Symposium Introduction: The Pedagogical Potential of Exemplar Narratives in Moral Development and Moral Education

Abstract

This symposium engages the important question of how exemplars might shape the character of learners, focusing on the pedagogical potential of exemplar narratives. In recent years there has been growing interest in the topic of moral exemplars, from educational, philosophical, and psychological perspectives. The pedagogical potential of learning by example has been known since antiquity, though the respect accorded to emulating heroes or saints waned in modernity, where it was deemed antithetical to autonomous reasoning, proof of the “herd mentality,” or even “self-suicide.” Since the turn of the last century, however, learning by example, particularly when it comes to moral education, has once again risen to prominence. This renewed interest has been spurred on in no small measure by the work of two key individuals whose contributions we review as an essential backdrop to this issue: Bryan Warnick and Linda Zagzebski.¹

While there are many historical insights concerning the educational importance of exemplars, returning to an interest in the transformative power of moral exemplars in the twenty-first century has brought new insights, critiques, methodologies, and challenges to the fore. Empirical research in psychology and education has shed light on the qualities of role models, and the features of the narratives in which these exemplars are embedded. The focus on narrative is central to consideration of how exemplars might be used in education. Across cultures and throughout history, narratives have been the primary place of encounter between real or imagined heroes and the listeners or readers who might be inspired by their example. As Zagzebski puts it, the “socially recognized procedure” for picking out exemplars is the “telling and re-telling of narratives.”²

Through this symposium we promote two key areas for developing the field going forward. First, while recent work has drawn attention to the importance of exemplars, there has been little direct examination of how exemplar stories influence their readership in terms of moral formation. Second, there is a great deal more scope for promoting our understanding of how exemplar narratives can be used, with appropriate critical reflection, in educational settings.

This introduction reviews recent work relating to exemplarist moral education, with sections covering the philosophical contribution of Linda Zagzebski's exemplarist moral theory (EMT), recent work in psychology on dynamics of admiration and emulation, and the important work of Bryan Warnick in the philosophy of education. It will consider the importance of attending to dynamics of narrativity and how exemplar stories function in terms of language, structure, and plot. Finally, we will summarize the contribution of the articles that follow by identifying common themes across the papers in this collection.

Recent academic interest in moral exemplars has undoubtedly gained momentum from Zagzebski's EMT. Developed at length in her 2015 Gifford lectures and her 2017 book, titled Exemplarist Moral Theory, Zagzebski proposes a foundationalist moral theory grounded on the admiration of exemplars rather than concepts of duty, rights, or consequences. According to EMT, the moral life is built on the identification of exemplars, whom we recognize through the emotion of admiration, and by reflective examination upon the characteristics of these exemplars that move us and motivate us to follow their example.³

Zagzebski describes EMT as a “map” of moral life rather than a “manual.” That is to say, EMT seeks to provide a conceptual structure that can “simplify, systematize, and justify our moral beliefs and practices” (EMT, 5). Moral exemplars, identified by direct reference through the morally basic emotion of admiration, are at its heart. Zagzebski argues that admiration, honed by ongoing reflection, reliably “detects excellence” when it comes to moral persons (EMT, 2). She contends that experiencing admiration precedes and allows us to apprehend and subsequently name valued qualities: “We can admire a courageous act … in advance of having the concept of courage” (EMT, 60).

In terms of its antecedents, EMT is modeled on the semantic theory of Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke,⁴ whereby ordinary language users identify natural kind terms (for example, gold or water) by direct reference before descriptive meaning. In other words, that “something like that” is water (pointing to water) comes before a conceptual grasp or description of what water is (i.e., H₂O). Zagzebski contends that, similarly, basic moral concepts (good, right, virtue) are defined in relation to exemplars. Hence, “a virtue is a trait we admire in an exemplar,” “a good motive is a motive we admire in an exemplar,” and so on for “right act,” “duty,” and other moral concepts (EMT, 21). For example, “a virtue is a trait that makes [an exemplar] admirable in a certain respect” (EMT, 21).

Zagzebski identifies three kinds of exemplar: the “saint,” who epitomizes charity; the “hero,” who exemplifies courage; and the “sage,” who embodies wisdom. While ancient Greece would “make no sense” without the hero, ancient China would be “incomprehensible” without the sage (EMT, 97). The “saint” prototype arose with Christianity, and while Zagzebski points to exemplifications of modern saints (not without problems, as we will see), she observes that in a post-Christian age, the saint (along with the hero and sage) is disappearing: “A longing to believe that there are exemplars probably still exists, but it coexists with the suspicion that is characteristic of our age” (EMT, 97).

