Fiction gives us a channel to explore problems we wouldn't otherwise regularly see in our day-to-day lives, and learn about the right ways to answer them, so th

Fiction gives us a channel to explore problems we wouldn't otherwise regularly see in our day-to-day lives, and learn about the right ways to answer them, so that when we are confronted with them for real, we have a better framework for dealing with them than our basic instincts provide. Real-world ethical problems tend to be much more complex than those presented in fiction, but that's exactly why we need fiction to provide us with the building blocks via easier-to-understand case studies.