Does Great Literature Make Us Better?

In my personal reading, I read and shared a New York Times article entitled "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" It's a provocative Cause/Effect claim, which boils down to "not necessarily."

Gregory Currie argues that while he personally enjoys and advocates reading literary fiction, the jury is still out on whether it makes us better people: more moral, more likely to treat our fellow humans with fairness, better able to make empathetic decisions.

Courtesy of NYTimes.com

I was intrigued by this idea:

Might it not be the other way around: that bright, socially competent and empathic people are more likely than others to find pleasure in the complex representations of human interaction we find in literature?

He's turning the Cause/Effect on its head: saying that it's possible that being a good person causes you to read good books, not vice versa.