Stories and the Moral Weight of Action

Stories involve the decision to act in particular cases and that decision has a moral weight all its own which is the particular concern of fiction.

Moral weight is the key to fiction.

I have come a long way to get to this point, and I owe that journey to my conversation with Katy Carl. I introduced the concept of moral weight into that conversation as a way to express how our vision works. I now see it as the heart of fiction.

How did I get here? It started with a discussion of vision and what we miss when we look at things every day. In short, we have selective attention because we can’t attend to everything, and we select for attention those things that have the greatest moral weight for us and that we may have to act on.

It is the combination of the moral weight of the object and the likelihood of our having to act towards it that shapes our vision. A child on the sidewalk securely holding its mother’s hand does not grab the whole of a driver’s attention. If they notice it at all, it is only as part of the situational awareness that good drivers are taught to practice. The child has great moral weight in itself, but that moral weight does not draw all the driver’s attention to it because there is little likelihood of their having to act toward it. But the moment that child lets go of its mother’s hand and darts into the street chasing a ball, the child immediately becomes the sole focus of the driver’s vision.

The driver now has to act in the moment, under enormous fear and pressure, and the result of a sudden action, like a swerve onto the sidewalk, could kill a different child or maybe several people. They don’t have time to fully assess the situation, and yet they must act. This need to act has a moral weight of its own. I am going to call it the moral weight of action.

If we acted with perfect knowledge in a world in which we could never lose by choosing the right course, there would be no moral weight of action, only the moral weights of the things acted upon. But that is never the case. There is often a cost to acting, and there is always some degree of uncertainty. Thus there is always a moral weight to action.

The soldier who throws himself on a grenade is reckoning that the collective moral weight of his comrades exceeds his own moral weight, and thus that the right thing to do is to throw himself on the grenade even though it will cause his certain death. Even if his moral calculus is correct, there is an enormous moral weight of action in his decision.

People can debate the trolley problem till the cows come home, but someone actually in control of the trolley has only seconds to act and therefore only seconds to decide which action to take. That time constraint does not change the moral weight of the people on the different tracks, but it significantly changes the moral weight of action for the person holding the lever.

And time is not the only constraint. If a ball rolls out into the street from one direction and a dog runs out from the other direction, a driver has to choose between hitting one or the other. The dog has more moral weight than the ball but less moral weight than the child who might or might not run out after the ball. The decision to act has to be made without full information about the moral weight of the objects involved, and this too greatly adds to the moral weight of action.

The moral weight of action consists in this:

1. I don’t have the time, resources, or skill to fully assess the situation before I act.

2. I am not certain of the true moral weight of every object that I may act upon.

3. I am not certain which objects my action may affect.

4. I am not certain if the result of my action will be what I intend.

5. I am not certain that I will ever know the full extent of the results of my action.

6. I am not certain that others will see the moral weight of the objects I affect by my action and therefore how they may respond to my action.

7. I am not certain what I will personally lose or gain by my actions.

8. I am not certain I can bear the cost of my action.

9. I am not certain if this action is better than all the other things I could spend my time and resources on.

10. I am not certain what the consequences of not acting will be.

In short, we might say that the essential feature of human life is that we must act with incomplete information. This colors every decision we ever make. It is the source of our fear, our anxiety, our arrogance, our confidence, our triumph, and our regret. It is what gives moral weight to our every act, and it is thus what forms the heart of every story.

The moral weight of action does not just affect our judgments of the moment, but our more considered judgments as well. In fact, the comparison of moral weight is the essence of judgment. This is why the symbol of judgment is the scale.

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Philosophers and theologians can and should debate the moral weight of things in the abstract, but every moral decision ever made was made by a particular person in a particular situation and therefore bore the moral weight of action.

This is what sets fiction apart from philosophy and theology. Fiction’s first concern is with the particular, and thus with the moral weight of action by a particular character in a particular setting at a particular time.

As Katy Carl points out, it is difficult to know that we have judged moral weight correctly:

The reason for bringing up the epistemic question, with all its many-headed difficulties, is to complicate the idea that it’s somehow just a terribly simple thing to “lend moral weight” to matters in narrative, let alone to lend them the moral weight they have in and of themselves. The very idea that things have moral weight in and of themselves is either inherently true, or it is a culturally imposed narrative. Things can either be inherently true, or they can be purely culturally imposed narratives, but not both, not in the same sense at the same time. To many, the concept of moral weight itself may appear to be nothing more than the construction of a hegemonic will to power, as prone to be broken down as to be built up. If it’s truly “stories all the way down,” how can we prove that we haven’t simply made up all the stories to serve our own preferences and interests?

