VALU ES AND VIRTUES

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Values and Virtues
Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics

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 Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction 1
Timothy Chappell
1. Modern Virtue Ethics 20
Christopher Miles Coope
2. The Admirable Life and the Desirable Life 53
Linda Zagzebski
3. Virtue and Rights in Aristotle’s Best Regime 67
Fred D. Miller, Jun.
4. The Virtues and Vices of Virtue Jurisprudence 90
R. A. Duff
5. Habituation as Mimesis 105
Hallvard J. Fossheim
6. Moral Incompetence 118
Adam Morton
7. The Variety of Life and the Unity of Practical Wisdom 136
Timothy Chappell
8. Moral Sense and Virtue in Hume’s Ethics 158
Paul Russell
9. Can Nietzsche be Both an Existentialist and a Virtue Ethicist? 171
Christine Swanton
10. Manners, Morals, and Practical Wisdom 189
Karen Stohr
11. The Hardboiled Detective as Moralist: Ethics in Crime Fiction 212
Sandrine Berges
12. ‘Like the Bloom on Youths’: How Pleasure Completes our Lives 226
Johan Brännmark
13. Mixed Determinates: Pleasure, Good, and Truth 239
Theodore Scaltsas
14. Three Dogmas of Desire 257
Talbot Brewer

Bibliography 285
Index 297
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 11
The Hardboiled Detective as Moralist: Ethics
in Crime Fiction
Sandrine Berges

Although much has been written to show that literature can influence the moral
character, the consensus seems to be that novels which are hard to read are good
for you, and those which are not are bad. If that is the case, rather than a mere
prejudice on the writers’ parts, then the view that literature is morally valuable
is paradoxical. What is the point of something being useful for moral education
if it is only accessible to a minority of adult readers? If novels are to form a
part of moral education, then they had better be accessible to most readers at
an age where their characters are not yet fully formed. So it would be nice if
novels which do not fall into the category of ‘high literature’, but not into the
junk-fiction category either, were good for one’s character. The argument of this
chapter is that a certain kind of genre fiction can be morally valuable: the modern
hardboiled detective novel. I shall begin, however, by arguing for the broader
claim that literature in general, and fiction such as novels in particular, can be
morally valuable.

1 W H AT W E D O N ’ T WA N T TO K N OW T H AT N OV E L S
TELL US

There has been a debate between those who think that the reading of novels
from a moral perspective (‘ethical criticism’) is a good thing, and those who
do not: Nussbaum 1990, 1998; Booth 1988, 1998 defend ethical criticism,
Posner 1997, 1998 is against it. However, the debate about ethical criticism
is concerned with the evaluation of works of literature as works of art. It does
not really address the question that interests me: whether novels may be good
for something else as well as being good works of art. For what it is worth,
my own view is that aesthetic appreciation is very rarely divorced from other
concerns—moral, cultural, emotional, and so on—and that this is especially so
in the case of novels. But my argument here does not need this claim. It will be
enough if novels can have a moral value alongside their aesthetic value—whether
 Ethics in Crime Fiction 213

or not the two sorts of value are connected. Thus I might agree with Posner that
novels should ultimately be judged on aesthetic rather than moral grounds, while
also agreeing with Nussbaum and Booth that some novels have an ethical value
as moral educators or corruptors.
My purpose in this section is to show that Nussbaum and Booth are right that
novels may serve as a part of our moral education, as a preliminary to arguing, in
sections 2–3, that some crime fiction serves this purpose very well. For the sake
of brevity, I shall focus my discussion on Nussbaum’s work, and especially on
her book Poetic Justice (Nussbaum 1995).
That book opens with the claim that a novel may be morally valuable ‘because
it summons powerful emotions, it disconcerts and puzzles. It inspires distrust of
conventional pieties and exacts a frequently painful confrontation with one’s own
thoughts and intentions’ (Nussbaum 1995: 5). Novels are not morally valuable
because they preach, or because they present examples of morally admirable
people and actions, but because they force us to work through moral dilemmas
in a way that is both emotionally engaged and original. They force us away
both from complacent dogmatism, and from the rehearsed middle-of-the-road
attitudes which we are always tempted to adopt for sheer peace of mind. In
short, reading novels can help us to develop morally good attitudes, responses,
and emotions, which we can then transfer to real life.
(Here there arises the familiar objection that highly immoral people can
appreciate good literature; therefore there is no transfer from reading to living.
I reply that if some people are indeed like that, then it is more likely a sign
that something is wrong with them than that literature cannot help moral
development.)
Novels are good for us, or at least some novels are, because in reading them we
identify with the characters; through this identification, we experience emotions
and perceive the world in ways that would not otherwise have happened.
Our identification promotes an emotional engagement which leads to a finer
perception of the world. This emotional engagement and fine perception are
both central to an Aristotelian ethics (Nussbaum 1995: 6):
Works that promote identification and emotional reaction cut through [our] self-
protective stratagems, requiring us to see and to respond to many things that may be
difficult to confront—and they make this process palatable by giving us pleasure in the
very act of confrontation.
Nussbaum does not claim, of course, that all novels promote identification, or
that identification is the only way in which literature can be morally valuable.
Her focus is on the nineteenth-century realist novel, which, she claims, can help
moral development in this way.
Being morally good, for Nussbaum, means being educated in one’s perceptions
and emotions (the same thing, for her: more about that below) so that one can
deliberate and act beyond general rules, with an eye for what is called for by each
214 Sandrine Berges