There is an elegant simplicity to Zagzebski's theory that resonates with the human experience that “[i]n every era and in every culture there have been supremely admirable persons who show us the upper reaches of human capability, and in doing so, inspire us to expect more from ourselves” (EMT, 1). When we behold exemplars, we experience admiration: “A state consisting of a characteristic feeling of admiring someone or something that appears admirable” (EMT, 34). The state has cognitive and affective elements (we feel it and appraise the person as admirable). Zagzebski recognizes that someone or something could only appear admirable, admitting the possibility of potential misattribution. This is a weak point in the theory that Zagzebski addresses in two ways: first, she argues that the trust that humans place in admiration is basic and entirely rational (EMT, 44); second, she argues that trustworthy, justified admiration is admiration that “survives conscientious reflection” (EMT, 50).

However, the strength of Zagzebski's defense on this point is open to question. Lani Watson and Alan Wilson have raised important questions regarding the stability of admiration as morally foundational,⁵ a critique that has been supported by Zagzebski's extremely unfortunate exaltation of Jean Vanier as her primary example of a moral saint. During the Gifford lectures, Zagzebski repeatedly pointed to the moral saintliness of Vanier, the founder of the international organization L'Arche, elaborating his story in her later book Exemplarist Moral Theory. Vanier was an officer in the navy turned moral philosopher who followed a vocation to care for the intellectually disabled. He established a community north of Paris in 1964, which became the first in a global movement. However, in February 2020, after his death, an internal report published by L'Arche, which was cited in the media thereafter, concluded that Vanier had sexually abused six women in France, over a period of thirty-five years.

Notwithstanding this important challenge, there are two aspects of EMT that have been crucial in explaining why the theory has gained traction beyond the limits of philosophical debate. Since Zagzebski grounds EMT in the emotion of admiration, the theory has been taken up by psychologists interested in the effects of admiration (and allied emotional states) on human behavior. Second, and more important for our purposes in this symposium, Zagzebski specifically highlights the importance of narratives. As she puts it, the “socially recognized procedure” for picking out exemplars is the “telling and re-telling of narratives” (EMT, 15).

While EMT is attractive to psychologists for its empirical tractability, the theory allows for productive engagement with other fields, most notably literature and education, because of its foregrounding in narrative. The emotion of admiration that drives EMT is “elicited through personal experiences and narratives.”¹¹ From the earliest years, moral transformation occurs in the encounter between person and story: “narratives are the primary vehicle for the moral education of the young, and the primary way humans of any age develop and alter their moral sensibilities. Narratives capture the imagination, and elicit emotions that motivate action.”¹²

Exemplar narratives form a compelling way to frame individual moral choices, as well as promoting readerly admiration and emulation of exemplary characters. Exemplar narratives bring to life otherwise abstract ethical dilemmas and provide a human face for values that might otherwise remain on a conceptual plain.¹⁶

As reference to Jefferson suggests, recognition of the potential of exemplar narratives in moral education is not new. In his 2008 book Imitation and Education, Warnick connects philosophy and education to demonstrate the historic and contemporary power of “learning by example.”¹⁷ He begins with an historical overview of the educational use of exemplars in antiquity to set the stage for an examination that synthesizes insights from education, psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy. At a time when role modelling was being advocated in educational circles without much conceptual or empirical basis, Warnick sought to develop a thorough and critical analysis of how people become exemplary, how exemplars inspire imitation, and how their potential can be harnessed critically in educational contexts. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Warnick's account, which predates Zagzebski's treatment of exemplars, is not cited in Exemplarist Moral Theory.