It is an excellent question, but it is a question for the philosopher and theologian, not for the storyteller, because the job of the storyteller is to portray the moral weight of action in a particular case. A story does not have to get moral weight right in the abstract to create the circumstances of the particular moral judgment that a character must make in a particular moment. It only has to create a hierarchy of moral weights in the story world.

Since the discernment of objective moral weight in the real world is such a fraught philosophical and theological problem, the storyteller can sidestep the problem by creating a story world in which the absolute and correct moral weight of things is defined absolutely. The story question of how the character makes moral judgments in the particular can thus be isolated from the philosophical and theological debates that might otherwise distract the reader and writer from their proper business of correctly assessing the moral weight of the decision to act, and, more particularly, the felt moral weight as the character faces their need to act.

This is the role of the MacGuffin in many stories. The MacGuffin becomes the undoubted and undoubtable repository of moral weight, which frees the storyteller to focus on the moral weight of particular actions. For example, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien endows the one ring with the whole moral weight of Middle Earth and every creature in it. However much the reader may be a moral relativist in their own life, when they enter the story world of Middle Earth, they hold the ring to be the objective repository of moral weight. And thus, no doubt of the objective value of the quest can be allowed to throw doubt on the moral weight of action that lies upon each of the members of the fellowship of the ring.

In this world, if you met a group of nine men on the road and they told you that they were going to a volcano to destroy a magic ring, you would think they were mad. You certainly would not think they held the whole moral weight of the world in their hands. You would ascribe no moral weight to their actions at all. You would think they were wasting their time. But when you encounter the same crew in Middle Earth, you accept unquestioningly the moral weight of action of their quest because you accept the absolute moral weight of the ring within the story world.

In The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen invents a theology in which if a mermaid can form a sacramental marriage with a human being, they will gain an immortal soul, and in which if the Children of the Air do acts of kindness for four hundred years they too will gain immortal souls and thus have access to heaven. A strict reader might look at this story and declare that this is a false theology and that no one but humans have immortal souls, and thus condemn the story for containing dangerous error.

But I would suggest, quite to the contrary, that this is the theology of what Tolkien called a subcreated world and that it exists precisely to give moral weight to the actions of the titular Little Mermaid. The Little Mermaid is not just seeking marriage to a prince but also an immortal soul and an immortal destiny. Thus at the end when she is presented with the temptation to kill her rival for the prince’s hand, far more weight rests upon that decision because of what she will lose if she does not marry him.

The purpose of creating a story world is to focus attention on the aspect of human experience that is the subject of the story, which is always, in one way or another, the moral weight of action. A fairytale creates a story world of moral certainty which in turn allows the moral weight of action to be isolated from the philosophical and theological question of general moral weight. No one — no one sane at least — will be distracted by the question of whether the destruction of a magic ring is the proper moral end of life while they are reading The Lord of the Rings.

By creating a secondary world in which the destruction of a magic ring actually is the proper moral end of life, Tolkien can focus on the process of living a moral life and serving a moral cause without a distracting debate on whether the cause is actually moral or not. No reader is ever going to be pro-ring. No one is ever going to argue that the ring gets a raw deal and that Frodo is wrong to destroy it. This absurd object therefore works as a repository of moral weight when the question to be examined is, what is it like to operate in the gravity well of an object of enormous moral weight?

But the fact that the novelist can sidestep the difficulties of determining moral weight in the abstract does not mean that the objective moral weight of things is irrelevant to fiction. As Joseph Bottom writes, "If novelists themselves don't believe there exists a deep structure of morality and manners that can be discerned by the novel, why should readers believe it?"

The moral weight of action, on which the drama of a story depends, depends in turn on the moral weight of the objects that a character acts upon. If those objects have moral weight only because they serve the character’s own ends, they will not weigh much at all. And if the objects acted upon have little moral weight, then the action has little moral weight.

