At Stanford they have a Center for Ethics in Society, and there they recently held an event considering that age-old question, Does Reading Literature Make You More Moral ?.
At the Stanford Report Justin Tackett now reports on the proceedings, in Stanford scholars debate the moral merits of reading fiction -- and if you're really curious you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
This seems like kind of a tired old question to me, the simple answer of course being: No -- but, of course, there is a bit more to it than that, and credit them for at least exploring a couple of different aspects of the question.
(I suppose literature can help shape readers' morality by serving as a sort of thought-experiment, walking readers through moral dilemmas and suggesting what the various outcomes of various behavior might be; still, I'd be embarrassed if even the smallest bit of my moral compass was influenced by what I read. On the other hand, literature and its lessons seems a much better thing to use as a morality-guide than the one that's far more often used as an excuse, the recipe for so much disaster that is religion (fiction of the worst sort).)
This seems like kind of a tired old question to me, the simple answer of course being: No -- but, of course, there is a bit more to it than that, and credit them for at least exploring a couple of different aspects of the question.
(I suppose literature can help shape readers' morality by serving as a sort of thought-experiment, walking readers through moral dilemmas and suggesting what the various outcomes of various behavior might be; still, I'd be embarrassed if even the smallest bit of my moral compass was influenced by what I read. On the other hand, literature and its lessons seems a much better thing to use as a morality-guide than the one that's far more often used as an excuse, the recipe for so much disaster that is religion (fiction of the worst sort).)