Moral dumbfounding and imaginative resistance

Abstract

ABSTRACT Moral dumbfounding and imaginative resistance have both spawned important literatures that intersect moral psychology. Moral dumbfounding, rooted in Jonathan Haidt’s empirical work, has been taken to be evidence of the epistemic and cognitive shallowness of many of our moral emotions and beliefs. Opinions about imaginative resistance, on the other hand, have treated it as something between a psychological curiosity and an ethical spandrel. This essay argues that the two are related and that teasing out this relation is important for understanding each phenomenon. For positions or practices that our moral communities treat as inadmissible, we do not naturally deliberate about the truth of such positions or imagine what the world would be like if we adopted those practices so much as we resist treating them as live options for moral consideration. As we near the perceived boundary of appropriate moral discourse, we switch from moral deliberation to the rehearsal of stock reasons for why the boundaries of deliberation are fixed where they are or to resisting uptake of reasons for doing what is perceived as morally deviant. Likewise, when asked to imagine a world in a way that invites situating the boundaries of what is morally inadmissible in our world differently, we switch from a willingness to suspend disbelief and accept a narrative on its own terms to explicitly bracketing or actively resisting the story.