While the gauntlet-laying form of the standard model may have obtained in antiquity (and may yet have some traction today), much imitation comes about unconsciously, implicitly and without intention on the part of the agent. Indeed, through a wide-ranging discussion in psychology and cognitive science, Warnick examines the natural, human impulse to imitate and turns his examination upside down by asking the question why some actions are not imitated. In providing an answer, Warnick engages with self-narratives; exemplars may not always be emulated unless the story they tell resonates with the story we tell ourselves about who we are, or who we might become. Warnick's “narrative-self theory of imitation” contrasts with the standard model in recognizing that the human person is constituted to imitate “impulsively” when this stimulus does not conflict with the implicit or sometimes explicit goals of the narrative self: “Those perceptions of human action that provoke imitation are those that are classified in a way so as to be not incompatible with the narrative senses of self and that exist within an enabling context that allows the imitation to take place.”²²

Warnick introduces an important subjective element to the standard paradigm. In the encounter between story and audience, the power of the exemplar narrative to elicit admiration, persuade, and inspire is not guaranteed. Exemplars will not be emulated unless the story they tell resonates with the story we tell ourselves about who we are, or who we might become.²³ Hence, it is not only the objective elements of exemplar narratives that are important — delivering a paradigm that can be enforced from without — but also one's self-narrative and the way exemplar narratives entwine with our own life stories, kindling the moral imagination and inspiring us to action. Warnick points to a dynamic interplay: “Our sense of example will help construct our personal stories, and our stories will then influence the examples we see and imitate. Exemplarity, perception and the narrative self are involved in an intricate dance.”²⁴

Both Zagzebski and Warnick highlight the central importance of narratives when it comes to exemplarist moral theory and education. This emphasis has also been identified and explored in recent empirical work. However, much of this work focuses on exemplar narratives in a somewhat piecemeal fashion, isolating specific features of exemplars. For example, it highlights exemplars as “attainable” and “relevant,”²⁵ or “important” and “surprising,”²⁶ rather than examining the stories in which these exemplars are embedded, their literary qualities, or the dynamics of how narratives qua narratives engage and inspire. In this symposium, we take a more holistic approach to reflect the fact that exemplar narratives are, above all, stories that should be appraised for the persuasiveness of their moral educational potential in their integral wholes.

Exemplars persuade readers through their narrative framing. Factors such as plot, character, the use of narrative voice, and structuring all condition our likelihood to find exemplars worthy of admiration and emulation. All stories are “embedded in a network of relations” that define their linguistic and imaginative character and that can be understood as constituting their narrative.²⁷ These contribute to the “verbal particularity” of a given work of literature and, ultimately, to its “singularity.”²⁸

At the level of narrative, no two exemplar tales are created equal, and authorial decisions about how the story is told have an unavoidable and decisive impact on our likelihood to engage with exemplars. Crucially, matters of narrative technique, such as plot, are not simply abstract considerations of interest only to textual analysis, but have direct outcomes on the success or otherwise of an exemplary tale in pedagogical settings. A parallel, but distinct, process can be found in drama, where the specific moment of performance, such as the staging of a play before a theatre audience, presents the essential physical, emotional, and linguistic parameters within which audiences can establish meaning.²⁹ While we consider genres such as novels and biography as written narratives, it is important also to take account of the way in which performance texts demand consideration in their own right as integrally related to a set moment that connects the performer and their audience.

In both narrative and performance, reception is a key issue. We cannot assume that the readers or audiences of exemplary tales will respond in uniform or even predictable ways to the exemplar narratives.³⁰ The transfer of meaning between the exemplar narrative and its audience is neither linear nor monolithic. To better understand exemplar narratives, we must engage with perspectives from literary and cultural studies to appreciate the material context in which exemplary tales are consumed by readers and spectators.³¹ Reading, for instance, is an active and critical process whose full psychological, neurological, and affective implications are currently only imperfectly understood. More prosaically, we may note that readers bring diverse interests to the text, as well as different affective and physical reading practices.³² More generally, the social “habitus” in which texts are consumed also plays a decisive role, with a narrative read as part of a reading group or class differing markedly from a text consumed by the individual as a solitary leisure pursuit.³³

Elsewhere, we have considered the mode of delivery in more detail, arguing that different narrators have different effects on the perceived credibility of a narrative and its motivational power.³⁴ Messaging dynamics that are consciously deployed to persuasive effect in advertising campaigns are latent in the delivery of exemplar narratives in educational settings and should be critically considered and actively considered. Research on the suasiveness of exemplar narratives needs to be augmented by incorporating the long-standing literature on communication in social psychology.

