Education and Moral Corruption by Literature

Emotional Engagement and the Epistemic Value of Narrative Art

Abstract

The aim is to assess the possibility of moral education through literature. It will be argued that narrative art is able to educate morally given than 1) it provides non-propositional knowledge which gives access to new perspectives, and 2) it cultivates and refines the readers’ ethical values and practices through emotional engagement. It will be argued that the inverse — the power to corrupt morally — doesn’t apply (or not so easily), appealing to the human imaginative resistance which seems to prevent the exportation of moral perspectives that go severely against one’s own axiological position.