Why We Need Stories to Understand Right and Wrong
On moral intuition, storytelling, and the limits of ethical systems.
There’s a thought experiment that appears early in most introductions to moral philosophy. A surgeon has five patients in critical condition, each with a failing organ, and a healthy man in the next room who, if sacrificed, could save them all. What should the doctor do?
What’s unsettling about this example isn’t only the imagined violence, or the artificiality of the setup. It’s that it asks us to entertain a choice we’re not quite sure how to justify or refuse. For many, the scenario provokes immediate discomfort, an instinct that something is wrong, even if one cannot say exactly what. There is the utilitarian response—that five lives outweigh one—which follows cleanly from the logic. And yet, most of us disagree. Some try to explain this resistance by appealing to other values—those of autonomy, consent, trust in medical institutions. But these, too, can be made unstable. The professor (or textbook, or lecture) will offer a new variation, one that forces these values into conflict with one another. And soon we find ourselves at a kind of crossroads: our moral ideas pulling in different directions, our principles beginning to contradict, and no obvious resolution. Often, what remains is only a pressure in the chest, a feeling of “no, not this.” In moral philosophy, this is sometimes called an “intuition.”
The Trouble with Intuition
Philosophy, to its credit, has long taken this kind of discomfort seriously. Much of the field is concerned, in one way or another, with what to do when our intuitions don’t align with our principles—when something feels wrong, even though the logic appears sound. Sometimes this tension is explained by pointing to evolutionary instincts, cultural norms, or affective bias; other times, it prompts a revision of the theory itself—an added principle, a sharper distinction, a better fit between our frameworks and our feelings. Thus, much of moral theory arises precisely in response to these tensions. The history of ethics—from Aristotle’s practical wisdom to Kant’s respect for persons—can be read as an extended attempt to honor our deepest moral instincts while making them publicly defensible. Even utilitarianism, often cast as cold arithmetic, is motivated by the compassionate intuition that each person’s suffering matters equally. These are not attempts to erase feeling, but to give it structure.
Mostly, this work is illuminating. But other times, it can seem as if the discomfort itself never quite receives center stage. It is noted, addressed, worked through, but may not become the focus of inquiry. There are, of course, traditions and philosophers who do exactly this. Bernard Williams questioned whether moral theories could ever truly account for the richness of human experience. Iris Murdoch viewed morality not as rule-following but as a way of learning to see more clearly. They have tried, in different ways, to hold onto the difficulty, to resist premature clarity. Still, there remains a tendency to ask how such responses might be incorporated into a broader account, rather than how they might call the structure of accounting itself into question. Similarly, it is not uncommon to find that our earliest moral responses are treated as starting points to be explained, rather than as serious forms of attention in their own right. Intuition is what we use to raise an objection. It is not, generally, where the argument is supposed to end.
But what if, in this practice, we’ve mischaracterized intuition entirely? Not as a vague impression or emotional knee-jerk, but as a form of understanding that operates on different terms—terms not opposed to reason, but prior to them. Not irrational exactly, but pre-rational, operating before the claim, the syllogism, the system.
What if the sense of wrongness that arises in such a case isn’t a flaw in our reasoning, but a form of moral knowledge that resists direct expression?
This is not to mystify intuition, or to elevate it beyond scrutiny. Intuitions misfire; they contradict each other; they are shaped by culture, experience, temperament. But the fact that they resist being formulated cleanly does not mean they are void. Some of our most foundational commitments—those that underwrite entire ethical systems—begin as little more than that pressure in the chest. We don't deduce the wrongness of cruelty; we feel it first. It is a kind of understanding that arrives fully formed and wordless.
And because it is wordless, we turn to narrative.
The Turn to Fiction
This is where the story enters, not as a distraction from philosophy, but as one of its most essential instruments. It invites us to remain inside the conditions of moral difficulty without insisting that they become clear. The novel, in particular, offers a site for the accumulation of ambiguity—for the slow saturation of experience with meaning that need not be made explicit to be felt. We learn, through this, that not every moral problem can be articulated in the language of formal logic. Not every ethical conflict is a matter of competing propositions. There are situations, lives, crises of conscience that resist paraphrase, and for those, we require a form capacious enough to contain ambiguity without reducing it. Fiction, then, becomes an extension of philosophy by other means.
The philosophical novel (think Dostoyevsky, Beauvoir, Tolstoy) not only illustrates but constructs moral thought. These writers were not merely dressing up theories in narrative clothes, but exploring ethical problems for which theory, on its own, proved insufficient. Raskolnikov’s fevered, spiraling justifications for murder could be diagrammed on a chalkboard, perhaps, but no diagram would capture the moral disintegration they produce. In The Mandarins, Beauvoir gives us not a conclusion, but a kind of intimacy with indecision itself. And The Death of Ivan Ilyich offers no choice, only a dawning, a sort of moral vision that arrives too late, when death makes honesty unavoidable.
