A Serious Man as Philosophy: The Elusiveness of Moral Knowledge

The film A Serious Man (2009) by the Coen brothers follows Larry, a righteous college professor in crisis. As he unexpectedly meets a rainstorm of hardships and misfortunes, Larry challenges the reason and the unjust nature of his predicaments. Philosophically, these challenges address the interface of ethics and epistemology and particularly the elusive concept of moral knowledge. What is moral knowledge, why is it important, and how can it be achieved? What can it contribute to establishing a moral doctrine and to responding to meta-ethical questions? These questions are central to the film, and are embodied in its philosophical assumptions, its existentialist philosophical approaches (mainly as inspired by Kafka), and mainly its aesthetic and artistic aspects (particularly the extensive use of explicit and implicit fables and parables). The philosophical examination of the question of moral knowledge in A Serious Man leads to questioning the very possibility of such knowledge. In that, the film continues the broad discussion of the Coens’ cinematic corpus in philosophy, and ethics in particular.