Moral Imagination and Truth

Abstract

Several years after I wrote the article in the last chapter, “Business Ethics as Moral Imagination,” I published another article that was commentary on Patricia Werhane’s Ruffin Lecture on moral imagination. In this chapter, I focus on the part of that paper where I develop some of my own views on moral imagination by drawing on Iris Murdoch’s work. Murdoch is both a philosopher and a novelist. I became interested in her after reading her novel, The Sea, The Sea. It’s a great story that keeps the reader wondering about whether the protagonist’s perceptions of the woman he desires are true. I was pleased to then discover that Murdoch had also written an excellent analysis of moral imagination and art in her book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. After reading this book, it seemed to me that her novel was a clever extended example of what Murdoch, the philosopher, had to say about imagination, art, and our perceptions of truth.