As with a fellowship of a ring met on a modern street, who are acting merely to amuse themselves, the moral weight of action is diminished if it is done in indifference to the true moral weight of things. A belief in moral absolutes, in objective moral weight, radically increases the moral weight of action. And since it is the moral weight of action that creates drama in a story, this means that a belief in moral absolutes creates better drama. Thus, while the devil may have the best tunes, God has the best stories.

However, the belief that there exists a deep structure of mortality and the belief that that deep structure is thus and not otherwise are two distinct things. As far as the moral weight of action is concerned, it is the existence of such a deep structure, not its particular character, that creates that weight. It is therefore a useful literary technique to create a deep structure of morality that, for the purpose of the story, can be fully and absolutely known to the reader.

But this can be a cop-out as well. And maybe it explains the popularity of fantasy and science fiction in our era. Tolkien showed the world how to create an object of absolute and unarguable moral weight that could be used to generate the gravest moral weight of action and thus create great drama, without having to commit oneself to any such source of moral weight in this world. Tolkien himself, of course, was committed to such a source of moral weight, but the model he used could equally be used to avoid the question of an absolute source of moral weight in this world by locating it in a secondary world.

In other words, this technique of investing a MacGuffin with great moral weight can be used to allow drama to be created even when people don’t believe in absolute moral weight. Perhaps this accounts for the dominance of fantasy and science fiction in popular culture today. They allow for the creation of MacGuffins as repositories of absolute moral weight without committing the writer or reader to affirming a source of absolute moral weight in this world.

I’m not sure that engagement with this moral MacGuffin can ever be as strong or as satisfying for someone who denies absolute moral weight in the real world, and this may account for the amount of sound and fury in modern entertainment. But it does highlight just how much drama depends on the existence of absolute moral weight in order to generate the moral weight of action on which drama depends.

This leads us to the next point, which is that the question of the knowability of the moral weight of things can itself be a concern of fiction, and a source of moral weight of action. If The Lord of the Rings is a work in which the moral weight of things is known and fixed, Hamlet is a work in which they are all in doubt. And so Hamlet dithers. And we watch enraptured for three hours as he dithers and dithers some more, for Hamlet bears, and Hamlet exposes and explores the terrible moral weight of action where moral certainty is hard to come by.

This is the place where realism and fairytales take different paths. The fairytale allows us to portray the moral weight of action in the presence of moral certainty, while realism allows us to portray the moral weight of action in the absence of moral certainty.

This creates an interesting dramatic problem for each. The realist can rely on the moral weight of things already acknowledged by the reader and so does not have to do the work to establish a MacGuffin the way the teller of fairytales must. On the other hand, the reader may not feel the moral weight in things that the realist writer assumes, leading the reader to rebel against the moral assumptions the writer is making, and thus never get to the moral weight of action that is at the heart of the drama.

For the teller of fairytales, the problem is that because the principle moral weight lies in the MacGuffin, the reader, even if they accept the moral weight in the story world, knows that the moral weight of the MacGuffin does not correspond to objects of moral weight in the real world, and therefore they may not feel the moral weight as keenly as they would in a realist story in which their sense of moral weight matched that of the author. And because uncertainty about the moral weight of objects, which is part of the moral weight of action, is missing in a fairytale, the final moral weight of action may not be as great as it is possible to create in a realist novel.

These difficulties do not amount to a reason to choose one over the other. A story is always a lens which focuses by distorting. It is right that we should have different lenses for different purposes, for each can show us something important. Also, I am not suggesting that it is impossible to have moral ambiguity in a fairytale, or moral certainty in a realist story, only that these seem to be characteristic tropes of the respective genres. And in the end, the genius of the author can triumph over the difficulties of the genre to produce something universal and profound regardless of genre.

But here I think it is important to remind ourselves that fiction is not concerned with solving philosophical and theological questions, even if it is deeply affected by them. Fiction is about particular actions in particular circumstances because these are the kinds of moral questions we face in our individual daily lives. No one has ever faced an abstract moral problem in their daily life. They have only ever faced the particular moral weight of action in a particular circumstance.

In Bleak House, Dickens gives us Mrs. Jellyby who is obsessed with helping the poor of Africa while ignoring the needs of her own children and neighbors. Locality, Dickens implies, has moral weight that should be accepted and reckoned in our moral decision-making. Our perspective and our scope are limited and particular. We are not always concerned with the matters of greatest weight in the world but with the weight of things within our proximity and scope of action.

