. Science has a provisional inductive truth, while ethics is more like logic and mathematics, ways of understanding that we bring to experience. Ethics arises in McGinn's thinking as a "supervenience" on "psychological concepts, folk psychology" (p. 56). As he puts it, "Ethical understanding arises naturally from the systematic development of psychological concepts.... Once you have the concept pain, and you have general reflective intelligence, then you are virtually bound to see that it is a bad thing--for others as well as yourself" (p. 56).

Next the author moves toward the topics of evil character (chap. 4) and the beautiful soul (chap. 5). The discussions of these are quite provocative. McGinn is interested in the relation between the properties called "moral goodness" and "beauty." He alludes to Reid's "Aesthetic Moral Theory."

The opening two parts of the book--first, the clarification of foundational concepts, and, second, the way these concepts appear as they are lived out or as they are neglected--introduce the last part, where McGinn suggests that fiction become the place to which we look for illustrations of how to be or not to be. The novel is a testing ground in which the student of ethics gets a window onto character and decision. In fiction ugliness and beauty of soul take on a life that lends force to teaching. Chapter 6 follows Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray in its path of cold destruction.

The plan of the book is a good one, but its content has serious short-comings. McGinn's metaphysical presuppositions prevent him from recognizing the true nature of ethics. Genuine ethics tries to articulate and wonder at one person transcending his interests to attend to the good of another. From the presupposition that we are centers of pleasure and pain, that we are "of the hedonic type" (p. 61), true self-transcendence is unthinkable. McGinn must twist and turn to try to bring some intelligibility to the ideas of "ought," "evil," and "beauty." He says he does not know the kind of thing soul is, but more disturbing than this, he says we really do not have to worry about such questions (p. 121). HIS presuppositions hide the essence of morality. Indeed without wanting to, he does reduce morality to a "naturalistic basis in folk psychology" (p. 56). This reduction arises from a horizon set too low. To McGinn's credit he does admit "ethical knowledge is indeed a mystery to us ..." (p. 50). Yet this mystery might indicate that we cannot dominate the source of ethics, that instead we need to listen more closely. McGinn sees the questions--"Who are we?" and "Who is the Source of ethics (from whom we can and do distinguish good pleasures from bad ones)?"--but does not really pose them. Instead, he takes great pains to, for example, make a case that the pleasure of the sadist be rejected! What's wrong with this picture? Genuine ethics grows from a more encompassing experience of Reality.

It is only from ground that we have sufficient power to live well. Reflection on morality must enter this ground. From ground the understanding of death (chap. 7; part 6) is not despair as McGinn interprets Dorian Gray and Frankenstein to indicate. Rather our finiteness is the invitation to self-transcendence--and thinking on this is ethics. Our understanding falls short and the author rightly suggests that we find stories to help us understand better.

--Ed Fleming, Westmoreland County Community College.