particular situation. But can reading novels be an appropriate way of becoming

good in this sense? Nussbaum’s notion of moral goodness is clearly meant to
be an Aristotelian one; but it faces the Aristotelian objection that the (only)
appropriate way of learning to be good is habituation through action. In order to
become virtuous, one has to act repeatedly as a virtuous person would, until one
has learned to find such actions pleasurable in themselves. What non-virtuous
people lack is the proper emotional involvement that only virtuous action can
bring. So, for example, they feel fear of punishment instead of shame, and
associate no pleasure with acting virtuously except their relief from such fear (see
Burnyeat 1980). We might (says the objection) allow that this sort of emotional
engagement could be stimulated by reading. But not the level of engagement
that leads us to virtue (NE 1179b4):
What argument would remould such people? It is hard, if not impossible, to remove by
argument the traits that have long since been incorporated in the character.
To this objection Nussbaum can reply, first, that the morally crucial part of
reading is identification, which is a third category alongside action and thought,
and which Aristotle does not consider in his writings on ethics.¹ Reading is, of
course, not the same as doing (one is not shipwrecked through reading Robinson
Crusoe). But it is not the same as thinking either: it is one thing to be told ‘if
you make up your mind rashly and on the grounds of appearances, you will later
regret it’, and quite another to read, with engagement, about Elizabeth Bennet’s
discomfiture as she realizes that she has radically misjudged Darcy and Wickham.
What the reader of Pride and Prejudice experiences is not a cogitation but an
imitation of Elizabeth’s own experience: a mixture of shame and anger at one’s
own ill-based judgements.
Now a reader of Pride and Prejudice can be someone who has never felt the
shame that comes from misjudging somebody’s character by looking only at his
superficial traits. Reading the novel teaches this person, and reminds the rest of
us, of something valuable: what it feels like to have such an emotion in such
circumstances. It also teaches or reminds us that such an emotion can, perhaps
should, be felt in those circumstances. This is valuable too.
To illustrate this, consider the sort of teenagers who mock and shun their
poorer (or, for that matter, richer) classmates. They often do not realize that it is
even possible, never mind appropriate, to feel ashamed of their behaviour. They
know that their attitude is frowned upon by some. But they are only familiar
with the arguments against this attitude: ‘you should treat everyone equally’, ‘you
should not be prejudiced by evidence of wealth or poverty’, ‘being rich or poor

¹ Perhaps he considers it in the Poetics, in his discussion of mimesis. Cp. Fossheim, Ch. 5, and
also Zamir 2002 on the Rhetoric: a complete Aristotelian view of ethics and literature must look
well beyond the Ethics.
 Ethics in Crime Fiction 215

