The Pursuit of Ethics

In response to Andrew Bagley's post "Why does emotion matter in fiction?", he notes that by creating empathy for characters through works of fiction, an author may thereby make his or her audience "feel" something, which in turn lends itself to philosophical concepts relating to ethics. Andrew goes on to say that "This is what makes literature and probably fiction valuable for ethical philosophy, which, from my outsider's perspective (I'm not well-versed in philosophy), is not a strictly intellectual pursuit."

I found this last line of his post to be interesting, because I had never considered philosophy to transcend the confines of intellectualism (not good philosophy anyways.) I will give a great degree of latitude to the phrase "not strictly intellectual", but this leads to more questions. What degree of philosophical discourse of ethics is (or should be) beyond the scope of intellectual debate? While employing emotion may be an effective method for an author to try and cast certain ethics or axiological claims in a particular light, I think that it behooves the philosophical thinker to approach those same concepts with not only an intellectual rigor, but also a healthy consideration of the irrational biases which emotions may cause one to form.