In this paper, I defend the view that we can have perceptual moral knowledge. First, I motivate the moral perception view by drawing on some examples involving perceptual knowledge of complex non‐moral properties. I argue that we have little reason to think that perception of moral properties couldn't operate in much the same way that our perception of these complex non‐moral properties operates. I then defend the moral perception view from two challenging objections that have yet to be adequately addressed. (...) The first objection is that the moral perception view has implausible commitments concerning the morally blind, people who would claim not to perceive wrongness. The second objection is that the moral perception view is not really compatible with a wide range of the main candidate moral theories. I argue that the moral empiricist has plausible responses to both of these objections. I then address three residual concerns that my defense raises. (shrink)

This paper develops the basis for a new account of radical moral imagination, understood as the transformation of moral understandings through creative response to the sensed inadequacy of one's moral concepts or morally significant appraisals of lived experience. Against Miranda Fricker, I argue that this kind of transition from moral perplexity to increased moral insight is not primarily a matter of the “top-down” use of concepts. Against Susan Babbitt, I argue that it is not primarily a matter of “bottom-up” intuitive (...) responsiveness to experience. Beyond courage and hope, radical moral imagination involves the articulation of inchoate experience, which allows individuals to make new kinds of moral moves and to lay claim to others' acknowledgment of the meaning of these moves. (shrink)

While examining the important role of imagination in making moral judgments, John Dewey and Moral Imagination focuses new attention on the relationship between American pragmatism and ethics. Steven Fesmire takes up threads of Dewey's thought that have been largely unexplored and elaborates pragmatism's distinctive contribution to understandings of moral experience, inquiry, and judgment. Building on two Deweyan notions—that moral character, belief, and reasoning are part of a social and historical context and that moral deliberation is an imaginative, dramatic rehearsal of (...) possibilities—Fesmire shows that moral imagination can be conceived as a process of aesthetic perception and artistic creativity. Fesmire's original readings of Dewey shed new light on the imaginative process, human emotional make-up and expression, and the nature of moral judgment. This original book presents a robust and distinctly pragmatic approach to ethics, politics, moral education, and moral conduct. [The downloadable sample is Chapter Seven, "The Moral Artist."]. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom and commonsense morality tend to take the integrity of persons for granted. But for people in systematically unjust societies, self-respect and human dignity may prove to be impossible dreams.Susan Babbitt explores the implications of this insight, arguing that in the face of systemic injustice, individual and social rationality may require the transformation rather than the realization of deep-seated aims, interests, and values. In particular, under such conditions, she argues, the cultivation and ongoing exercise of moral imagination is necessary (...) to discover and defend a more humane social vision. Impossible Dreams is one of those rare books that fruitfully combines discourses that were previously largely separate: feminist and antiracist political theory, analytic ethics and philosophy of mind, and a wide range of non-philosophical literature on the lives of oppressed peoples around the world. It is both an object lesson in reaching across academic barriers and a demonstration of how the best of feminist philosophy can be in conversation with the best of “mainstream” philosophy—as well as affect the lives of real people. (shrink)

1. Presumably the point of, say, inculcating a moral outlook lies in a concern with how people live. It may seem that the very idea of a moral outlook makes room for, and requires, the existence of moral theory, conceived as a discipline which seeks to formulate acceptable principles of conduct. It is then natural to think of ethics as a branch of philosophy related to moral theory, so conceived, rather as the philosophy of science is related to science. On (...) this view, the primary topic of ethics is the concept of right conduct, and the nature and justification of principles of behaviour. If there is a place for an interest in the concept of virtue, it is a secondary place. Virtue is a disposition to behave rightly; the nature of virtue is explained, as it were, from the outside in. (shrink)

After this, nothing happened -- Ethics at the horizon -- Critique of abysmal reasoning.

These challenging essays defend Romanticism against its critics. They argue that Romantic thought, interpreted as the pursuit of freedom in concrete contexts, remains a central and exemplary form of both artistic work and philosophical understanding. Marshalling a wide range of texts from literature, philosophy and criticism, Richard Eldridge traces the central themes and stylistic features of Romantic thinking in the work of Kant, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Cavell and Updike. Through his analysis he shows that Romanticism is neither emptily literary (...) and escapist nor dogmatically optimistic and sentimental. This is the first serious philosophical defense of the ethical ideals of Romanticism and will appeal particularly to all professionals and students in philosophy, literature and aesthetics who are interested in what, philosophically, literature can show that philosophy cannot say. (shrink)

The Critique of the Power of Judgment (a more accurate rendition of what has hitherto been translated as the Critique of Judgment) is the third of Kant's great critiques following the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. This entirely new translation of Kant's masterpiece follows the principles and high standards of all other volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. This volume includes: for the first time the indispensable first draft of Kant's (...) introduction to the work; the only English edition notes to the many differences between the first (1790) and second (1793) editions of the work; and relevant passages in Kant's anthropology lectures where he elaborated on his aesthetic views. All in all this new edition offers the serious student of Kant a dramatically richer, more complete and more accurate translation. (shrink)

