Imaginative Resistance Research Articles

Imaginative resistance and the moral/conventional distinction

Children, even very young children, distinguish moral from conventional transgressions, inasmuch as they hold that the former, but not the latter, would still be wrong if there was no rule prohibiting them. Many people have taken this finding as evidence that morality is objective, and therefore universal. I argue that reflection on the phenomenon of imaginative resistance will lead us to question these claims. If a concept applies in virtue of the obtaining of a set of more basic facts, then it is authority independent, and we therefore resist the attempts of authorities to claim that it does not apply. Thus, the moral/conventional distinction is a product of imaginative resistance to claims that a concept does not apply when its supervenience base is in place (or vice versa). All we can rightfully conclude from the fact that children are disposed to make the moral/conventional distinction is that our moral concepts belong to the class of authority-independent concepts. Though the set of basic facts in virtue of which an authority-independent concept obtains must be objective, the concept itself might be conventional, inasmuch as we could easily draw its boundaries wider or narrower, or fail to have a concept that corresponds to these properties at all.

The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance

L'A. souleve, en reference a Hume, le paradoxe de la resistance de l'imagination qui designe la difficulte que nous eprouvons a imaginer des mondes fictifs qui s'ecartent de la norme morale. Examinant le phenomene de deviance morale a travers la relation entre l'imagination et la possibilite, l'A. montre que la resistance ne releve pas d'une incapacite a imaginer des mondes deviants, mais de la volonte de ne pas le faire (unwillingness) qui s'inscrit dans le desir plus general de ne pas etre manipule.