Should the Novelist Get a Moral Pass?

Is The Literary Writer Morally Different Than The Philosopher?

Justin E. Smith makes an excellent defense of “immoral” literature, i.e., work whose narrators and/or authors violate moral taboos. Smith compares the moralizers who want to sanitize literature to Soviet censors. Ours is an age, he says, of “soft totalitarianism,” where an internet panopticon plays the same role that the oppressive state once played:

We …