Dorian Gray & Moral Realism

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
-Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

As we discussed in class on Friday, books can have content that discusses characters performing moral or immoral actions, but cannot be in themselves moral or immoral. Nicole mentioned that books cannot be moral or immoral because they are not conscious beings; that is, books are not moral agents capable of being moral or immoral. I agree with these two points.

We also discussed how the morality or immorality came from the reader's interpretation of the content of the book. Stacy mentioned moral relativism, and decided that books could not be moral or immoral because they could always be interpreted in different ways, by different cultures. As a moral realist, I feared that Wilde's theory led to moral relativism, but I am now confident that it does not.

I retract my statement that the (im)morality lies in the reader's interpretation; instead, I think it lies in the actions of the characters in the work. When a character performs an action, that action falls on the spectrum of morality (or, it is perhaps amoral, if there is such an action), or at least it would if that action were occurring in the real world, rather than in a work of fiction. The reader can decide whether or not an action is moral, but that one person's decision is not the ultimate marker of morality.