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The Ethics of Storytelling.
Human beings are inescapably creatures of ‘ought’…this sense of ought permeates everything we do, including our works of the imagination.
Such works, powerful and compelling, are potential treasure-houses in which we can conduct some of our most important conversations about what we ought to be and do.
And there is no essential difference between the stories of literature and the stories of our lives. We are each characters in our own story and in each other’s stories.
— Daniel Taylor
Where does morality come from? Do the films we watch — or the books we read — shape our morals?
It may seem difficult to disagree with Daniel Taylor, above, that humans are creatures of “ought.”
On the other hand, the claim is so general that it seems difficult to disprove.
One troublesome assumption arises in the second sentence: do the stories we tell function as conversations, as the author contends? Or do stories function, more often than not, as monologues?
That is, the stories we tell are typically aimed at listeners — listeners who may interrupt from time to time — and yet whose attentiveness is crucial.
If stories work more like “one-sided” monologues than they do two-sided conversations, what is the…
