Moral Imagination

In two studies, we investigate how moral imagination – the ability to generate multiple alternative ethical courses of action in the face of complex ethical dilemmas – is enhanced or inhibited by moral efficacy. Specifically, we examine how moral efficacy, derived from internal (self-efficacy) and external (means efficacy) sources, influences moral imagination, and consider whether the individuals’ moral identity moderates the moral efficacy-moral imagination relationship. Findings show that in response to an ethical dilemma, individuals with high self-efficacy generated a greater number of initial ethical courses of action than individuals with low self-efficacy, and individuals with higher means efficacy generated a greater number of novel ethical courses of action than individuals with low means efficacy. Moral identity internalization moderated the moral efficacy-moral imagination relationship. As hypothesized, the relationship between self-efficacy and moral imagination was stronger for individuals with a weak moral identity; however, contrary to our hypothesis, the relationship between means efficacy and moral imagination was stronger for people with strong moral identity.

So Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of Africa

in his recent essay “Latinos and Transnationalism” in the new InterAmerican Journal of Philosophy, Eduardo Mendieta argues that North American pragmatism is best understood as “a people’s moral imagination and habitus captured in thought” (27). He draws on the work of Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Randolph Bourne to remind us that the difficult times that we are presently experiencing in terms of the national and international economy are due in large part to a failure of moral and political imagination. He calls for pragmatic philosophers to sustain and re-invent this moral and imaginative habitus in real and effective ways, combating the ongoing degradation of civic vitality in order to continue to see the work of citizenship as that of achieving our country. Mendieta sees the Latino community within North America as particularly well located to take up this challenge for two reasons. The first reason is a matter of pure mathematics: Latinos are an increasingly large portion of the US population and are therefore increasingly determinative of the national moral imagination and habitus. Mendieta’s second point is a deeper cultural point. He notes that Latinos, in contrast with prior immigrant populations, “have retained extensive and continuous ties with their places of origin,” giving them a special critical perspective from which they are able to more concretely re-imagine the meaning, value, and rights of US citizenship (33). Following Mendieta’s call to think carefully and vividly through the connections between pragmatism as the thoughtful expression of North American moral imagination and habitus and the Hispanic/Latino worlds, my primary thesis will be recognizable to philosophers within the pragmatic tradition. I argue here that the re-imaginings that take place in the contact between

Patricia Werhane, in the book “Moral Imagination and Management Decision Making,” proposes that business ethics education has overlooked the importance of moral imagination. Werhane's book is a thin volume—less than 150 pages in length. Its central message is that managers need to deliberately and proactively expand their consciousness and, from this enlarged awareness, imagine and enact novel ethical responses.

In the essays which make up The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch gives us a picture of moral life in which ‘the metaphor of vision [is] almost irresistibly suggested’. This chapter aims to clarify the role played by the metaphor of vision in Murdoch’s philosophical thinking. I’ll examine two different things which might be meant by the term ‘moral vision’: vision of moral things or vision which is itself moral. The suggestion will be that while both capture something important about Murdoch’s work, each may mislead about what is distinctive in her views. For Murdoch, I shall suggest, there is no distinctively moral vision. There is only vision: a loving gaze directed upon the reality of others.

Moral sensitivity and moral reasoning are essential competencies biomedical researchers have to develop to make ethical decisions in their daily practices. Previous research has shown that these competencies can be developed through ethics education. However, it is unclear which underlying mechanisms best support the development of these competencies. In this article we argue that the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning can be fostered through teaching strategies that tap into students’ moral imagination. We describe how moral imagination can stimulate the development of these competencies through three different merits of moral imagination. Moral imagination can help students to 1) transfer and apply abstract moral concepts to concrete situations and contexts, 2) explore the perspective of others, 3) explore and foresee the moral consequences of different decisions and actions. We explain these three merits of moral imagination in the context of biomedical research and present a theoretical model for how these merits can be used to stimulate the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning. Furthermore, we describe multiple teaching strategies for biomedical curricula that tap into the three merits of moral imagination. These teaching strategies can inspire teachers to design ethics education that activates students’ moral imagination for the development of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning.

A plethora of research has shed light on AI’s perpetuation of biases, and the primary focus has been on technological fixes or biased data. However, there is deafening silence regarding the key role of programmers in mitigating bias in AI. A significant gap exists in the understanding of how a programmer’s personal characteristics may influence their professional design choices. This study addresses this gap by exploring the link between programmers’ sense of social responsibility and their moral imagination in AI, i.e., intentions to correct bias in AI, particularly against marginalized populations. Furthermore, it is unexplored how a programmer’s preference for hierarchy between groups, social dominance orientation-egalitarianism (SDO-E), influences this relationship. We conducted a between-subject online experiment with 263 programmers based in the United States. They were randomly assigned to conditions that mimic narratives about agency reflected in technology determinism (low responsibility) and technology instrumentalism (high responsibility). The findings reveal that high social responsibility significantly boosts programmers’ moral imagination concerning their intentions to correct bias in AI, and it is especially effective for high SDO-E programmers. In contrast, low SDO-E programmers exhibit consistently high levels of moral imagination in AI, regardless of the condition, as they are highly empathetic, allowing the perspective-taking needed for moral imagination, and are naturally motivated to equalize groups. This study underscores the need to cultivate social responsibility among programmers to enhance fairness and ethics in the development of artificial intelligence. The findings have important theoretical and practical implications for AI ethics, algorithmic fairness, etc.