does not make you a better or worse person’, and so on. Austen’s novel—and
it is one that teenagers often read—does not rehearse those arguments. Instead
it puts us in a fictional situation where we identify imaginatively with a heroine
who makes crucial misjudgements of just this sort, and then is caught out by
them. The teenager who reads Pride and Prejudice puts herself in a position where
she not only knows that she can get people wrong by relying on appearances, and
that she will be ashamed of herself if she does. More importantly, it also teaches
her what this will feel like.
Nussbaum can add a second response to the objection that only action can
habituate us into virtue. This is that virtue is not merely a matter of fine
action; it also intrinsically involves fine moral perception. So in Love’s Knowledge
Nussbaum cites a scene from Henry James’s The Golden Bowl as an example of
such fine moral awareness (Nussbaum 1990: 152):
Moral knowledge, James suggests, is not simply intellectual grasp of propositions; it is not
even simply intellectual grasp of particular facts; it is perception. It is seeing a complex,
concrete reality in a highly lucid and richly responsive way; it is taking in what is there,
with imagination and feeling.
So learning to see things right is a separate matter from learning to do right.
Therefore, even if we can’t learn much about doing right by reading novels (as is
perhaps the case), that is no reason to think that we can’t learn a lot about seeing
things right from novels.
A good novel does not tell us that there is a correct way to think about
moral issues. Instead, it teaches us to respond to the world in something like
the manner that Nussbaum describes in the passage just quoted (Nussbaum
1990: 152). It presents us with pictures of the world which take in fine detail
in unconventional and surprising ways, thereby stimulating the imagination and
the emotions. Through Elizabeth’s eyes, we first see the world as a place where
pleasant, attractive people deserve our attention and sympathy more than others
who are less so. Then, through her mistakes and her trials, we come to perceive
the world in rather finer detail. This teaches us not just that the moral universe
is a complex one, but also how we might focus our gaze to take in the relevant
aspects of it. This, too, is morally valuable.
To sum up. Doing rather than thinking may be central to the process of
becoming virtuous; but identification with fictional characters is neither doing nor
thinking, and it, too, may have something to add to the process. The kind of iden-
tification that happens when we read a novel can help our moral development in
two ways. First, it educates the emotions in a way that argument cannot, through
an emotional experience that can sometimes be as vivid as anything we feel in
acting. Second, the identifications that we shall experience through our reading
will educate our perceptions, which are themselves a necessary part of virtue.
216 Sandrine Berges

So much, then, in defence of the general claim, on which I concur with

Nussbaum, that reading novels can contribute to moral education. Let me now
turn to a particular application of that general claim which Nussbaum does not
make: that hardboiled detective novels can be especially good educators.

2 EV I L A N D T H E O R D I N A RY: A D AY I N T H E L I F E
OF THE HARDBOILED DETECTIVE

Here are a few examples of hardboiled-detective novels that I believe to be

morally valuable: Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels; Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone
series (a female hardboiled who started in the seventies and is still going); Sara
Paretsky’s V.I. stories; and Jean-Claude Izzo’s Fabio Montale trilogy (Montale
is an ex-cop in Marseille). This list of authors and novels is not meant to be
definitive: there are many other authors whose novels would probably serve just
as well for the points I want to make. I have chosen them simply because I know
them and like them.
These books share a common heritage: they are all strongly influenced by the
realism of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. (I shall not discuss either
here, since their works are often regarded as classics rather than mere examples
of the crime genre. My thesis, remember, is that there can be moral value in
mere genre novels.) In these books, the plot is defined less by the mystery of the
crime than by the evil or violence that unfolds during the investigation, in the
process of solving the mystery. There is never just one criminal, but a myriad of
wrongdoers and people indifferent to the evil surrounding them, all somehow
caught up in the web of evil. In the same way, there is never just one victim
(the body at the beginning, or even the several corpses we come across in the
course of the novel) but an indescribably large number of sufferers: people whose
lives are affected, sometimes crippled, by an injustice which should have been
righted. In Paretsky’s Hard Times, for example, V. I. Warshawski investigates
the commercial use of slave labour in a private prison. However, it is very clear
that the victims she identifies are not merely those women who work in the
T-Shirt factory hidden in the prison building, but all of those prisoners who were
picked on by the police for dubious reasons, and kept imprisoned in disgraceful
conditions with no adequate legal representation.
According to Nussbaum in Poetic Justice, part of what makes novels morally
valuable is that they succeed in engaging our emotions in an appropriate manner;
which they do by focusing on the ordinary in such a way that it forces us to
reassess what we know and what we are familiar with. We feel what we do in
response, because what is being discussed is close to our heart, and because it is so
presented that we cannot ignore it. In a novel, familiarity stops breeding contempt
(Nussbaum 1995: 9). Nussbaum illustrates this claim by reference to Dickens’s
Hard Times, where the reader is made to visit, in her imagination, the various
 Ethics in Crime Fiction 217

