Moral Sense, Conscience, and Consciousness in the English Novel
Keynote by
St Francis College, New York, USA
Why have English novelists (in spite of obvious reasons dealing with status, class, and gender) spent so much effort focused on the propriety (and morality) of manners? How has this attention to manners – the dealings between and among people – generated so many moral dilemmas? While the scope of this discussion is broad and sweeping, the purpose is to address enduring issues and key questions that persist in prose English literary history: What does it mean to be good? Where is the locus of moral decisions? Do we have a moral sense? Where is the boundary between one’s mind and the world? How are emotions related to morality? How (according to the developmental psychologist Paul Bloom) do we reconcile humanist values with a mechanistic explanation of the brain? With burgeoning secular science from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century there was an overriding concern with moral questions, especially of a social nature, that relied on, first, initial response and, later, self examination. The history of the novel reflects the development of moral introspection, from moral sense, to conscience, and into consciousness