We propose that firms that engage in morally imaginative sensemaking will manage society's changing ethical expectations more effectively than those engaging in habituated sensemaking. Specifically, we argue that managers engaging in habituated sensemaking will tend to view changes in expectations as threats and respond to them defensively. In contrast, morally imaginative managers will tend to see these same changes as opportunities and address them by proactively or interactively engaging stakeholders in learning processes. We contribute to the literature on moral imagination by highlighting the value of moral imagination relative to conventional sensemaking, and by positioning moral imagination as an ongoing mode of sensemaking. While we recognize that managers' capacity to continuously address changing ethical expectations using moral imagination is constrained by cognitive limitations, we posit that morally imaginative sensemaking may economize on cognitive resources over time by enabling managers to avoid managing ethical issues unproductively based on habit. We also contribute to the issues management literature by calling attention to two underlying factors, managerial sensemaking mode and firm enterprise strategy, that drive companies' approaches to issues management.

Ethical criticism often suggests that reading literature can enhance the reader's ‘moral imagination’ and understanding of ‘ethical activity’. However, the connection between enhanced ‘moral imagination’ and ‘ethical activity’ is not always so clear. Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor have recently argued that ‘real’ kindness has become devalued in society because of the prevalence of what they call ‘sentimental kindness’. This article argues that criticism that privileges literature's value for a ‘moral imagination’ can be read as promoting such sentimental kindness when it comes to describing literature's relevance for ethical activity. The article also reads James Joyce's exploration of kindness in Finnegans Wake as a description of kindness that is closer to the ‘real’ kindness Phillips and Taylor promote.

Patricia Werhane’s landmark book Moral Imagination in Management Decision-making and subsequent related work are practically synonymous with business ethics scholarship on moral imagination. In this chapter, I present an overview of Werhane’s work on moral imagination, discuss its impacts in the business and business ethics literatures and beyond, and then offer a theoretical extension. Integrating Werhane’s scholarship that treats moral imagination as an organization-level concept with Nonaka’s (1991) theory of the knowledge-creating company, I present the concept of the morally imaginative organization. Recognizing that leaders of organizations in complex, dynamic environments will be unable to anticipate, identify, and/or respond to the many moral dilemmas that their organizations enact (or fail to enact), I present a normative model in which moral imagination involves all organizational actors and is embedded into the organization’s strategically important knowledge-creating processes. I call for further research at the intersection of business ethics and social science which honors Werhane’s legacy by exploring how organizations can become more morally imaginative.

The purpose of this article is to show how moral imagination can be cultivated through meditation. Moral imagination was conceived as a three-stage process of ethical development. The first stage is reproductive imagination, that involves attaining awareness of the contextual factors that affect perception of a moral problem. The second stage, productive imagination, consists of reframing the problem from different perspectives. The third stage, creative imagination, entails developing morally acceptable alternatives to solve the ethical problem. This article contends that moral imagination can be cultivated through three kinds of meditation: non-discursive, semidiscursive, and discursive meditation. Part one shows how the seed of reproductive moral imagination is planted during sessions of nondiscursive meditation. Productive moral imagination, as will be shown in part two, is nurtured through semidiscursive meditation. Part three will demonstrate the flowering of creative moral imagination through discursive meditation. Reflection and small group discussion on each form of meditation will help to show business people how to cultivate moral imagination.

Moral imagination: Facilitating prosocial decision-making through scene imagery and theory of mind

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.

The subject of cosmopolitanism and Rorty's relation to it has been taken up piecemeal in the preceding chapters. What I would like to do now is discuss the importance of Rortyism's moral imagination and why Rorty's ceaseless reference to the reweaving and redescription of personal identities (as well as cultural ones) is central to any discussion of Rorty's relationship to cosmopolitan thought, although I do not endorse it without qualifications, as will be apparent in due course. In doing so, I will leave behind Rorty's recurring references to the ways that we should change the subject, away from anti-representationalism and anti-foundationalism, and focus more upon the upshot of his commitment to deflationism and ‘the conversation of mankind’. This moves us away from the academic philosophical debates concerning epistemology and its jargon (‘raw feels’, ‘anomalous monism’, ‘triangulation’, ‘the logical space of reason’, etc.), and into a language that is more apt for a discussion of moral and political imagination and human flourishing. Rorty described himself as a radical deflationist, which I understand to mean that he was a radical cultural deflationist. This certainly did not mean that he believed that cultural commitments are irrelevant to identity. Clearly, given his version of ethnocentrism, he believed that there is nothing but culture to consult when trying to forge a plan of life for ourselves as individuals, or a safe, stable and just community for our families, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens of our various countries and, ultimately, of the world.

I argue against interpretations of Mencius by Liu Xiusheng and Eric Hutton that attempt to make sense of a Mencian account of moral judgment and deliberation in light of the moral particularism of John McDowell. These interpretations read Mencius’s account as relying on a faculty of moral perception, which generates moral judgments by directly perceiving moral facts that are immediately intuited with the help of rudimentary and innate moral inclinations. However, I argue that it is a mistake to identify innate moral inclinations as the foundational source of moral judgments and knowledge. Instead, if we understand that for Mencius an individual’s natural dispositions (xing 性) have a relational element, then the normativity of moral judgments can be seen as stemming from the relationships that constitute the dispositions of each individual. Finally, this essay elaborates on John Dewey's account of moral deliberation as moral imagination, an account which also takes the relational quality of natural dispositions as its starting point, in order to suggest the vital role of imagination for Mencius’s own account of moral deliberation.