scenes of the everyday life of the rich and poor; their workplaces, and homes. The
effect is that the moral issues we debate when we read Hard Times are brought
home to us: understood as real issues that we are probably already debating.
In the light of this, it is surprising that in her other works on ethics and the
novel, Nussbaum’s leading examples almost always come from Henry James’s
novels. For, with a few exceptions, James’s plots are not about (what most
of us would call) ordinary life. Most of them concern the union of a very
naive American with a sophisticated, impoverished, and/or dishonest European
aristocrat. The heroes and heroines then spend extraordinary long stretches of
their leisured lives debating with their equally implausible friends how to salvage
their almost fantastically doomed relationships (or, alternatively, how to sink
them further). If we are truly concerned with praising novels which depict the
ordinary, perhaps we would do better to take a look at crime literature instead.
The kind of crime fiction I am concerned with typically focuses on the
portrayal of evil and of what happens when we fight it. So, clearly, there is
plenty of morally important material in the plots of these novels. But, it will be
asked, how does the genre deal with these pressing moral issues? Does it promote
identification and emotional response? Can we learn from those portrayals of evil?
The answers are all positive, for the crime novel focuses on the ordinary even
more than do novels like Dickens’s Hard Times. This focus forces us to confront
and reflect on the evil that we see every day (and ignore; otherwise, it would not
be so omnipresent). By presenting it in the context of a criminal investigation,
the crime novel makes ordinary evil extraordinary, and forces us to see it and
react to it in new, unprejudiced ways.
Our emotional involvement in crime novels typically comes from our iden-
tification with the hero’s or heroine’s indignation with crime, and passion for
justice. We see the corpses of murder victims through the eyes of the person
who must now interview the victim’s family, or who fears that he could have
prevented the murder altogether, if only he had been faster and more efficient. By
following the investigation, we meet people whom we may know only as statistics
and whom we never get to talk to; people whose lives are crippled by evil that
would not exist if anyone cared about them: the ghetto dwellers (Rankin, Izzo),
the homeless (Paretsky, Rankin), the prisoners (Paretsky, Izzo), the immigrants
legal and illegal (Muller, Izzo), and the oppressed racial minorities (Muller).
We are used to seeing evil only from our own perspective: organized crime
means we might get mugged and our children might be sold drugs; corruption
means that politicians whom we trusted will now have to be replaced. But the
crime novel brings us, and makes us care about, the perspective of those who are
more directly affected by evil: the children whose career alternatives are crime
and unemployment; the mothers who have to accept slave wages from criminal
employers in order to feed their children; the witnesses whose own lives turns
out to be so steeped in crime that they are unable to care about the victim whose
death is being investigated—and so on.
218 Sandrine Berges

All we, the readers, normally experience of crime is no more than the tip of
the iceberg—an iceberg which is, in any case, a threat to us only if we are ‘at sea’,
and certainly not if we see it only on television. The crime novel teaches us that,
in fact, we are ‘at sea’: all this horror and chaos is part of our everyday life, of the
life of the people we pass in the street, those we work with and who live not very
far from us. If we do not think that this evil is part of our lives, it is because we
choose not to see it.
The crime novel emphasizes the ordinariness of evil by rarely stepping out of
ordinary scenes. In the course of solving a crime, the hero or heroine lives a fairly
ordinary life, has confrontations with his or her boss, does paperwork, engages
or tries to stay out of office politics, goes on dates, has arguments with his or her
partner, splits up, makes up or meets someone new, hangs around in bars, drives
around town, or stays home. The extraordinary does occur: the detective meets
great criminals, gets into danger, gets involved in car-chases or cross-country
chases, gets beaten up, or tortured, has her house or office ransacked, bombed or
burned . . . we would hardly keep turning the pages if it didn’t! But in no way
do these exceptional events dispel the reader’s feeling that what is being depicted
is part of our world, and that it is a part that we would do well not to ignore.
Because it forces us to confront the evil around us from the perspective of
someone who knows and cares, the crime novel, I believe, qualifies as morally
valuable on the criteria set out by Nussbaum. The fact that these novels are more
accessible than Henry James’s (and a better read than Dickens’s Hard Times!) can
be no objection to their value. Even if James’s psychological and moral analysis
is finer than that to be found in the typical hardboiled-detective book, all that
means is that those who are already on a superior moral plane (whoever they are)
may benefit from reading James. Those of us who struggle to come to terms with
everyday moral dilemmas may, in fact, benefit more from crime literature.
Nussbaum may object that these novels do not deal with moral issues in a
subtle enough manner, and so that they do not really educate moral perception.²
On the contrary, the novels I focus on show that the implications of evil are
endless, that an evil act must be dealt with on many levels over long periods of
time before it will go away (if it ever will). More about this in the next section.

