Problem
Despite the book's popularity, a number of libraries in the United States declined to carry E. L. James' steamy erotic work Fifty Shades of Grey, often citing policies excluding erotica from their collections. Many would add that unlike a masterpiece such as James Joyce's Ulysses, an erotic novel offers nothing in the way of literary merit. Consider the exclusion of erotic fiction from two points of view. Is the act of library censorship morally defensible in terms of utilitarianism? And, according to the concept of critical thinking, can we include such a work in the study of the humanities as something worth reading or preserving? Do Fifty Shades of Grey and novels like it belong in either the physical library or in what we might call "the library of the mind"?