Thesis advisor: Jorge L.A. Garcia / When Odysseus sets sail from Circe’s island, she advises him to stop up his ears and eyes when he passes the Sirens or he will suffer terrible consequences. He makes his crew do it, but keeps his own senses clear, asking only to be tied to the mast so he cannot act on any bewitchments. This story could almost be an allegory about the moral danger of art. In this dissertation, I defend a small part of what I take to be the Odyssean thesis: that art is worth the danger it represents, and, specifically, that what I call "evil stories" are worth the danger they represent. The phrase "evil stories" is a shorthand, for me, for the longer phrase "stories which require us, in order to understand them, to imaginatively simulate the point of view of characters who commit acts of great harm for sadistic, malicious, or defiant reasons." I argue that auditing “evil stories” is not, for most people, and as part of a balanced imaginative diet, so morally dangerous that they ought to be avoided; moreover, I argue that it can be morally opportune to audit them and, in some special cases, morally obligatory. My strategy to defend this thesis is two part. First, I formulate and respond to what I take to be the most serious reasons to suspect that auditing evil stories is too morally dangerous. Those reasons include: the idea that auditing evil stories is itself an immoral action (chapter 3); the idea that it is a virtue to be unable to perform the mental operations involved in adequately auditing evil stories (chapter 4); the idea that understanding evil actions or characters is tantamount to condoning them (chapter 5); and the idea that being fascinated by evil undercuts one's standing to condemn it (chapter 6). Second, I venture several tentative arguments in support of the idea that evil stories can actually provide opportunities for moral growth and education: the idea that evil stories provoke unique and valuable kinds of moral reflection and that we can sometimes be obligated to audit them (chapter 7); and the idea that auditing evil stories is uniquely revelatory of some kind of moral truth (chapter 8). In the course of all this rebutting and reason giving, I propose a way of thinking about the ethics of audition in general which I call "role-centered response moralism," which develops obliquely across the subsections of various chapters. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

The emerging dialogue between the arts and humanities and professional health care education is explored by considering ethical practice in nursing via several narratives of student nurses and nurse educators in one Scottish university. Adopting a narrative methodology based upon the literary hermeneutic of Paul Ricoeur, this thesis is presented as a ‘narrative research text’ in which my own role as a narrative researcher is critically developed. Utilising two different narrative frameworks, narratives are ‘constructed’ from data drawn from the research methods of focus groups, one-to-one interviews, reflective practice journals and documentary sources. Contemporary approaches in professional health care ethics education tend to share features of deduction, universality and generalisability. Their merits notwithstanding, perspectives drawn from the arts and humanities can offer valid critiques and alternative perspectives. Reading literature and poetry is offered as an engaged and interpretive contribution to a teleological ethic characterised by attention to ends (e.g. human flourishing), cultivation of virtue, telling of narrative, recognising relationality and in acknowledging the significance of contextual factors. These perspectives can all contribute to an ‘eclectic’ approach to ethics education in nursing. These narratives of student nurses support the careful inclusion of the arts and humanities within nurse education curricula for their potential to encourage self-awareness, critical thinking and concern for others. Narratives of nurse educators support these insights in addition to demonstrating ways in which the arts and humanities themselves can offer critical perspectives on current curriculum philosophies. These narratives suggest that the reading of literature and poetry can contribute to an eclectic approach to ‘ethical competency’ in nurse education. This is a broad-based educational approach which draws upon shared interpretive dimensions of the arts and humanities via engagement, action and response. This thesis contributes to current literature in the field of professional health care education by demonstrating the significance of findings derived from inclusion of a teleological ethic within ethics education.