Doing ethics may be seen as the necessary middle point between merely and passively learning about ethical ideas and acting on them. It is certainly possible to use literature as a means to ethical discussion or instruction in a number of ways. Literature has arguably been misused in the role of moral text, a fact which contributes to the controversy over such use that still goes on within the academy in particular. But literature has three great, intrinsic strengths as a medium for ethics. The foregrounding of language that takes place in the literary work is important because of the complex dependency of ethics on language.
Ethical problems are often problems of speech.
Virtue ethics, the approach to moral philosophy originated by Aristotle, gives us some tools for discussing the importance of the literary character to literature s ethical function. We defer judgments about character more than we do about actions, outcomes, or rules. The high-quality literary work not only grounds abstract ethical ideas, it does so in a way that can render ethical matters interesting and even exciting. It allows ethics to be done as story. From a consideration of the histories of ethics and of literature, it becomes obvious that to combine these two subjects is no random pairing.