In 2005 what would be at stake in naming some kinds of fiction as moral—with the concomitant understanding that some would then have to be named immoral? What is lost if we give up the category? What is gained if we invoke it? Why should we use these terms for black marks on a white page that perform the trick of making us believe that people who have never existed are as real as our best friends? As a species we seem to have a relationship to story that is very deep indeed. We want to sit around the fire and hear what happens next. But why? Why isn't life enough for us? Why do we need these alternative lives—neither ours nor those of anyone we might have known? Are we after a predictability that life in the body doesn't offer? And if part of our pleasure is moral—if we want the hero to triumph and the villain to be punished—is that proof of the inherently moral nature of our consciousness? But what about Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair? No one in her right mind likes Amelia better; no one in her right mind would say that Becky was morally superior. Consider the vexing question of charm, and the colorlessness of life without it. Is this a moral issue? Should color and charm be redefined as virtues, along with honesty, fortitude, generosity, a sense of justice, and filial love?

Not all virtues are equal to all people at all times. At certain historical moments some virtues may be more important than others. At the time of the writing of the Iliad, Greek culture could be kept alive only by a warrior class; courage in battle was of primary importance. What virtues are most needed now? Most readers of serious fiction would probably have a list different from those of most Muslim fundamentalists and evangelical Christians. The latter might have a lively sense of the sin that reading certain books could lead to—a sense that would seem quite foreign to the former.

I am no stranger to what I would like to call literary protectionism; in the Catholic Church of my childhood certain books were forbidden to me under pain of mortal sin. The range of the interdiction was wide; it traveled from Voltaire to Erskine Caldwell. (I would like to say this is a thing of the past in Catholicism, but recent actions taken by the Vatican lead me to believe that that is too hopeful a position.) The Church fathers would have said they were protecting me from the temptation to leave the comforting bosom of Mother Church, sparing me the blandishments of atheistic freethinking and the seductions of free love. Broadly speaking, then, impiety and unchastity were the sins they feared most, the ones feared by fundamentalists of all stripes.

For most readers of serious fiction in 2005 these words are archaic and irrelevant. We serious readers, even if we call ourselves religious, are more concerned with oppressive religious and civil structures than with the dangers of a life unsheltered by them. As readers of novels we stake our claim in the territory of the individual—for the novel, in its form and its history, is a celebration of the honorable task of creating an individual self through reflection and experimentation in the stress of a lived life. Some novels treat the relationship of the individual to the community—but this is the exception rather than the rule. Fundamentalists believe that individualism has gone too far—that the notion of personal good has trumped a sense of responsibility to the larger group. Most often, though, this idea is called up in regard to sexual issues; when the issue is whether to pay more taxes so that wealth can be spread to the group, the sacredness of the individual is brought to the fore. What some of us call compassion, others call naiveté. Those of us who are accused of being naive point to the fact that the desire to repress freedom results in deaths that can be laid directly at its feet, whereas the dangers of unchastity or impiety, whatever they may be, have no direct connection to firing squads or torture chambers.