In the following work, our main goal is to examine the already existing possible relations between ethics and literature and to establish if a more fruitful way of allying them could be found, as well as to answer why, if found possible, this should be estimated to be both a reasonable and necessary choice. First of all we try to seize and explain the field of the ethics, as we understand it today and to show how the most common ways of approaching it might be seen as insufficient. For a moment, this quest takes us a step away from a strictly literary topic in the land of practical philosophy and at least partly in the land of politics. Here we examine the achievements regarding the ethics that have been accomplished in the philosophical and political area, and try to show why we tend to feel that perhaps they are only capable to take as so far, and that an alternative way to deal with the ethical dimension of the human life deserves to be explored. As we shall see, this alternative could be sought in a different understanding of literature and its place in the human life. However, this also implicates the idea that the ethical field itself should undergo some changes and possibly become broader than it has usually been up till now; that of course, if we find it in our interest that the questions and dilemmas regarding the ethics become more vastly recognized and discussed. We dedicate special attention to those aspects of literature and the ethics, due to which we feel that literary composition can be understood as an (almost) unique space where we can face the ethical abyss of human nature and deal with it. Finally, we overview and examine a variety of examples of different relations that have had the chance to form between literature and the ethics during history, in order to answer how and if their failures and success can impact our current efforts. Hoping that it will become clear that all the existent and historical divergences between the two of them should not have (at least in theory) any fatal consequences for the ethical literary project, that we try to initiate.
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