This is installment two in our podcast series. “Ways of World-Breaking & Ethical Escapism”, delivered as a talk in the department by Assoc. Prof. John Holbo, on March 30, 2010. Here is the abstract:

Tamar Gendler takes ‘the puzzle of imaginative resistance’ to be that of ‘explaining comparative difficulty imagining fictional worlds we take to be morally deviant.’ Gendler follows Kendall Walton, who prefers to focus on difficulties ‘making true’. This paper seeks to dissolve any such puzzle, largely by considering the workings of genre: relationship between absurdities and absurdism; reflections on narrators and authors; then, a major class of counter-examples: most genre fiction is ‘morally deviant’. Superman lives in a world in which behavior that would be morally appalling in the real world is sane and admirable. In effect, these fictions are perfectionist fantasies about impossible compossibilities of virtues, but not explicitly so. So the world contains many metaethically fantastic fictions, while containing few fictions about metaethics, per se.