ABSTRACT
Sometimes a fictional character’s behavior, like that of an actual person, defies
understanding – or so it seems. The incomprehensibility of extreme cases of
morally condemnable behavior is familiar: how could someone do something
that is so selfish, so unconscious of the needs of others, so gratuitously cruel, so
violently brutal? Explanations of this incomprehensibility have been offered in
terms of the resistance we have to imagining being like that, or to doing such
things.1 But people engage in incredibly admirable behaviors as well, morally
and otherwise, where there should be no such imaginative resistance. These
include behaviors that are self-sacrificing in the extreme, matter-of-fact in the
face of carnage and chaos, persistent when others have given up. They include
impressive behaviors in non-moral ways as well: the performance under pres-
sure of baseball’s ‘‘clutch hitter,’’ the ability to come up with a joke or bon mot
appropriate to whatever the occasion. With these cases, neither morality nor
moral justification is the issue, or even an issue; it is just hard to know how one
could have, or come to have, the psychological strength or summon the resour-
ces that enable one to rise to the occasion. And there is a third type of incom-
prehensible behavior, eccentricities due to mental traits or dispositions that are
deeply different from, alien to, one’s own: the quirkiness of an obsessive collector
of paper clips, a child-like naivete´.
