A post by Ruxandra Teodorescu

As a genre, Science Fiction often engages with philosophical themes and questions, its genre conventions providing a unique platform for exploring philosophical ideas in imaginative and speculative contexts. Its emphasis on detailed worldbuilding creates an immersive experience, accessible through one’s imagination, from which one can emerge knowledgeable about subjective perspectives other than one’s own. While this epistemic access to different experiential perspectives is not devoid of challenges in practice, it shows how literature can engage the reader in moral dilemmas. Oftentimes, authors deliberately challenge or subvert traditional moral frameworks to provoke reflection and incite empathy.

Contemporary philosophers and literary scholars (most notably Nussbaum 1990) have theorized that reading fiction can encourage readers to shift perspectives and engage in moral exploration and hypothetical moral decision-making while contemplating their positions on and in these fictional narratives. Over the years these assumptions have been subject to empirical studies, which James O. Young (2018) summarizes for The Junkyard and assesses that engaging with fiction improves affective and cognitive empathy.

In the following, by delving into Amy Kind’s work on epistemic accessibility and studies of the moral imagination by both Mark Johnson and Mark Coeckelbergh, I argue that literary narratives allow us to probe moral norms and look beyond our subjective experience. Applied to SF, this demonstrates how the genre’s specific distance from and yet connection to contemporary times provides a productive playground for moral thought experiments. Finally, showing that the nature of ethical concepts and principles is not detached from their relationship to the world, I will investigate the example of C. Robert Cargill’s Day Zero to show how AI narratives do their part in challenging and furthering the ontological foundations of ethics.