3 C A S U I S T RY, C A R E , C H A R AC T E R , A N D C R I M E

Let me spell out my claim that crime fiction can be morally valuable, by being
more specific about what kind of moral thinking it encourages. I shall argue that
it directs us towards an Aristotelian way of thinking about evil and justice, in that

² See Nussbaum 1995: 10; Booth 1988: 201–5. On why we read popular fiction, and why many
of the things that can be said about genre fiction don’t apply to crime novels, see Carroll 1994;
and Knight 1994. See also Knight and McKnight 1997: 124 on how crime fiction encourages finer
perception.
 Ethics in Crime Fiction 219

the main virtues the hero/heroine of the crime novel displays, and which we are
encouraged to identify with, are just those most clearly identified by Aristotelian
ethics.
I pick out three characteristics of the moral thinking implicit in crime fiction
for special attention.
(i) First: there is a willingness to go beyond the rules, which are seen as
inadequate guidance for action in difficult cases. Instead, the detective is typically
shown as psychologically and emotionally observant, and intuitive to an extent
that suggests that she has ‘some sort of complex responsiveness to the salient
features of one’s concrete situation’ (Nussbaum 1990: 55); something, in other
words, very like what many Aristotelians call phronesis, or practical wisdom.
(ii) Second: what keeps the detective going through a gruelling investigation,
through danger, and in the face of the criticism of just about everyone he comes
across? The answer is that he cares, deeply. He cares for the victim and the victim’s
survivors; he cares for past or future victims of similar crimes; he cares for all the
misery he uncovers during the investigation; and he is angry with the criminal
and all those who aid him—the detective is angry that justice is not done.
(iii) Third: there is an emphasis on character development. The serial nature
of most hardboiled-detective fiction enables the author to develop the hero or
heroine. The detective is seen to change, and mature from one book to another
as she experiences evil and learns to deal with it. She becomes not just scarred but
also quicker of understanding, keener in her responses, actions and emotions,
and more able to see the larger picture of evil that the case she is working on is
part of.
Here are examples, which I shall give in fairly full detail, of each of these
characteristics in turn.

(i) Rules and intuition

In Ian Rankin’s The Falls, Siobhan Clarke reflects on why she is about to break
the rules and keep an assignment with a suspect without informing her superiors
in the police force (Rankin 2001: 442). She cannot quite say what moved her,
if not a slight disgust with what she calls ‘company players’, those who stick
conscientiously by every rule even when the case appears to demand that they
break them. At the same time, she is worried that she might become too much
like John Rebus, who breaks rules as the norm, and often keeps information to
himself when he should be sharing it with colleagues. Siobhan does not want to
become a ‘lone wolf detective’ any more than she wants to be a ‘company player’.
She just wants to do her job well: solve the case and ensure that justice is done.
Her assignment with a suspect is the culmination of her role in a murder
investigation. The suspect is the ‘quizmaster’ who has been sending her ’clues’ by
email, which are supposed to lead her ultimately to the motive for the murder.
With the help of a colleague, Siobhan has cracked the clues one by one. At first,
220 Sandrine Berges