We further consider the way in which historical understandings of rhetoric in Western culture can be used to approach the specificity of exemplar narratives as literary texts within moral education and, in particular, the parallels between rhetoric and the behavioral insights of “nudge” theory.³⁵ Examining scholarship on “choice architecture,” salience, and admiration in this scholarship, we argue that accounts of rhetorical persuasion, particularly in the works of Quintilian and Aristotle, offer new insights into the encounter between readers and exemplary tales. In doing so, we argue that it is essential to acknowledge the literary and textual character of these tales and that they cannot be reduced to being simple vehicles for moral choice.

The contributions in this symposium develop our understanding of exemplar narratives to substantially new ground. Despite the focus on narrative in Warnick's and Zagzebski's work, there has been little direct engagement with exemplar narratives, in contrast to a growing body of research on the features of exemplars. Second, there is more scope for promoting understanding of how exemplar narratives can be used, with appropriate reflection, in educational settings.

We move the discussion beyond the theoretical contribution of narratives to learning by the example reviewed above through focusing on specific writers, such as Tolkien and Tolstoy. In doing so we develop a more concrete appreciation of how moral education could adopt the oeuvres of specific novelists and develop an understanding of how the thematic or narrative characteristics of these works relate to exemplar education.

Furthermore, the symposium draws on work concerning drama and performance, a focus rarely addressed in the literature on exemplars but of immediate applicability both to the performing arts and to screen media, such as film and television. In addition to these practical contexts that have the potential to expand exemplarist pedagogy, the symposium also brings to bear the work of thinkers not typically related to exemplarist thought, such as Nietzsche and Beauvoir, and thus expands the theoretical sophistication and nuance of our examination of learning by example. Cumulatively these contributions develop our understanding of exemplar narrative education in both theoretical and practical terms. By focusing on how the specific qualities of texts enable students to engage with exemplar narratives, we seek to make our work directly applicable to the classroom.

That human beings are moved by exemplars has been largely taken for granted. These papers elucidate how these different narratives appeal to their audience and promote emulation, admiration, and reflective moral development.

Unlike the models suggested by Zagzebski or Warnick, for example, Tolstoy does not intend his narratives to function by presenting human excellences worthy of emulation. In fact, according to Tolstoy, positive moral exemplars would exemplify widely held values that serve to perpetuate uncritically the social status quo. Daniel Moulin shows how Tolstoy instead invites the reader to reflect on how the actions of his protagonists frequently show us what not to do. These poor moral examples (as opposed to laudable exemplars) awaken autonomous reflection on ethical principles that drive moral and political change.

In a manner not dissimilar to the parables of the gospels, Tolstoy makes his appeals to readers' moral sensibilities by means of subversive narratives that contrast the apparently wise with the apparently foolish. This theme is particularly prominent in his story “Little Girls Smarter than Men,”³⁶ where the children's natural moral goodness is highlighted as a counterpoint to the folly of the adults, calling to mind the discourse to the apostles in Matthew 18: “Unless you are like children, you will not enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 15:3).

Like the writer of the Fourth Gospel, Tolstoy uses dramatic irony to great effect. For example, in two of the stories Moulin discusses (“How Much Land Does a Man Need?” and “The Man and the Cucumbers”),³⁷ readers perceive — while the protagonists remain blind to the realization — that they will ultimately be unseated by their avarice. Also akin to the biblical writers, Tolstoy presents his “parables” with open endings, so that the reader must fill in the blanks as the morality play before them unfolds. As Moulin eloquently puts it, “the narrative brings the reader to truths that the author knows and that the author thinks the reader should know.” Rather than drawing biblical allusions, Moulin notes instead Tolstoy's latent Platonism, where moral knowledge in the form of ideas is recollected through the experience of examples.

Moulin questions whether Tolstoy, for all his narrative skill, should himself be considered a moral exemplar, especially in the light of his regressive treatment of women. But this is beyond the point. Tolstoy did not set out to be exemplary; his goal was to awaken and stimulate autonomous reasoning to enable moral and political change. Accordingly, it would be “most unwise and unnecessary to emulate his character.” His stories, however, offer extremely fertile ground for reflection on moral exemplar narratives, even if affirmative emulation as proposed by Zagzebski is scarcely their explicit aim. Their purpose — and the resonance with the New Testament writers is again clear — is to promote transformation through a change of heart (metanoia).

