ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the natural in ethics through the writings of one of the Danish authors that has written most about nature, the nineteenth-century writer Hans Christian Andersen. It focuses on two of the darker stories: The Little Mermaid and The Story of a Mother. The Story of a Mother is essentially a quest story about a mother whose child has been taken by Death. The Little Mermaid is a coming-of-age story, a story about great and unrequited love, a tragic quest story and a morality tale. A proponent of natural law theory explains it in the following way: At the heart of tradition, however, is a conviction that creation is itself revelatory, and knowledge of the requirements of respect for created beings is accessible at least in part to human reason. Nature is not revelatory in the way that natural law theory requires, but neither is technology necessarily liberating.