luck and her capacity for observing details helped. Then she came to understand
and anticipate the quizmaster’s thought patterns, and she put that understanding
together with her knowledge of the case. This and her ability to pick out, from
her background of information and perception, which details are relevant when
has enabled her to come to a point where she could actually find the quizmaster.
As she knows so much about him, it makes no sense for anyone else to be allowed
to track him down. She is the best person for the job.
By contrast, when Derek Linford, a ‘company player’, attempts to break the
rules in another Rebus novel, Set in Darkness, he does it on an impulse. He
has been made unhappy in love, and to feel professionally inadequate by John
Rebus. To defy him, he starts tailing a suspect without authorization. When the
suspect leaves the pub, Linford jumps out of his car, forgetting his mobile phone.
Within minutes he is in a dark alley and the suspect jumps him, leaving him
incapacitated for weeks, and unable, of course, to continue the investigation.
Clearly, breaking the rules was not the best idea Derek Linford ever had.
So what is the difference between Siobhan and Derek, police officers of the
same age, same training, same abilities? But they do not have the same abilities.
Derek may be as intelligent and physically strong as Siobhan, but he lacks what
can only be called practical wisdom, and she has it. She is able to judge the
situation she finds herself in finely enough to know what is the most appropriate
course of action. She is, moreover, practised in such fine judgements, as we
see from her ability to solve some of the quizmaster’s clues. She can pick out
the ‘salient features’ of the situation she is in, and she can match it with an
appropriate course of action. The fact that she does not quite know why she
thinks her course of action is best speaks for the complexity of her response: she
is moved by a huge background of information containing the ‘salient features’
of all the relevant situations she has been part of. This is practical wisdom in the
sense Nussbaum understands it.
Derek Linford, on the other hand, does not make any fine judgements about
the situation he is in. In fact, he fails to notice very obvious things such as ‘it is a
bad idea to follow a killer up a dark alley when no one knows where you are and
you have no means of contacting them’. He hasn’t even thought that it might be
inappropriate to park a flash car outside a Leith pub frequented mostly by thugs.
In fact, he hasn’t thought at all, and it is not obvious that he would have been
able to think in this manner, for such perception demands a certain degree of
intuitive response and emotive involvement which he lacks. He fails to take into
account what other people might feel or think. He simply assumes, for instance,
that Rebus has got it in for him, thus misreading his character dramatically; and
he fails to recognize that the man he is following is highly dangerous. Derek
Linford does not have practical wisdom—and this is why most of the time, he
chooses to stick to the rules. For him, career success can only lie in that direction.
So how are the Rankin novels ethically valuable? The novels say that the
best detectives, those we are encouraged to admire and identify with, solve cases
 Ethics in Crime Fiction 221

by being less abstract and more practical; by stepping back from the rules and
focusing on each case as deserving a new answer; by becoming involved in an
intuitive and emotional way as well as intellectually and physically; by being
practised observers, not just of scene of crime details, but of human emotions
and ambitions; and by learning to tap into a background of past experience
which is relevant to the case at hand. In short, good detectives are Aristotelian:
they emphasize practical wisdom rather than obedience to rules. These novels
familiarize us with the idea that it is often more productive to address moral
problems on a case-by-case basis, taking in the particular features of a situation,
rather than by applying rules in a blind, impartial, and impersonal way.

(ii) Care
In Jean-Claude Izzo’s trilogy, Fabio Montale is first a demoted cop, and then an
ex-cop. His investigations take place in Marseille’s, a town crippled by racism
and corruption, a breeding ground for the Mafia, for the National Front, and,
more recently, for Islamic Fundamentalism. What drives Montale in his fight
against injustice is his anger at these evils, and his intense desire to eradicate
them. In the second novel, Chourmo, his beloved cousin comes to him to ask for
help in finding her son, who has run away to be with his girlfriend. She adds
that she does not want him seeing the girl, as she is an Algerian, and ‘You know
what these people are like’. When he hears this he threatens to throw her out of
his house. Later on in the story, he witnesses a murder and is taken to a police
station to be interrogated by a corrupt police officer. When he leaves the station,
he tears off a National Front election poster and throws it in the bin, knowing
full well that no one who works in that station will thank him for it.
Montale is a man who feels pain every time an innocent person, or at least
someone who is not totally corrupt, dies. The nephew he is looking for has been
murdered. His reaction to seeing the body is ‘like a red lightning inside my eyes.
His blood. His death splashes me. How will I be able to shut my eyes now,
without seeing his body?’ (Izzo 2002a: 220) But what keeps him going through
all this anger and pain is the chourmo spirit of the title, that is, the spirit of
the old galley slaves who knew that their only chance of survival was to stick
together and to help each other, a certain kind of concern and sympathy and
active involvement in other people’s troubles which comes from the recognition
that ‘we are all in it together’: ‘When someone was in the shit, you could only be
from the same family. It was as simple as that’ (Izzo 2002a: 170).
Montale’s emotional involvement is informed and appropriate. He is angry at
racism because he recognizes it as oppression and understands it has no rational
justification. He also knows what kind of anger to display when. His anger at his
cousin is a personal kind: he lets her see his feelings, hopes she will be influenced
by his display, and then forgives her. In the police station his anger is both public
and symbolic. He acts to make his action noticed, both by the racist police
222 Sandrine Berges

officers and by the black and North African ‘suspects’ who are dragged there for
questioning every day: to show them that somebody rejects the racial and political
injustice that they are involved in, and cares enough to act. Montale’s emotions are
wise as well as powerful. They are directed towards justice. They lead him to act
morally. Again, it becomes clear that this conception of morality is Aristotelian:
a virtuous person according to Aristotle feels the right kind of emotions, at the
right moment, and is thus driven by them to the right course of action.