The theme of transformation is also key in the paper by Ann Phelps and Dylan Brown, who examine the craft of acting and the capacity of drama to form moral character through the playing of a theatrical character. Actors must identify with the characters they perform and, through their capacity for empathy, habituate characters' virtues and vices through embodiment on stage. This leads to the question of whether character transformation could be explicitly developed by learners taking on character roles that enable them to embody the virtues of those they admire. Phelps and Brown bring the dramatic method of Constantin Stanislavski into dialogue with EMT, reflecting on actors' embodiment of virtues and vices “even after the curtain closes.”

Acting enables an exemplar to be translated from a theoretical and abstract plane to a practical and sensory one. This is true for both the actor and the audience. Those in the audience become empathically involved in the story unfolding on the stage, allowing them to experience exemplary characters in an intuitive and visceral way — echoing the origins of the mediaeval morality play with its clear pedagogical intent. However, the character transformation of the audience is catalyzed by a corresponding transformation within the actor portraying the exemplary character.

Phelps and Brown share their experience of the use of drama within a broadly Aristotelian character education program at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. They note how drama can offer a means through which students can be encouraged to reflect on and engage with the sort of moral character they would like to develop, recounting transformations that occurred when students “played” their moral exemplars. The improvisation this acting required allowed for moral rehearsal that helped learners feel better equipped to respond ethically in future real-life scenarios.

The inner change of heart that Moulin identified as Tolstoy's aim can be outwardly performed in dramatic reenactments that enable learners to embody the virtues of their exemplars. As “one man in his time plays many parts on the world's stage,” Phelps and Brown suggest that playing villains can also be morally formative, providing an opportunity for students to connect with their “shadow” and reflect on vicious character in a safe and supportive space.

It could be argued that “acting like one's exemplar” is too superficial an exercise for the cultivation of true character. However, this would be to construe performance as essentially pretense and to draw too much of a wedge between what is real and what is imagined. As the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott proposed, much of reality is transitional, occupying the intermediate area of human experience between inner reality and the outside world.³⁸ While the process of becoming who one wants to be might initially involve “trying on” different identities (as with Erving Goffman's “masks”),³⁹ over time and with the right will we come to inhabit them from within — the difference between “genuine habituation and mere hypocrisy,” as Phelps and Brown put it.

The project of “becoming who one is” links directly to Matthew Dennis's paper, which also picks up themes encountered in our examination of Tolstoy, namely, the need to engage autonomous reason to become who one authentically is rather than merely to emulate one's heroes uncritically. Dennis links Nietzsche's ethical ideal of “becoming who one is” to social media technologies, which he argues have given rise to a new set of ethical ideals concerned with self-cultivation. According to Dennis, online influencers use social media platforms to share their process of self-becoming with their followers, exemplifying the Nietzschean ethical ideal in the process.

Dennis contends that Nietzsche scholars (himself included) have argued that Nietzsche's practical philosophy is best understood as “some kind of exemplarism,” albeit one that encompasses many non-moral qualities and that involves “cultivating what is unique, distinctive, and personal about oneself,” which at first blush would seem to be somewhat at odds with the very idea of emulation. If we are to be true to ourselves, how can imitation or emulation of others be anything other than evidence of heteronomous reasoning?

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he argues, we encounter a different species of exemplarism,⁴⁰ wherein followers are exhorted not to emulate their teacher's qualities or actions, but rather to model the ethos of their life on the project of cultivating their unique self. This stands in sharp contrast to Warnick's standard model, wherein an excellent act is presented to a learner for the express purpose of their replicating it.⁴¹ Dennis identifies this uniquely Nietzschean exemplarism as a “distinctive and original twist on the idea of a moral exemplar,” arguing further that this project has been adopted enthusiastically in contemporary culture, in particular by online influencers who, he goes so far as to suggest, might be seen as contemporary incarnations of Nietzsche's ethical ideal of “becoming who one is.”

While negative press about social media platforms and the influencers who use them is widespread, Dennis submits that many of these online celebrities motivate people in positive ways, helping people to live a flourishing life in digital environments. He notes that we now have a window through which to observe this “self-cultivationary process” by means of Instagram feeds documenting influencers' own transformations — successes and failures, highs and lows. He believes that this mode of self-presentation creates a space of vulnerability and authenticity wherein influencers, far from being elevated to heroic status, become exemplars that are permitted feet of clay. This is witnessed in the newly coined concept of “instamacy,” a word combining “intimacy” with the first four letters of one of the most popular social media platforms used by influencers, Instagram, which currently has over 2.35 billion monthly active users.⁴²

