Introduction: Layers of Understanding and Long-Arc Narrative

First describing the difference between simply understanding a word and the more complex way we understand that word at the end of a story, this Introduction briefly sketches the ground covered in the fifteen chapters presented in this volume. The themes include the role of ethical vision in moral life, the ethical content of self-narratives and their potential difficulties, the layered depths of moral responsibility, some distinctive ways that moral progress can be unobvious or indirect, and the reduction or prevention of understanding that descriptive oversimplification can all too easily engender and the moral importance of full and particularized description.