(iii) Character development

At the end of one of Marcia Muller’s novels, her heroine, Sharon McCone,
shoots a man. Her friend and colleague steps out of his office building; the killer
who has been lying in wait for him steps out and takes aim. McCone shoots the
killer from a distance, and he dies. Of course, everybody is grateful that she saved
her colleague’s life. Still, somehow, no one feels they are able to be close to her
any more. She has shot and killed a man. They did not know she had it in her to
take a life. She did not either. McCone has to deal not only with all her friends
giving her the cold shoulder but with the kind of person she has become; or is it
the kind of person she has turned out to be?
In each of the ensuing novels, McCone makes some progress towards regaining
her friends’ trust and coming to terms with the changes in her character: both
the changes that led to the shooting, and the changes that it led to. In a very
Californian manner, she comes to terms with it all after a long introspective
night spent sitting on top of a hill with her boyfriend. What is significant here
is the emphasis placed by Muller on character changes. Her heroine’s character
grows every time she resolves a moral challenge, which means that in the later
novels she is a very different person from who she was in the early ones. It is very
tempting—and I don’t see any reason to resist the temptation—to see Aristotle’s
concept of habituation and character-maturation in this feature of crime novels.
In order to become virtuous, one has to educate one’s character by practising
being good: that is, by practising making the right decisions through displaying
the right emotions and using practical wisdom. The hardboiled detective’s career
is all about practising solving moral problems, so it is no surprise that we see
them growing into better or worse people as the series progresses.
This is just a brief selection of evidence to show how three authors’ crime
fiction exemplifies three characteristics of Aristotelian virtue ethics. There is
plenty more evidence that I could have given: besides Chandler and Hammett,
whom I denied myself, there is also Paretsky (section 2); again, I might have
referred to Sue Grafton, Reginald Hill, the French author Fred Vargas, Kathy
Reichs, or Patricia Cornwell—not to mention the many hardboiled-detective
authors whom I have not read. It seems to me undeniable that Fabio Montale
and Sharon McCone display practical reason when they solve crimes, that Rebus,
Siobhan Clarke, and McCone are emotionally engaged individuals, and that
 Ethics in Crime Fiction 223

Rebus, Clarke, and Montale’s characters are depicted as changing as a result of

what they go through. I hope it is equally clear from my discussion that these
are Aristotelian character-traits, and that what we learn about them from these
novels is morally valuable.

4 PA R A N O I A A N D D A R K N E S S : T WO O B J E C T I O N S

Let me close by addressing two objections. The first objection, which I call
the paranoia objection, is drawn from Jane Austen’s commentary on the gothic
novel in Northanger Abbey. The heroine of that book, Catherine Morland, is
encouraged by a shallow acquaintance to read every gothic novel she can lay her
hands on and discuss them at length. She becomes so obsessed with them that
when she visits an ancient abbey with friends, she imagines that atrocities of
the kind she has read about in Radcliffe’s Udolfo are going on. Her suspicions
are exposed, she is shamed and becomes again her sensible self, realizing she
may have read rather too many gothic novels. Towards the end of the novel she
discovers that the master of the abbey is, in fact, crueller than anything she had
imagined in her fantasies—but in a mundane rather than a fantastical way. We
are made to feel that gothic fantasies mislead, not by making us think the world
is a worse place than it, in fact, is but by directing our thoughts away from the
real evil in the world.
A critic of my thesis about the moral value of genre fiction might well apply
Austen’s criticism to crime novels. The avid reader of crime novels may become
the subject of a paranoia similar to Catherine Morland’s. She may begin to see
corruption everywhere, suspect innocent looking neighbours of being criminals
(as, for instance, James Stewart and Diane Keaton do in Rear Window and
Manhattan Murder Mystery —although, of course, they turn out to be right).
Such paranoia may detract the crime-fiction reader from the real evil that is going
on in the world, and may stop her from becoming engaged in the fight against
injustice. Why bother joining any political party, if you think that all politicians
are involved in crime? Why help right social wrongs, if you are convinced that
the activities of the multinationals doom our social order anyway? If crime
and corruption are omnipresent, then nothing we do will change anything, so
engagement is useless and presumptuous.
If this is the kind of attitude that crime novels encourage, then indeed they
are not morally valuable. However, seeing evil everywhere is only paranoia if
there is a fantastic element to one’s vision; if it involves conspiracy theories and
the suspicion of one’s neighbours as a matter of principle. But if it involves
realizing that many people’s lives are touched by evil in such a way that can
only be remedied by major social reform, by a very general understanding that
such evil exists, and an equally universal desire to put a stop to it, then it is not
paranoia. It is not paranoid to deplore the omnipresence of racism in the streets
224 Sandrine Berges