In Dennis's view, instamacy represents a new ethical ideal that has arisen through the unique affordances of social media, taking up in the twenty-first century the Nietzschean call to model the ethos of one's exemplars in the — ironically — inimitable project of cultivating one's unique self. While many of us may express skepticism about the identification of instamacy as a new ethical ideal, perhaps because we question its putative authenticity and vulnerability, one aspect of the uniquely Nietzschean exemplarism that Dennis's analysis foregrounds is the need for innovative and contemporary exemplars. This theme is addressed in Kate Kirkpatrick's contribution, which takes up Simone de Beauvoir's objection that narrative exemplars have often served an ideological function that perpetuates oppressive ideals — especially (but not exclusively) about women.

While we have already discussed the problem that EMT relies on the fallible emotion of admiration as a “detector of excellence,” Kirkpatrick's submission asks the further, key question of who the “we” is that Zagzebski identifies as appraising as admirable the exemplars she discusses. Ultimately, the identification of some individuals as exemplary reflects and upholds the interests of the powerful rather than the flourishing of all people. Thus, critical reflection on the “we” who are evaluating possible sources of moral exemplars is required, alongside an appetite for new and more inclusive exemplars in literary narratives.

With recourse to Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum,⁴³ Kirkpatrick notes the way in which literature expands readers' empathy and offers a necessary source of philosophical insight. Rather than occluding the interests of the subjugated, literary texts can open our eyes to their experiences. Kirkpatrick argues that “a central message of Beauvoir's The Second Sex was that when women look for exemplars in becoming themselves they are often disappointed or confused, because instead of finding ‘true women’ they find a multiplicity of one-dimensional myths” in which many women were objectified and defined from without. These toxic exemplars, created and upheld by patriarchal interests, estrange women from becoming who they are and foist on them the task of becoming who others want them to be.

The first insight to take from Kirkpatrick's submission, therefore, is the examination of the “we” in Zagzebski's invitation to consider whom “we deem to be admirable”: Who is “we” and why do “we” laud these exemplars as admirable? Any educational program using moral exemplars should take into account that the “heroes gallery” presented for the edification of learners could be constrained by prejudices that are ultimately antithetical to the well-being of some students. There is a need, therefore, for new portraits to be hung in the gallery to offer better exemplars for women than the objectified women of men's dreams. “On Beauvoir's view,” Kirkpatrick asserts, “the answer to bad speech is not censorship, but more and more plural speech — in this case, speech in women's own voices, contesting the narratives of those who objectify, instrumentalize, and exploit them.”

The contributions in this symposium highlight the role that negative exemplars can play in the moral life. For instance, Moulin draws attention to Tolstoy's use of characters that exemplify what not to do, while Phelps and Brown propose that there can be something morally formative in performing vicious characters on stage. Kirkpatrick, too,notes that EMT overlooks the important role of negative exemplars and the potentially transformative emotions they evoke. Existentialists like Beauvoir wrote extensively about negative exemplars in their work. Kirkpatrick observes that Zagzebski's confidence in emulating what we admire rather than recognizing the morally educative influence of other emotions stands at odds with many exemplarists in the history of philosophy. Moreover, it would seem to go against the intuitions of moral educators that nothing much can be learned from exemplifications of what not to do.

Alison Milbank's contribution to the symposium similarly challenges Zagzebski's overreliance on positive exemplars as spurs to moral development. Milbank shows how the fantasy worlds of J. K. Rowling's Hogwarts and J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth create a fictional place of encounter in which readers witness the transformations of characters who are exemplary in their flawed nature. Zagzebski's unidimensional account of exemplars is contrasted with Warnick's account of imitation, in which he argues that in addition to “offering an ‘inspiration to attain an ideal,’ exemplars can also ‘elicit questioning’ and ‘open up new ways of seeing the world’.”⁴⁴ The fictional exemplars in the fantasy worlds Milbank describes enable this questioning, particularly in younger readers. For example, in the Harry Potter stories readers encounter the young characters' negotiation of ethical decision-making and learn to model their own actions after the patterns they find there. This kind of exemplarity is more morally formative than straightforwardly imitating paragons of virtue. Readers engage in what Warnick calls “process” rather than “results” imitation, in that they are imitating forms of life within communities of interpretation rather than simply copying an action.⁴⁵

Milbank draws on Paul Ricoeur's mimetic narrativity to illuminate how any text or story is mimetically appropriated by readers, bridging the space between the text and the reader's world.⁴⁶ She makes a case for how the reading process itself develops moral character, not least because of the required patience and constancy readers cultivate in working through the seven Harry Potter stories and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, equipping younger readers to take on greater challenges in their reading. Milbank also references Simone Weil's ethic of “attention” as another facet of how the act of reading promotes character; “there is an embedded moral exemplarity in the reading process of such long novels, which call out readers' loving attention and patience, as they commit to ‘deep reading’.”

