MEGAN LAVERTY THE INTERPLAY OF VIRTUE AND ROMANTIC E THICS IN CH A NG-R A E LEE’ S A G E S T URE L IFE In this paper I examine the opposition in moral philosophy between Virtue Ethics and what I am calling Romantic Ethics. Over and above the theoretical dialogue among philosophers concerned with these broad ethical paradigms, I am especially interested in how this opposition may be both exemplified and illuminated through literature, and have chosen the novel, A Gesture L ife, by Chang-rae Lee as a striking case in point. I use the term ‘Virtue Ethics’ to denote moral philosophies that fall within the Aristotelian tradition. ‘Romantic Ethics’, on the other hand, refers to the philosophies of Martin Buber, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Raimond Gaita and Chris Cordner in so far as they all have something in common with the Romantic tradition. Both Virtue and Romantic Ethics consider that the question of ethics – what it is to live well – should be answered phenomenologically: that is, it should involve an examination of what human beings experience as meaningful in their lives, in particular as it includes the significance of others. Romantic ethics, in an effort to capture the ‘depth’ of meaning in inter-personal relationships, radicalizes our experience of the other to such an extent that it makes conventional morality seem banal and superficial. Virtue ethics, by contrast, attempts to capture the ‘breadth’ of meaning in inter-personal relationships normal- izing them to such an extent that it fails to take account of our deepest personal attachments, making them seem aberrant or simply irrelevant. I will argue that we need to retain the insights of both theories because they function as opposing forces in dialectical relationship in which we all exist. The ethical imperative therefore becomes one of accepting and living within this dialectic. It is to allow our day to dayliving to be informed and shaped by experiences in which we are radicallyclaimed by the alterity of a unique other (this is the Romantic Ethics aspect ) , but also to acknowledge social convention as the necessary mediating ground for the living out of our personal and not so personal relations with others (the Virtue Ethics aspect ) . I support this thesis using Chang-rae Lee’s novel, A Gesture L ife as a paradigm. It represents the ethicallife as one of balancing a socially conventional understanding of ourselves and our obligations to others with those intense, deeply personal experiences, 191 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV, 191–205. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.