The introduction outlines some important differences in approaches to literature and ethics. It goes on to situate the following work in relation to those differences. For example, we may be concerned principally with the literature (e.g., how to evaluate literary works morally) or the ethics (e.g., how to think in more nuanced ways about ethical problems in real life); this volume is concerned principally with the latter. More significantly, the study of ethics may be descriptive or normative. In other words, it may address what constitutes ethical thought or it may advocate a particular version of ethics. The book is divided into two parts. The first part treats descriptive ethics, seeking to isolate cross-cultural and transhistorical patterns in the relation between ethical attitudes, on the one hand, and structures of storytelling, on the other. The second part takes up normative ethics, focusing on an aspect of emotional response that is important in both ethics and literature – empathy.

The first chapter takes up the task of defining ethics, considered as a set of psychological structures and processes. In other work, I have argued that the three processes of categorization are, in distinct ways, consequential for our response to literature. Specifically, we make use of rule-defined categorization, prototype-defined categorization, and exemplar-defined categorization. In my descriptive account of ethics, all three types also enter importantly into our moral thought, feeling, and behavior. In connection with rule-based categorization, I argue that we have broad or fundamental ethical orientations that are guided by our various settings of parameters within general principles. These parameters concern such issues as what sorts of action or condition fall under the scope of morality. For example, there appears to be a broad division between people who are principally concerned with ending unjustified pleasure and people whose primary moral worries bear on undeserved pain. The first chapter explores this level of ethics.