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THE success of William J. Bennett's admirable anthology of moral tales, The Book of Virtues*--which has become a major best-seller--is both heartening and puzzling: heartening because we want to think that people hunger for literature that teaches virtue, puzzling because it is not obvious why literature might have that effect.
Almost every account we have from psychologists of the moral development of the child emphasizes reinforcements and imitation. Children acquire rules of conduct by having compliance with those rules rewarded and violations punished and by observing and imitating the behavior of their parents and friends.
We are, however, neither rewarded nor punished in any palpable sense by stories about imaginary people. We may wish to imitate a fictional character who succeeds, but why should we identify with one who suffers? Bennett's answer to this question is that such stories create "moral literacy": they supply examples that tell readers how to recognize the virtues in the practical world, and they "help anchor our children in their culture," a world of "shared ideals." I believe he is correct, but his answer is open to several objections from skeptics.
To begin with, strict behaviorists will argue that children no more acquire moral habits from moral literature than they acquire athletic ability from reading the sports pages or musical ability from listening to songs. Living according to certain rules requires a certain biological endowment developed through the same experiences by which we learn to field a ground ball or play the violin--practice, practice, practice.
For their part, cultural relativists--or, as they currently fashion themselves, postmodernists--will claim that there is no culture of shared ideals, but only many competing cultures (or "interpretive communities"). Each has its own ideals, unique to its culture. It may be nice to acquaint children with their culture, but we should not imagine that there is anything fundamentally moral about it.
Finally, some philosophers and theologians will suggest that, while there are universal moral standards, moral stories obscure them precisely because they "anchor our children in their culture." These stories are always about people like the people who read them. Rarely do the stories instruct white children to be fair to black ones, or Gentiles to help Jews, or Apaches to welcome the Navaho. And many...