Engaging with Counter-Moral Fictions: A Contextual Approach

In order to understand our complex engagement with counter-moral fictions, and to assess it
adequately, we must acknowledge that there are different types of counter-moral fictions. In
particular, there is an important distinction between fictional and actual immorality in countermoral
fictions. Appreciators engage with fictional immorality because the affective responses
elicited by the narrative allow for a discontinuity in their evaluative attitudes. While these
affective responses constitute genuine emotions, they contrast with the emotions appreciators
would normally experience in real-life scenarios that involve moral deviance. This is possible
because the criteria governing emotional responses to merely fictional immorality do not
include ethical appropriateness.
Further, the distinction between fictional and actual immorality not only impacts how
appreciators engage with counter-moral fictions, but how we should assess both the works and
our imaginative and emotional engagement with them. Only instances of actual immorality can
be legitimate candidates to be ethically criticised; but this ethical assessment depends on the
extra-fictional commitments of the attitude expressed by the work. For this reason, the ethical
assessment of actual immorality can only be understood as an extrinsic assessment of the work
in a specific context that gives the work certain extra-fictional pretensions. We should thus
defend contextual autonomism in regards to the ethical criticism of fiction. Finally,
appreciators’ responses to fiction can only be legitimately ethically assessed when they are
expressive of their actual attitudes and motivations. Nevertheless, in these cases the object of
the ethical assessment are not the responses to fiction, but appreciators’ actual character.
Therefore responses to fiction cannot be assessed qua responses to fiction, and we should
defend response amoralism.