The Harder Right

CONTENTS

Introduction-3

Passing Stranger — 8

Love the One You’re With — 21

Lemon — 38

Shila — 53

Ayew’s Last Letter — 64

Girls in Paradise — 70

The Train to Amsterdam — 84

Black Ice — 94

(E)ruction (D)isorder — 110

Coral Fish — 121

In Treasured Teapots — 128

Deep Well — 141

The Harder Right — 152

Notes — 161

Introduction

The Harder Right is a collection of short stories designed both to evoke feelings of sympathy and to stimulate discussion about ethical situations. The stories themselves do not judge the characters or present solutions to the situations they face. That is left to the reader. These stories can be enjoyed simply as they are or they can provide grist for interesting discussions. I have used them in graduate and undergraduate business ethics class and in a required media ethics class for communications majors at my university. I have also led discussions based on the stories for the general public in libraries in New York and South Carolina.

Empathy and stories: educating for heart

Historian Lynn Hunt, in her book Inventing Human Rights, links human rights to the reading of novels. The idea of civil rights had been around for a while but it wasn’t until the 18th century, she says, when the modern novel evolved, that moral concerns, which had been restricted to white, propertied males, extended to all people. The novel and human rights arose in tandem.

People have a natural sympathy for those around them. Literature’s great contribution to the moral enterprise is that it provided the psychological groundwork for caring about others who were not part of their circles of family and kin. Readers entered into unknown worlds in their own homes and in the privacy of their own space. Their compassion was spurred to include those who they didn’t know and who were dissimilar.

Readers imaginatively entered into the lives of servants and slaves, rich and poor, farmers and city dwellers, the powerful and the desperate.

Emotional...