The Moral Medium

Corey mentioned as a comment on an earlier post of mine: "I would not concede that there is an objectively better way to represent a claim, in any certain form."

I initially agreed with him but the more time I spent thinking about it, I became less and less sure until I arrived at the conclusion that there is, I think, better mediums for certain types of claims. I'll begin with what I consider to be the more obvious and move to the more contentious:

"Atoms have mass." Here is a comment for which there is one best medium. While it may be interesting to read a novel that somehow makes this claim intriguing and bases upon it a novel, this claim needs to be clearly explained and the supporting research needs to be provided. This is the expectation in the scientific community, and rightly so: such claims need to be tested.

"Theft is wrong." Moral philosophy, the subject of Nussbaum's introduction does, I think, have a best medium: dialogue. Dialogue synthesis literture's ease of reading with the philisophical rigor of a treatise prose. It allows characters to challenge other views and presuppositions providing a more natural venue for the exploration and defense of claims and supporting claims. To maintain that theft is wrong, perhaps it may be necessary to develop a fully robust moral theory with specific that would likely be lost is a work of literature.

An idea I am taken with is similar to the strategy Matthew Silliman used. He wrote "Sentience and Sensibility: a Conversation of Moral Philosophy" as a dialogue and then, as an appendix, included an essay he co-authored with Professor Johnson articulating, exactly, the moral theory.