Jane Austen as Applied Moral Philosopher

Austen's fiction is not "about" romance. It's about character. And we need it now.

Thank you for reading Knowledge Problem! I’m grateful for your support. This post is a bit of a year-end cultural reflection, not as far removed from my usual electricity economics fare as it may seem, so I hope it’s a fun read for the end of our holidays. I wish you and yours all the best for a wonderful 2026!

The year 2026 brings four semiquincentennials that matter greatly to me, that I think are related to each other: the American Declaration of Independence; the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; the publication of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and the patenting of James Watt’s double-acting steam engine. Each event marks a profound shift in how human beings understood and interacted with the physical world and with each other. Before this cluster of anniversaries, we’ve just passed another related semiquincentennial, of the birth of one of our most influential applied moral philosophers.

I am speaking, of course, of Jane Austen.

Austen is often credited with inventing the modern novel, and rightly so. Her innovations in free indirect discourse and the use of an omniscient yet ironic narrator reshaped narrative form. Her wit and satirical precision left a deep imprint on writers like Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. But another important innovation for which she is less recognized was neither technical nor stylistic. It was philosophical, making moral philosophy practical by embedding it in narrative. She showed what ethical reasoning looks like when it is lived rather than theorized.

This applied moral philosophy remains underappreciated, even though it is central to why her novels remain popular and intellectually alive. Austen does not argue didactically for virtue, and she does not preach. Instead, she dramatizes how character is formed, tested, distorted, and sometimes repaired through ordinary social interaction. Her plots function like experiments in moral development. Readers continue to recognize themselves in her characters because Austen understood something enduring about how people actually learn to live well with others.

Two and a half centuries later, her novels continue to shape how we think about self-knowledge, persuasion, moral error, and the ethical significance of everyday life. If anything, her relevance has increased in a world where moral disagreement is increasingly performative, certainty is loudly asserted, and humility is scarce.

A persistent misunderstanding obscures this influence. Austen is often described as a writer “about” love, courtship, marriage, and money, particularly as they constrained Regency-era women. At one level it’s true that these topics dominate her plots. At a deeper level, though, the description misses the point. Austen’s novels are not romances in the modern sense, nor are they social comedies primarily about class or economics. They are studies of individual character.

Love, marriage, and money are not her subjects so much as her instruments; they are the context in which character is revealed and can evolve. Courtship reveals pride, vanity, generosity, and self-command. Marriage reveals whether affection is supported by judgment and compatibility of character. Money exposes prudence, dependence, honesty, and responsibility. These domains matter morally because they are where lives actually unfold. Austen’s insight is that ethical formation does not occur in the abstract, but in situations where reputation, desire, misunderstanding, and constraint all interact.

December 16 marked the semiquincentennial of Austen’s birth, prompting festivals, essays, and renewed reflection around the world. Two of the most illuminating pieces I’ve read were Karen Swallow Prior’s essay in The Dispatch and Henry Oliver’s essay in The Common Reader. They approach Austen from different directions—one from moral philosophy and theology, the other from literary history and modern social life—but they converge on the same conclusion. Austen’s enduring power lies in her focus on character: how it forms, how it fails, and how it can change.

To see what these essays illuminate, it helps to dig into the philosophical tradition Austen embodies, even if she never announces it explicitly. Her fiction reflects a long tradition of virtue ethics adapted to modern social life. Like Aristotle, she treats ethics as a matter of practice and habituation rather than rule-following. Her protagonists do not become better by learning maxims. Mary Bennet’s constant “extracting” from moral texts in Pride and Prejudice is a standing joke precisely because bookish knowledge never matures into judgment. Austen’s characters improve, when they do, by learning to see more clearly—both themselves and others. Moral reasoning here is practical and contextual, not deductive.

Austen also draws on Stoic themes of self-command and emotional regulation, always tempered by sympathy and social awareness. Feeling deeply is not condemned; letting feeling displace judgment is. Her characters are not praised for emotional suppression, but for proportion and propriety. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne Dashwood’s failure is not that she feels intensely, but that her passions overwhelm judgment and disregard social consequences. Elinor Dashwood’s virtue lies in emotional depth disciplined by reason, patience, and regard for others.

The Scottish Enlightenment adds a crucial modern layer to this moral vision. Like David Hume, Austen understands moral judgment as grounded in sentiment informed by experience rather than abstract reason alone. Moral understanding emerges from observing how people interact, err, respond, and correct themselves over time. We learn what generosity, vanity, or integrity look like by watching them play out in lived situations, which is why stories are such powerful vehicles for moral insight.

