The true dilemmas of life, ethical or otherwise, can't be expressed as inductive or deductive arguments. At best, you can put together an abductive argument tha

The true dilemmas of life, ethical or otherwise, can't be expressed as inductive or deductive arguments. At best, you can put together an abductive argument that ends up looking like a pros and cons list - and even still it's a judgement call, and not one that's readily communicable to contemporaries or posterity. Buddha, Jesus, Plato/Socrates, Swift, Nietzsche - seriously, if you throw a dart at a random distribution of centuries, the greatest moral thinker from that century used fictional constructs of some kind to illustrate their point. The 21st century is not going to be any different. But there's an even bigger problem here that borders on illiteracy. Believing that ideas fleshed out in fiction serve no practical purpose completely ignores the history of all ideas, not just moral ones. Great fiction thinks. If you want to learn about love, read Shakespeare. Texts on the mating habits of higher primates are not going to help your romantic life. If you want to learn about friendship, The Lord of the Rings is going to offer better advice than anything Freud wrote. If you want to learn about government, Homer or Jonathan Swift can teach you more about the machinations of power than Machiavelli or John Locke. I believe the reason is that fiction speaks to the whole mind, not just the part of the brain that parses language and performs algebra.