{"id":5747,"date":"2009-07-30T09:34:12","date_gmt":"2009-07-30T09:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5747"},"modified":"2009-07-30T09:34:12","modified_gmt":"2009-07-30T09:34:12","slug":"reforming-the-humanities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5747","title":{"rendered":"reforming the humanities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, I submitted the copy-edited version of my next book for layout and production. It is entitled <em>Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante Through Modern Times<\/em>, and it will be published by Palgrave Macmillan this year. The first paragraph says:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p>This is a book about ethics and stories. Ethics (or morality) encompasses what is right or good, what we ought to do, and how laws and institutions should be organized. I argue that a good way to make ethical judgments and decisions is to describe reality in the form of a true narrative. Fictional stories also support moral conclusions that can translate into real life. I argue that when the moral judgments supported by a good story conflict with general principles, we ought to follow the story and amend or suspend our principles, rather than the reverse. What makes a story \u201cgood\u201d for this purpose is not its conformity to correct moral principles, but its merits as a narrative&#8211;for instance, its perceptiveness and coherence and its avoidance of clich\u00e9, sentimentality, and euphemism. <\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, I submitted the copy-edited version of my next book for layout and production. It is entitled Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante Through Modern Times, and it will be published by Palgrave Macmillan this year. The first paragraph says: This is a book about ethics and stories. Ethics (or morality) encompasses [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}