To read these works seriously is to confront the possibility that the clearest expression of a moral idea may not be a claim, but a character. That there are forms of meaning which are only accessible by being lived through, even if only imaginatively. This is the work that literature performs, often more effectively than argument: it makes explicit the intuition that theory tends to smooth over, and in doing so, it reminds us that many of our most deeply held convictions do not arise out of deduction, but out of attention to what it is like to be a person among others.
If we return to the thought experiment—to the man on the table, the patients behind the curtain—we can now ask a different question. Not what should be done, but what has already been done by the framing of the question. What kind of moral attention does it assume? What does it permit us not to see?
The “feeling of wrongness”—the one we struggle to name, the one that precedes any formal objection—is not the end of moral inquiry. But it is, I think, where all of it begins.
What Grounds Belief
This is, of course, not a crisis unique to utilitarianism. All moral systems—once interrogated far enough—reach a similar impasse. The premises beneath the premises are not self-justifying. We cannot prove that suffering is bad, only fail to imagine a coherent world in which it isn’t. We cannot deduce the inviolability of the person, only gesture to the abyss that opens when that assumption is removed. Ethics, as it turns out, is not a tower built on bedrock, but a net suspended over air.
None of this is to deny the need for moral theory. We require principles not just to justify our actions, but to coordinate with others, to make judgments consistent, and to protect against bias. Without theory, moral life risks collapsing into personal taste or selective empathy. But theory also has its blind spots, especially when it comes to how moral understanding is first formed, or how it feels from the inside. The tension isn’t between reason and emotion, or clarity and confusion, but between abstraction and experience.
The arguments still matter. They refine, pressure, and test the shape of our convictions, but they do not generate them. The conviction precedes the claim, as the claim merely attempts to translate what we already feel.
This is what is most often missed in conversations about moral “objections.” An objection that points out a contradiction within a theory may weaken it. But an objection that simply feels wrong—as in the case of the surgeon, or the infamous trolley tracks, or any of Peter Singer’s cleanly utilitarian nightmares—does not puncture the logic. It punctures our willingness to go along with it. And that, in itself, is not a rebuttal, not unless we are prepared to step back from the theory entirely and ask what gave it authority to begin with.
This movement back toward first principles, toward the justifications behind the justifications, is what we call “metaethics.” And here, the ground shifts again, because if we ask why happiness, or autonomy, or fairness ought to be the currency of moral life, we find ourselves answering not with reasons, but with experiences and intuitions. With analogies and memories and stories. The shape of a life. The world we’d want a child to wake into. The ache in the body when we witness a humiliation that goes unchallenged. Or something simpler still: the instinct to recoil from pain, to avoid the hot stove—not because we were told to, but because pain announces itself as bad before we are capable of argument. These are not “just feelings.” They are how moral thought begins before it is polished into form.
Against Moral Clarity
It is no accident that the language of moral intuition is often spatial, visual, even architectural. We say a decision “sits wrong.” That something “strikes us” or “feels off.” We talk about people having a “moral compass,” or “failing to see” what should be obvious. This is not literary excess; it is the native tongue of intuition. We are not speaking about morals the way we speak about math. We are navigating, sensing, seeing, recoiling. Perceiving.
This is the kind of moral knowledge fiction is uniquely equipped to trace because fiction, at its best, is not allegory or argument, but the study of consciousness under pressure. It lets us inhabit perspectives we would not otherwise understand, and it does not resolve contradictions so much as let us live with them, hour by hour, page by page.
This is also the reason why certain moral questions sound different in fiction than they do in thought experiments. In fiction, the healthy man in the next room is not a placeholder. He has a name. He has parents. He eats lunch. He wonders what the weather will be tomorrow. It ensures that the moral weight of his existence is not derived from his role in a scenario, but that it is intrinsic, ambient, not in need of justification. For some, this may veer into sentimentality, but I think it is also realism. Fiction, unlike theory, cannot afford to forget what life is like before it becomes material for a proposition.
No theory, however elegant, can fully express what is contained in several scenes from The Brothers Karamazov, or several pages of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, or the long despair of Sarah in The Mandarins, as she tries and fails to determine which path is the morally serious one. These novels do not offer conclusions. They offer complications.
It is a mistake, I think, to believe that moral philosophy should always move toward clarity. Sometimes it must move toward depth. There are forms of knowing that sharpen not by narrowing but by enlarging. Philosophy can map a landscape, but fiction lets us walk through it barefoot.
And in walking, we come closer to the original sense, that unspoken recognition from which all this springs. A sense before sense-making. An intuition, or story, before belief.
Thank you for reading! I’m currently in Taiwan for the summer, though I’m hoping to write and publish more regularly going forward. If you enjoyed this piece, consider subscribing, sharing, or leaving a comment. It would mean a lot.
I’m Bridget, seventeen, a student and writer from Rhode Island. In Pencil is a publication exploring philosophy, literature, education, and more—all broadly rooted in the humanities. The name suggests a kind of thinking that’s provisional, open to revision.