This particularity of our moral responsibility, and therefore of the moral weight of things within our scope of action, is precisely the thing that informs the particularity of an individual story. Particularity is fundamental to our moral responsibilities, and it is through stories that we explore the weight of particularity in our lives.

How does all of this speak to the theme of serious popular fiction? There might be no better marker of serious fiction than that serious fiction acknowledges the full moral weight of action while light fiction reduces or eliminates it. This is precisely the thing that makes it light. It does not bear the moral weight of action. So I might rephrase my definition of serious popular fiction to say, “Stories that carry the full moral weight of action in tales of action, adventure, romance, and even magic.”

This project is not without its difficulties. To be conscious of the full moral weight of action is to hesitate to act, and what one tends to want in popular fiction is characters who act boldly. In some sense, the appeal of the popular hero is that they don’t bear the full moral weight of action and thus imaginatively relieve us of the terrible moral weight of action.

Many accounts of the hero’s journey model of story omit the refusal of the call. I have long wondered why they do that, but now I think I understand. It is the refusal of the call that shows the moral weight of action. Why does the hero refuse the call? Because he becomes aware of the full moral weight of action. He hesitates because he feels the terrible weight of it upon his shoulders. But light fiction ignores the moral weight of action and thus it omits the refusal of the call.

The moral weight of action lies at the heart of fiction. The principal task of the author is to frame the moral weight of action. All of the build-up to the climax of a story is occupied with building up this moral weight of action. This means building up the moral weight of the objects in the story that form the base load for the moral weight of action, but also creating all the particular forms of uncertainty and particularity that further weigh upon the decision to act.

This is what tension is: the increasing moral weight of action.

This is what raising the stakes means: increasing the moral weight of action.

This is what a scene should do: increase the moral weight of action.

This is what a passage of dialogue should do: increase the moral weight of action.

This is what descriptions and the introduction of characters should do: invest objects with moral weight so as to increase the moral weight of action.

This is what the mirror moment is: the point at which the protagonist acknowledges the terrible weight of action.

This is what the climax or crisis point is: the point at which the protagonist commits the act which bears the terrible weight of action to which the story has been building.

This is the question that an author should ask themselves for every decision they make: does it increase the moral weight of action?

This is how fiction works and why it matters, because as much as we may attend to philosophers and theologians as they attempt to delineate the inherent moral weight of things, when it comes to living our lives day to day, it is the moral weight of action that we have to face and deal with, and fiction gives us the experience of bearing that moral weight and discharging the moral responsibility that it places upon us for good or ill. Fiction is the art of the particular and of the moral weight of action, which only exists and can only be felt or judged in the particular.

I suspect that this idea is going to feel unsatisfactory to many writers, including those of different parties and creeds, who hope to use their fiction to advance the idea that certain objects in the world have moral weight in the abstract. I do not think they should despair of achieving this result. After all, it is the task of the novelist to invest the objects and characters in their story with moral weight because the moral weight of people and objects forms the base load that is essential to creating the moral weight of action that is at the heart of a story.

And even if they use a MacGuffin as the principle repository of moral weight in order to focus on the moral weight of action, the moral weight invested in the MacGuffin must in some sense come from some more real and fundamental source of moral weight or it will not function well as a MacGuffin. The ring may be the MacGuffin of The Lord of the Rings, but it gains its moral weight through all the things that will be lost if it falls into the hands of Sauron, things which the novel spends large amounts of time exploring and investing with moral weight of their own.

On the other hand, all stories, even realist stories, take place in a subcreated world, and acceptance of the absolute moral weight of things in the subcreated world of the story does not necessarily translate into acceptance of that moral weight in the real world. At best, causing the reader to accept the moral weight of a thing in a story world might influence them to consider its moral weight in the real world. Perhaps a story can cause them to consider it where a philosophical argument might not, if only because they might be more likely to read the story than a philosophical essay. But the story can only convince within the story world. The final step is out of the author’s hands.

But I will return to the point that the focus of a story is the moral weight of action itself. It is the moral weight of action that we have to face and bear every day in our ordinary lives, and thus why far more people read stories than read textbooks on ethics or moral theology. What a novel has to say about the moral weight of action itself and how we bear it or buckle under it may be perfectly valid and compelling even if we don’t agree with the author on the relative moral weight that they invest in its various objects and characters. It isn’t the moral argument that the reader came to the story for but for the experience of facing and bearing the moral weight of action.