Fables where the moral is communicated by the arbitrary reaction of another.

Gelzo

The story could go something like the hero finding someone's lost valuables and dutifully returning them to the rightful owner, but the owner decides to reward the honesty with an even greater prize.

This is total bullcrap. Just because something ends up good for you in the end doesn't make it the right thing to do, and it's a poor reflection of reality to assume that people will always be kind and generous.

A better way to teach this moral would be to show the hero getting caught for keeping the valuables, being overcome with guilt, or finding satisfaction in his honesty without a reward.

Here's another example. Let's say someone is cheating on their spouse and the hero has to decide whether it's right to squeal. This could either result in a marriage being ruined, or the couple coming to terms with it and having a more honest marriage. If he keeps his lips shut, it could result in blissful ignorance or... AIDS or some shit. It could happen either way, but what is the right thing to do shouldn't depend on something you won't be able to predict. Sometimes doing the moral thing makes things worse for everyone, but the reason it was moral in the first place was that you couldn't know the result would be bad for everyone.

BonSequitur

Actually, that's not exactly undisputed. The idea that you can do 'the right thing' and still end up with everyone being worse off for it is a deontological view, one in which morality stems from duty. Moral consequentialists, on the other hand, pretty much do define morals in terms of consequences.

But anyway, it's not like moral systems actually work in postmodernity (If they ever have) anyway. Deontology has basically no connection to "reality" (I just talked about "reality." Take a shot.) whereas consequentialism leads to instinctually repulsive behaviour. Moral relativism basically reduces to total amorality or gets mired in nonsense about defining boundaries between cultures, whereas moral scepticism is about as useful as every kind of scepticism, i.e., not at all. "Moral resistance," besides being yet another boring post-modern politicisation of an issue that really doesn't need it any further, is at best incomplete. Utilitarianism comes from John Stuart Mill and nobody who's been proven so wrong about economics can be right about anything else, whereas moral realism (The idea that moral concepts like 'good' actually exist in reality as such) comes from Plato and seriously, fuck that guy. Rule utilitarianism is basically a hilarious heuristic. Anyone who claims to act by a complete, meaningful or comprehensive moral system is essentially living in a reality bubble, which I guess is kind of post-modern in and of itself.

Bee

On the other hand, if we all believed honesty was something that should be rewarded, we would probably see a lot more of it being rewarded.

"You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?"

Gelzo

^^Okay, but in either case it's worthless as a form of moral instruction that makes sense, because I can write a story where any action is argued to be moral because of what a person's actions are. I could say it's moral to stab people in the gut whenever you get an opportunity in a story where everyone the main character shanks learns from the experience about the fragility of life and goes on to live richer lives.