and in the police force, nor is it paranoid to suspect that some politicians are in
cahoots with the mafia—if these are real phenomena. These sentiments, on the
contrary, can help us to think of ways of remedying these evils. In so far as they
are responsive to truths, the more people have them the better. The novels Jane
Austen parodies distract the reader from the real evil around her, towards fantasy.
But good crime novels, although they do arguably have some fantastic elements
(maybe not all corporations are as corrupt and criminal as Sara Paretsky would
have us believe—yet no doubt some are), also attempt to give a realistic picture
of the everyday misery and injustice against which we often close our eyes. To
come back to Northanger Abbey, a crime-novel reader would have suspected that
General Tilney was up to something unpleasant, and that if he found out that
Catherine was not rich, then he would not let her marry his son.
The second objection is more worrying. It is that hardboiled detective fiction
gives us a picture of the world that is so dark and pessimistic that one may be
discouraged from wanting to pursue justice. Detectives in crime fiction are often
portrayed as loners, and, as they solve more cases, they seem to get lonelier and
lonelier. They are often unsuccessful in their relationships; they are estranged
from their families; their circle of friends diminishes with each new investigation;
and they become less and less good at making new friends. In some series it is
simply that the job is too demanding and that potential friends and lovers cannot
accept that it takes precedence over them. Or, maybe, what is at issue is that
the detective is willing to risk his life whilst those who love him wait anxiously
for the end of the investigation. In some other novels, the problem is that the
detective has seen too much evil: ‘I stink of death’, says Fabio Montale, and he
is reluctant to impose this smell on people who are not so tainted by evil, people
who do not deal with it as closely as he. All in all, the message seems to be: ‘Don’t
try this at home! If you want a quiet life, if you want a decent life, leave injustice
well alone.’ And if that is the message, then crime novels discourage rather than
encourage moral involvement.
It is hard to deny that anyone who has reasonable expectations of what their
life should be like will not want to emulate the heroes and heroines of detective
fiction. The ordinary person will not think it is a good idea to become a private
investigator who does the police’s work for them, or a police officer who works
against the rules (unless of course this is one’s ambition anyway). But this is not
quite the same as saying that readers will be discouraged from fighting injustice.
The kind of injustice that is being depicted in crime novels is mostly of the
kind that exists because everybody ignores it; it is not the kind that can only be
solved by a Zorro, a Batman, or a Lone Ranger. The detective in crime novels is
often portrayed as ultimately powerless in the face of all pervading evil because
the evil is of a kind that can only be solved by a change in society’s attitudes.
Racism is the root of the evil Montale fights, but the fight against racism is not
a one-man job. More generally, in all of the novels I have discussed, what seems
to cause the most trouble is people’s unwillingness to help each other; the fact
 Ethics in Crime Fiction 225

that they turn away when they witness a crime being committed; that they are
reluctant to come forward as witnesses; that they refuse to see that some of their
compatriots are so badly off that they have no option but a life of crime. It is this
kind of omnipresent evil which makes life difficult for the hardboiled detective,
rather than the few extraordinary evil and powerful characters they encounter.
The latter simply make things worse in a world that is already in a very poor
shape. Fighting them is the detective’s job, and we would be very imprudent to
try it at home. But fighting the kind of social evil that crime novels depict so
realistically—that does seem to be our job, and there is no reason why it should
make our lives a misery.
To conclude: I have not tried to show that crime novels are better novels than
the writings of (say) Henry James, or that they give us more morally speaking.
Nussbaum may well be right that the reader of Henry James will gain more
moral understanding than the reader of Ian Rankin. But how many James readers
are there? In order to read and appreciate James, a certain degree of cultural,
intellectual, and moral refinement is necessary; and, in a way, if we already are so
refined, then we are not in sore need of moral education. But what about those of
us who have not the time, nor the inclination, to learn to read James? Surely the
recognition that crime writing is morally valuable too will come, for us, as a relief.