<Invited Articles>Some Implications of Moral Imagination: From Practical Ethics to Metaethics

Hayashi Yoshihiro

doi:10.14989/203149

"Moral Imagination" has become a key ethical concept in the English-speaking world, though inadequately recognized in Japanese academic ethics. This paper aims to explore the theoretical and practical implications of moral imagination. Some ethicists, including Hume and Smith, discussed the role of imagination in ethics. Today the importance of moral imagination has been more and more emphasized, because the limit of mainstream rationalist ethics is growing obvious. Its model of moral reasoning is invalid to real ethical problems. Moral imagination is an essential faculty that enables us to implement ethics in practical cases, functioning in the cognition of situation, reflection on mental models, and the exploration of possibilities. Especially business ethicists take moral imagination seriously. According to Mark Johnson, there are various imaginative resources in moral reasoning: metaphors, prototypes, framing of situation, and narrative. These underlie alleged purely rationalist ethical theories and decision-making. On the other hand, moral imagination theory has a metaethical dimension: a questions on the position of normative dimension, a broader scope of morality, and "transperspectivity" as a form of objectivity without absolutes. This paper examines these points critically and explores its implications for environmental ethics and moral education.

<Invited Articles>Some Implications of Moral Imagination: From Practical Ethics to Metaethics

Bibliographic Information

Abstract

Journal

Keywords

Details 詳細情報について

Export

Report a problem