Hume’s virtue-centered ethics rejects the idea that reason alone motivates moral action. Instead, moral judgment arises from our shared capacity to feel approval and disapproval when we observe character and conduct. This emphasis on sentiment is not moral relativism. Hume argued that certain traits attract moral approbation across societies because they are useful or agreeable to oneself or others. In this way, Hume preserved the Aristotelian focus on character while grounding it in human psychology. His ethics is empirical, social, and observational, precisely the kind of moral inquiry at which fiction excels.

Adam Smith gives this moral psychology its social structure. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argues that conscience develops through an imagined standpoint—the “impartial spectator”—formed by learning to see ourselves as others might see us. Ethical growth, on this view, arises from interaction, reflection, embarrassment, and the desire not merely for praise but for praiseworthiness:

Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blame-worthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame. (TMS Part III, Chapter II, paragraph 1)

Austen’s narrative form performs this work on the reader. Free indirect discourse places us inside a character’s reasoning while inviting us to step back and evaluate it. We experience the temptation of self-serving interpretation, and then we watch it collapse.

Austen also incorporates perspective-taking directly into her narratives. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Bennet reminds Elizabeth to “make allowance for differences of situation and temper” when judging Charlotte’s decision to marry Mr. Collins. In Emma, Mr. Knightley rebukes Emma for mocking Miss Bates: “her situation should secure your compassion.” These moments explicitly train both characters and readers in Smithian sympathy.

The strongest example of Austen applying Smithian sympathy and perspective-taking is her general characterization of Emma Woodhouse as intelligent, clever, generous, and benevolent, but too confident in her ability to manage other peoples’ lives. Given that courtship and marriage is the contextual firmament of the plot, this belief manifests in her matchmaking, particularly her disastrous attempt to marry off Harriet Smith, young and pretty and capable of improvement but not very bright and of dubious parentage, to the handsome young vicar Mr. Elton. In this context, Emma is Smith’s “man of system”, someone so enamored with her own plan that she treats people like pieces on a chessboard rather than agents with their own principles of motion:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. (TMS Part VI, Section II, Chapter II, paragraph 17)

Mr. Knightley functions as the impartial spectator, warning Emma that others are “not your playthings”. His judgment creates the conditions for Emma’s moral growth. A good recent treatment of this topic is Pride and Profit: The Intersection of Jane Austen and Adam Smith (2015) by Cecil Bohanon and Michelle Albert Vachris (who were generous enough to cite a 2014 conference presentation I gave making this argument). And here’s a reflection on the man of system that I wrote back in 2005.

Smith also draws explicitly on Stoic ideas, especially in his treatment of self-command and propriety. Self-command, for Smith, is not emotional repression but disciplined responsiveness: the capacity to govern one’s passions so they are proportionate to circumstances and intelligible to others. Propriety concerns the fit among feeling, expression, and situation—whether one’s emotions and actions can be endorsed by an impartial spectator. A person of propriety does not feel nothing; she feels rightly, and expresses those feelings appropriately.

This framework maps remarkably well onto Austen’s moral world. Her judgments of character turn less on what her characters feel than on how they manage and express those feelings in social settings. Marianne Dashwood’s failing is not passion itself, but a lack of self-command and propriety. Elinor Dashwood exemplifies Smithian virtue: she feels deeply, restrains herself appropriately, and calibrates expression to context, not out of repression, but out of regard for others.

Smith’s broader contribution is to show how moral norms emerge from ordinary social life—family relations, friendship, reputation, embarrassment, and the desire to be worthy of esteem. Austen’s novels operate entirely within this terrain.

Seeing virtue ethics as a living tradition helps explain why Austen’s novels look the way they do. She avoids spectacular moral crises and heroic self-sacrifice. Instead, she focuses relentlessly on the ordinary settings where character is revealed: drawing rooms, walks, dinners, letters, and conversations that appear trivial until one recognizes them as moral laboratories. Her protagonists rarely change because of a single revelation. They change because repeated encounters expose their blind spots.

Moral improvement is a central feature of how the characters in Austen’s novels evolve, or fail to do so, but not in a threadbare, stereotyped Victorian sense. Her characters start and end as imperfect beings but with humility and experience they can move toward virtue. Even Austen’s most admirable characters are flawed; what distinguishes them is their willingness to improve and to be corrected. Elizabeth Bennet’s growth turns on recognizing her prejudice and vanity; Darcy must overcome pride; Emma must be humbled; Captain Wentworth must relinquish resentment. In each case, virtue emerges slowly, through experience. And those who fail to improve, such as Lydia Bennet and Mr. Wickham, lead shallow, unfulfilling lives.

