What is this conversation really about? Mark Schroeder has characterized it as 'notoriously obscure' (Schroeder 2009, 568). But what (if anything) underwrites such a principle, and do we really need it? Enter the ongoing conversation between particularism and generalism in contemporary metaethics. Parents say it firmly and laws encode it with relatively little grey area. This is a familiar moral principle of a general kind. **penultimate draft** Hands are not for hitting. To interpret the poem adequately, we must develop and apply an informed judgment to each individual case-the same process required of an Aristotelian ethical agent. I analyze key episodes from Books I, II, and V, and show that if we attempted to derive general ethical or interpretive rules from these episodes, these rules would lead us to misread other parts of the poem. The variation and diversity of The Faerie Queene offer, not rules to follow or examples to imitate, but rather, case studies to analyze, whose narrative particularity both demands and develops judgment.
Spenser’s wide range of literary and philosophical sources likewise means that the poem has no single interpretive key. In The Faerie Queene, this is partly because the significance of individual characters, motifs, and actions changes radically from episode to episode. The agent or reader must evaluate the unique circumstances of each case before she can act or interpret correctly. For Aristotle, there is no single rule for what constitutes good action similarly, in The Faerie Queene, there is no single rule for interpreting the poem’s allegories. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene constitutes an Aristotelian inquiry into ethics because of its continual demand for judgment.
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