ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the two primary ways in which moral issues pertaining to literature are discussed in Anglophone philosophy of art. Moral judgment is a common feature of interpreting, appreciating, and evaluating literary works. For example, people often attribute virtues or vices to characters and praise or condemn their actions on explicitly moral grounds. Moral judgment is even written into many of the concepts they use to understand literary works: just think, for instance, of the very notion of villain. Early versions of the imitation model are found in both Plato and Aristotle. For all their significant differences, both Plato and Aristotle held that the audience's reactions—emotional and otherwise—to things represented in a work are echoed in the audience reactions to those very same kinds of thing in real life. Conditioning occurs when a given response—whether behavioral or psychological—becomes more likely or less likely as a result of reinforcement.
