The Ethical Imagination

Science and technology force us to ask some of the most challenging and unprecedented ethical questions in the world today. These issues encompass what it means to be human, how we relate to others and our world, and how we find meaning in life. How we can find a shared ethics for an interdependent world? In her 2006 CBC Massey Lectures, ethicist and McGill University professor Margaret Somerville tackles some of the most contentious issues of our times, and proposes a brilliant new kind of ethical language and thought to help us navigate them.

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.

The Enlightenment idea that reason creates fixed moral rules that specify "the right thing to do" is mistaken, according to Johnson, because it misses the ways in which human conceptual systems are grounded in bodily experience, and it ignores the expansive and constructive nature of our best moral thinking. Since new findings in cognitive science explain reasoning in terms of prototypes, frame semantics, metaphor, and basic-level experience, Johnson contends that we must revise our views of ethics and adopt an alternative conception of moral reflection - one that is thoroughly imaginative.

What do we do with our fantasies? Are there right and wrong ways to imagine, feel, think, or desire? Do we have our fantasies, or do they have us? In The Ethical Imagination: Exploring Fantasy and Desire in Analytical Psychology, Sean Fitzpatrick explores how our obligation to the Other extends to our most intimate spaces. Informed by Jungian psychology and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Fitzpatrick imagines an ethical approach that can negotiate the delicate and porous boundary between inner and outer, personal and collective fantasy. Combining both theory and practice, the book examines theorists of the imagination, such as Plato, Coleridge, Sartre, and Richard Kearney, explores stories from contemporary culture, such as Jimmy Carter and New York’s "Cannibal Cop", and includes encounters in the consulting room. The Ethical Imagination explores how these questions have been asked in different ways across culture and history, and Fitzpatrick examines the impact of our modern, digital world on ethics and imagination. In this original examination of the ethical status of our imagination, this book illustrates how our greatest innovations, works of art, and acts of compassion emerge from the human imagination, but so also do our horrific atrocities. Fitzpatrick compellingly demonstrates that what and how we imagine matters. Unique and innovative, this book will be of immense interest to Jungian psychotherapists, analytical psychologists, and other mental health professionals interested in the ethics, the imagination, and clinical work with fantasy. It will also be an important book for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, philosophy, religious studies, and ethics.

This book provides a comprehensive, critical overview of the turn to ethics in literature, film, and visual culture. It discusses the concept of a biovisual ethics, offering a new theory of the relation between film and ethics based on the premise that images are capable of generating their own ethical content. This ethics operates hermeneutically and materializes in cinema’s unique power to show us other modes of being. The author considers a wealth of contemporary art films and documentaries that embody ethical issues through the very form of the text. The ethical imagination generated by films such as The Nine Muses, Post Tenebras Lux, Amour, and Nostalgia For the Light is crucially defined by openness, uncertainty, opacity, and the refusal of hegemonic practices of visual representation.

When it comes to the most controversial moral questions of our lives - abortion, euthanasia, suicide, capital punishment, racial justice, and affirmative action - there is a right and wrong, but no one owns the truth. This book guides us through the opposing arguments on these profound issues, opening up ways for our pluralistic society to think about them. How does one make up one's mind about the difficult, yet everyday, inescapable social and moral problems we all face? The public debate often degenerates into name-calling and even violence. Conservatives and liberals alike act as if there is only one way to think. In a format that is accessible, anecdotal, and concrete, Edward Tivnan lays out the best arguments on all sides of these visceral topics. He explores the most sophisticated thinking from philosophy, theology, medicine, and the law, as well as examples from the emotional complexities of everyday life, and carefully mediates between opposing ideals - not to lead us to a position of convenience, but to help us toward independent decisions of conviction. Tivnan's analysis, therefore, does not dictate answers, but calls for an effort to understand and respect why people believe so strongly in their own values. Only by facing up to our differences of opinion can we make progress, expand our moral imagination, and achieve a decent and respectful society. In concluding chapters, Tivnan describes the peculiar nature of American democracy, invented by men who knew that freedom would breed conflicting values and expected that such differences would secure the nation's future as a republican democracy. The first premise of a decent, free society, Tivnan writes, is tolerance; "the first sparks of tolerance and decency reside in the imagination - what I want to call the moral imagination." He concludes that expanding our moral imagination "will cleanse debate of hatred and moral arrogance."

Originally published in hardcover in 2005.

I hope the cover of this book, as well as the words and ideas within, might stimulate insights. For me, the bird on the man's shoulder symbolizes the human spirit, imagination, freedom, and the capacity and courage to explore physical, intellectual, and spiritual unknowns a It's hard to tell whether the bird is a pigeon (a messenger) or a dove (a symbol of harmony, love, and peace), but in either case she's an ordinary, everyday bird. As such, she carries the message that all of us, not just a 'chosen few,' need to exercise our ethical imaginations and engage in journeys of the human spirit.o - from The Ethical Imagination In the 2006 CBC Massey Lectures, renowned ethicist Margaret Somerville asked: What does it mean to be human today, when mind-altering scientific breakthroughs are challenging our ideas of ourselves, how we relate to others and the world, and how we find meaning in life? Somerville touches upon controversial topics such as new reproductive technologies, genetic modification, and transhumanism. And she eloquently proposes that it is only by undertaking a journey of the imagination - by heeding our stories, myths, and moral intuition - that we can truly develop an ethics to guide us into the future.