Does a good story always have a good purpose? This is a recurring question when it comes to whether moral doctrine should come first before story itself. In other words, should the story plots design be dominate by a moral doctrine or not? or should the story plots serve a moral doctrine or not?

Breaking Bad, arguably the best drama in US, is an example that a good story or meaningful story but is not purposeful. The story has no agenda to prove any moral rules around drugs. The only real motivation of the writers and producers were merely to tell an interesting story. To their success in compiling an intriguing story, they said they were just lucky. meaningful== relatable, resonating, thought-provoking purposeful== serving certain values, achieving a moral goal

Brothers Karamazov is certainly pretty meaningful but does it really has a clear moral purpose? Most of the book is made up by debates and wrestling between different ideas. For sure, all those conversations pointed to the divine and the deep nature of humanity. Yet, Dostoevsky didn't really provide a clear "right answer" to any of those debates. It is not the purpose behind the story but the plots, details, and pictures of the story itself allows people from various different values, including atheists, sensualists, intellectuals, religious, enjoyed this book to a great extent. I guess that is what makes a good story. It is not how good the moral doctrine that can be inferred from the meanings and symbols in the story that makes the story good, but the meanings and symbols themselves. Were they presented in a convincing and rich and genuine way? Story tellers that started from a moral doctrine motivation will often end up ruining the story. With a goal to establish and defend the moral belief, the author has to come up with plots that proved the point. The risk of failure is high: the designed plots may be unconvincing because the limited capability of the author, and in some cases particularly, the audience would accept the story but disagree with the interpretation of the author. That's why sometimes audience hates the main characters who the author wanted to praise but loves the villain the author wanted to criticize.

It is the audience's job to infer purpose from the story, thus different interpretations have to be allowed. The creator's goal is to provide relatable and resonating information rather than preaching an moral doctrine, which is perhaps not easier than preaching. That is not to say creators have no moral responsibility in their stories what so ever. Terrible story tellers enslave people's attention by arousing the sinful desires in human flesh, and it's very effective and works every single time. I believe the ethics for story tellers is that they are forbidden from pushing the already weak human will one step closer to the cliff of temptations.

The worst story is born, when both a moral purpose is planned and the desire manipulation skill is employed to make up the weakness of the story itself. Yes, worse than the desire-pleasing stories are stories that please desires and have a moral purpose. In addition to cause people to stumble, they are also shamelessly hypocritical.

If firms are “plays”, the venue of aesthetic experience, does that also mean that a "purposeful firm" doesn't necessarily mean it must have an articulated purpose. Instead, if only the day-to-day operations and interactions are paid with due care and reason, people within the firm would perceive it as a purposeful firm and that they are doing meaningful work. This is an argument that can be empirically tested.