In addition to the virtues that are cultivated in the process of reading, Milbank notes the more “obvious” exemplarity encountered by readers through the characters in these fantasy novels. The personalities in the Harry Potter series are explicitly linked, through the four houses of Hogwarts to which they belong, as aligning with virtues of character, making moral reflection central to the experience of reading these works. Moreover, given that the protagonists are predominantly adolescents, the reader observes their maturation in step with their own development, yielding further opportunities to model their own actions after the literary characters. On occasion, an exemplarist pedagogy is referenced explicitly; for example, Milbank notes how Neville Longbottom credits his transformation to Harry's example: “The thing is, it helps when people stand up to them, it gives everyone hope. I used to notice that when you did it, Harry.” The influence of exemplarism is also evident in more subtle ways. With the characters' developmental trajectory occurring over several novels, the reader learns that cultivating character strengths takes time, a process Aristotle referred to as “habituation.”

A further aspect of Zagzebski's theory that Milbank finds deficient is its failure to define exemplars against a guiding telos. Zagzebski's use of “direct reference” to identify exemplars locates the telos as nothing more than an exemplar's actions — “a virtue is a trait we admire in an exemplar”; “a good motive is a motive we admire in an exemplar”; and so on for “right act,” “duty,” and other moral concepts (EMT, 21). However, the actions of an exemplar make sense in relation to their final aims. What makes a person (or character) exemplary is not their perfection in attaining the virtues of a hero, sage, or saint but the purposes to which they ultimately aim. From the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Milbank identifies Frodo and Sam as moral exemplars whose failures are part of the larger narrative aim and therefore not shameful.

While no one could doubt that Christ and Confucius are exemplary, Milbank points out that “each of these exemplars is situated in texts which are teleological in character and from which their actions derive meaning.” To put this another way, we can only pose the question “What Would Jesus Do?,” because we see his actions against a narrative backdrop that reveals his final purposes.

The underlying idea of imitation that makes these novels morally formative aligns better with Warnick's account of the “invitational role” of imitation than with Zagzebski's account. Throughout this collection, contributors have expressed reservations about aspects of EMT. One criticism is that EMT underestimates the moral significance of “negative exemplars” (that is to say, those characters who exemplify what not to do). As we will see in detail, there is much that negative exemplars can do to awaken and stimulate moral reasoning and changes of heart, which EMT neglects. This exclusive reliance on positive exemplars also seems to contradict the intuitions of moral educators that much can be learned from exemplifications of what not to do.

A second key issue raised by our contributors is the nature of the imitation stimulated by exemplars. Inspiration by an exemplar should not lead to their actions being copied unthinkingly or mechanically. Emulators engage autonomous reason to become who they authentically are, rather than aping their heroes uncritically. In this sense, Milbank's reference to Warnick's distinction between “process” and “results” imitation is instructive.⁴⁷ This difference encapsulates the idea that in emulating a person we find to be admirable we are invited to model the “ethos” of their life, not their exact qualities or actions. Moreover, we can find morally flawed characters to be exemplary when we look at the overall purposes to which their actions aim. It seems that in this respect Zagzebski's account of how exemplars function in the moral life is rather static and does not take account of the time frame over which exemplars exert their influence. This “bigger picture” was revealed by the Vanier case and calls to mind the ancient wisdom that we should “count no one happy until the end is known.”

A final point to which this collection bears witness is the need for innovative and contemporary exemplars to expand our moral horizons beyond the usual exemplary suspects. Dennis identifies online exemplars as possibly “contemporary incarnations of Nietzsche's ethical ideal of becoming who one is” while Kirkpatrick highlights Beauvoir's objection that narrative exemplars have often served an ideological function that perpetuates oppressive social ideals. If we are to use narrative exemplars in the education of the young, we must find new exemplars and look forward for inspiration as much as we look to the past.