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We Live (...) By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection. (shrink)

Publisher's description: The realistic spirit, a nonmetaphysical approach to philosophical thought concerned with the character of philosophy itself, informs all of the discussions in these essays by philosopher Cora Diamond. Diamond explains Wittgenstein's notoriously elusive later writings, explores the background to his thought in the work of Frege, and discusses ethics in a way that reflects his influence. Diamond's new reading of Wittgenstein challenges currently accepted interpretations and shows what it means to look without mythology at the coherence, commitments, and (...) connections that are distinctive of the mind. (shrink)

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, explore such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves (...) emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements. (shrink)

Most contemporary moral philosophy is concerned with issues of rationality, universality, impartiality, and principle. By contrast Laurence Blum is concerned with the psychology of moral agency. The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. Blum takes up the challenge of Iris Murdoch to articulate a vision of moral excellence that provides a worthy aspiration for human beings. Drawing on (...) accounts of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust Blum argues that impartial principle can mislead us about the variety of forms of moral excellence. (shrink)

Those who deny that general principles are important for moral deliberation have mostly misunderstood how principles work. Principles do not give us algorithms for living. They identify broad requirements we must live up to, but they do not actually tell us what to do. We are left instead to craft responses that honor our general commitments using the materials of the case at hand.

Moral imagination, according to John Kekes, is indispensable to a fulfilling and responsible life.

This is the first English translation of all of Kant's writings on moral and political philosophy collected in a single volume. No other collection competes with the comprehensiveness of this one. As well as Kant's most famous moral and political writings, the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Toward Perpetual Peace, the volume includes shorter essays and reviews, some of which have never been translated before. The volume has been furnished (...) with a substantial editorial apparatus including translator's introductions and explanatory notes to each text by Mary Gregor, and a general introduction to Kant's moral and political philosophy by Allen Wood. There is also an English-German and German-English glossary of key terms. (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as indispensable (...) for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

Although the role of imagination in moral reasoning is often neglected, recent literature, mostly of pragmatist signature, points to imagination as one of its central elements. In this article we develop some of their arguments by looking at the moral role of imagination in practice, in particular the practice of neonatal intensive care. Drawing on empirical research, we analyze a decision-making process in various stages: delivery, staff meeting, and reflection afterwards. We show how imagination aids medical practitioners demarcating moral categories, (...) tuning their actions, and exploring long-range consequences of decisions. We argue that imagination helps to bring about at least four kinds of integration in the moral decision-making process: personal integration by creating a moral self-image in moments of reflection; social integration by aiding the conciliation of the diverging perspectives of the people involved; temporal integration by facilitating the parties to transcend the present moment and connect past, present, and future; and epistemological integration by helping to combine the various forms of knowledge and experience needed to make moral decisions. Furthermore, we argue that the role of imagination in these moral decision-processes is limited in several significant ways. Rather than being a solution itself, it is merely an aid and cannot replace the decision itself. Finally, there are also limits to the practical relevance of this theoretical reflection. In the end, it is up to care professionals as reflective practitioners to re-imagine the practice of intensive care and make the right decisions with hope and imagination. (shrink)

A prima facie analysis suggests that there are essentially two, mutually exclusive, ways in which risk arising from engineering design can be managed: by imposing external constraints on engineers or by engendering their feelings of responsibility and respect their autonomy. The author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. However, he then shows that this opposition is a false one and that there is no simple relation between regulation and autonomy. Furthermore, the author argues that the most pressing need (...) is not more or less regulation but the further development of moral imagination. The enhancement of moral imagination can help engineers to discern the moral relevance of design problems, to create new design options, and to envisage the possible outcomes of their designs. The author suggests a dual program of developing regulatory frameworks that support engineers' autonomy and responsibility simultaneously with efforts to promote their moral imagination. He describes how some existing institutional changes have started off in this direction and proposes empirical research to take this further. (shrink)

A prima facie analysis suggests that there are essentially two, mutually exclusive, ways in which risk arising from engineering design can be managed: by imposing external constraints on engineers or by engendering their feelings of responsibility and respect their autonomy. The author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. However, he then shows that this opposition is a false one and that there is no simple relation between regulation and autonomy. Furthermore, the author argues that the most pressing need (...) is not more or less regulation but the further development of moral imagination. The enhancement of moral imagination can help engineers to discern the moral relevance of design problems, to create new design options, and to envisage the possible outcomes of their designs. The author suggests a dual program of developing regulatory frameworks that support engineers’ autonomy and responsibility simultaneously with efforts to promote their moral imagination. He describes how some existing institutional changes have started off in this direction and proposes empirical research to take this further. (shrink)

Systemic discrimination produces individuals with a degraded self-concept who therefore may not care about autonomy or set ends compatible with human flourishing. Under systemic discrimination, the dominant conceptual and evaluative framework does not enable the oppressed to articulate their humanity or the rationality of aspiring to full human flourishing. And the injustice of that system may be fully visible only from a perspective outside of that system.