The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 12, 2007

Philosophical Trends in the XXth Century

Imagining Evil (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sopranos)

In this paper, I explore a set of moral questions about the portrayal of evil characters in fiction: might the portrayal of evil in fiction ever be morally wrong? If so, under what circumstances and for what reasons? What kinds of portrayals are morally wrong and what kinds are not? I argue that whether or not imagining evil is morally wrong depends on the formal and structural properties of the work.