Literature and Moral Feeling argued that ethics is best understood as a constraint on egocentric self-interest. That constraint is specified variously by groups or individuals who set parameters differently within common ethical principles, and who use a range of emotion-guided narrative genres to imagine and evaluate possible actions. Though it covers many ethical concerns (collectively termed “morality”), this account leaves out fairness (alternatively, justice). The following essay seeks to make up for that deficit. Framing its analysis by reference to a (...) well-known problem in Milton's Paradise Lost, it distinguishes two systems of ethical response organized around first- and third-person perspectives. Like the first-person concerns of morality, third person concerns of justice are specified by setting parameters within common principles. In treating these principles and parameters, the essay articulates cognitive and affective components of third-person ethical evaluation. These, then, help to resolve the problem with Milton's poem. That resolution, in turn, suggests further complications in the account of ethical evaluation. (shrink)

These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out, and figured with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.Henry James,The Bostonians, ch. xxxixThis paper is intended to contribute to the study of both Homer and Greek tragedy, and more (...) particularly to the study of the influence of the epic upon the later poets. The current revival of interest among English scholars in the poetic qualities of the Homeric poems must be welcomed by all who care for the continuing survival and propagation of classical literature. The renewed emphasis on the validity of literary criticism as applied to presumably oral texts may encourage a more positive appreciation of the subtlety of Homeric narrative techniques, and of the coherent plan which unifies each poem. The aim of this paper is to focus attention on a number of elements in Greek tragedy which are already present in Homer, and especially on the way in which these poets exploit the theme of knowledge—knowledge of one's future, knowledge of one's circumstances, knowledge of oneself. Recent scholarship on tragedy has paid much more attention to literary criticism in general and to poetic irony in particular: these insights can also illuminate the epic. Conversely, the renewed interest in Homer's structural and thematic complexity should also enrich the study of the tragedians, his true heirs. (shrink)

The conflict between Jupiter and Juno in the Aeneid is commonly read as a battle between the forces of order and chaos . The present article argues that this schematization, though morally and aesthetically satisfying, fails to account for most of the data. Virgil's Jupiter is in fact concerned solely with power and adulation , despite persistent attempts by readers—and characters in the poem—to see him as benign. By systematically discussing every appearance of Jupiter in the poem, the article seeks (...) to correct the distorted or incomplete views of the god that arise from selective examination. The first section looks at Jupiter's own speeches to illustrate his motivations. The second section demonstrates how these motivations, though frequently misconstrued by the human characters, are confirmed by the glimpses of Jupiter focalized through the omniscient narrator. The third discusses the implications of this portrait of Jupiter for Virgil's vision of Rome and of human happiness. (shrink)