How to Be Good at Telling Others to Be Good: A Case for Epilogue Storytelling

According to Adam Swift, it is ‘for the empirical, descriptive/explanatory, social scientific disciplines to (try to) tell us what states of the world can indeed be realized’, but it is ‘for philosophy to tell us which of those states and means of achieving them are better and worse than one another’ (Swift, 2008, p. 369). Likewise, Ingrid Robeyns describes our work as a search for ‘mythical paradise island’. We ‘dream of going there and ask ourselves how we could get there, and in which direction we should be moving in order to eventually reach Paradise Island’ (Robeyns, 2008, p. 345). This paper argues that included in the criteria for which states of being are ‘better and worse’ is their effectiveness in reality. Though not social scientists, and so not perhaps expected or able to provide regular cost-benefit analysis to relate theory to ‘the challenges that real societies face’ (Farrelly, 2007, p. 860), political philosophers can at least call on imaginative powers to be better storytellers, or ‘literary intellectuals’ (Rorty, 2007, p. 103). A book with a good moral tale, or movie for that matter, normally has a healthy epilogue to show how things would be, if we did what we should (the ‘should’ being learnt from the main body of the story). When we propose normative ideals, one has a responsibility to consider what the world would look like for the people within it if those ideals were taken up, on whatever scale we are proposing them for. I therefore argue for normative theorists to consider epilogue storytelling in their work, with, of course, a description of what that would look like.