Business Ethics as Moral Imagination

Abstract

This chapter is from the first article that I wrote on moral imagination in the late 1980s. I originally wrote it as a commentary on a Ruffin Lecture at the Darden School of the University of Virginia. It is probably one of the earliest articles on the subject in business ethics, because it was published prior to Mark Johnson’s book, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (1994) and Patricia Werhane’s Moral Imagination and Management Decision Making (1999). To write it, I mostly drew mostly from literature in philosophy. After teaching business ethics in business schools, I became interested in ways to stimulate my students’ imaginations that went beyond the usual use of case studies. I stumbled on to psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s book on fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, which was really about the development of ethics in children. His discussion of fairy tales offered an enjoyable way to examine role of imagination in ethics. I later wrote several other articles that developed my views on moral imagination, including the one in the next chapter.