This is where Karen Swallow Prior’s essay in The Dispatch is especially incisive. Taking Alasdair MacIntyre’s description of Austen as “the last great representative of the classical tradition of the virtues” as its starting point, Prior places Austen squarely within a classical and explicitly Christian moral framework. Following MacIntyre, she argues that everyday practices are not morally neutral but formative of character. On this reading, Austen’s novels are animated by humility, self-knowledge, and repentance—virtues that depend on the willingness to admit error and change course. Prior underscores this claim by drawing on Austen’s own prayers, written in the language of the Book of Common Prayer, with their searching attention to “faults of temper” and “evil habits” that harm others and oneself alike.

Prior also makes a compelling case that Austen’s wit and irony are not signs of cynicism but moral virtues in their own right. Austen’s satire is corrective rather than contemptuous. It laughs at folly without denying human dignity, in part because it recognizes folly as universal. As Mr. Bennet observes in Pride and Prejudice, “what do we live for, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?” Moral failure in Austen’s world rarely stems from malice. It arises from self-deception, pride, and inattentiveness, failings that can be remedied only through painful self-recognition. Prior reads Austen, rightly, as a moral educator whose novels trace the movement from ignorance of self to knowledge of self, crystallized in moments like Elizabeth Bennet’s “Till this moment I never knew myself.”

Henry Oliver’s essay in The Common Reader complements this reading by emphasizing not tradition but invention. Austen, on this account, does not merely inherit a virtue-ethical framework; she creates a narrative technology capable of expressing it. Her formal techniques—especially free indirect discourse—allow her to represent moral perception as something that unfolds over time. Readers are invited to inhabit a character’s point of view while simultaneously seeing its limitations. This double vision is both aesthetic and ethical. It trains readers to recognize how reasonable people err, how social status and self-interest distort judgment, and how correction requires humility, evidence, and openness to persuasion.

Oliver’s emphasis also reframes the familiar summary of Austen as a novelist “about” romance and money. Courtship and marriage matter morally in Austen’s world precisely because they take place in a commercial, reputation-sensitive society. Status competition is real, incentives are real, and moral life unfolds amid them. Virtue is not some abstraction imagined apart from these conditions; it is learned within them.

Read together, the two essays illuminate complementary aspects of the same Austen. Prior shows how her moral vision belongs to a deep ethical tradition that treats everyday life as character-forming and prizes humility and self-knowledge. Oliver shows how Austen’s formal innovations make that moral vision legible and compelling for modern readers. Both reject the idea that Austen is merely observational or morally neutral. Both treat her fiction as normatively rich without preaching. And both emphasize persuasion as a moral practice. To persuade—and to be persuadable—requires humility, patience, and respect for others as moral agents. Austen’s civility, on this view, is not superficial decorum but the social infrastructure that makes moral learning possible.

These essays sharpen the virtue-ethics interpretation in three ways. First, they clarify that Austen’s ethics is developmental: virtue is acquired gradually through experience and reflection. Second, they highlight persuasion as ethically central: characters who refuse correction—out of pride, resentment, or status anxiety—are morally stunted. Third, they illuminate Austen’s stance toward reason. Reason matters deeply, but it is never sovereign. Reason untempered by humility becomes pedantry, as with Mary Bennet and Mr. Collins; emotion ungoverned by judgment becomes recklessness, as with Marianne Dashwood.

This understanding of Jane Austen as applied virtue ethicist is why Austen matters so much right now. In a cultural moment defined by outrage cycles, performative certainty, and moral posturing, where disagreement is often treated as a sign of bad faith rather than fallibility, Austen offers a substantively different moral posture. Her novels assume that people are usually wrong in understandable ways, not evil; that moral improvement requires attention, patience, and the willingness to be persuaded; and that judgment without self-knowledge quickly degrades into arrogance. Austen’s world is one in which character is revealed not by declarations but by conduct, not by slogans but by habits, and not by dominance but by restraint. Two hundred and fifty years on, her fiction still trains readers in the hardest and most necessary moral skill of all: learning to see ourselves clearly and with humility while taking others seriously and in good faith. In 2026, that may be her most urgent lesson.