The Moral Imagination And Public Life

Thomas E. McCollough explores the relationship of personal values to public policy, and he poses the concept of moral community as the vital link between the concerned citizen and the body politic. He delineates a collective vision of the public good that might be brought to bear on policy issues such as health care, education, civil liberties, and the environment.

Originally published in hardcover in 2005.

In the rush to development in Botswana, and Africa more generally, changes in work, diet, and medical care have resulted in escalating experiences of chronic illness, debilitating disease, and accident. Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana documents how transformations wrought by colonialism, independence, industrialization, and development have effected changes in bodily life and perceptions of health, illness, and debility. In this intimate and powerful book, Julie Livingston explores the lives of debilitated persons, their caregivers, the medical and social networks of caring, and methods that communities have adopted for promoting well-being. Livingston traces how Tswana medical thought and practice have become intertwined with Western bio-medical ideas and techniques. By focusing on experiences and meanings of illness and bodily misfortune, Livingston sheds light on the complexities of the current HIV/AIDS epidemic and places it in context with a long and complex history of impairment and debility. This book presents practical and thoughtful responses to physical misfortune and offers an understanding of the complex dynamic between social change and suffering.

Around the world communities that have suffered the trauma of unspeakable violence--in Liberia, Somalia, West Africa, Columbia, and elsewhere--are struggling to recover and reconcile, searching for ways not just to survive but to heal. In When Blood and Bones Cry Out, John Paul Lederach, a pioneer of peace-building, and his daughter, Angela Jill Lederach, show how communities can recover and reconnect through the power of making music, creating metaphors, and telling their extraordinary stories of suffering and survival. Instead of relying on more common linear explanations of healing and reconciliation, the Lederachs demonstrate how healing is circular, dynamic, and continuing, even in the midst of ongoing violence. They explore the concept of "social healing," a profoundly important intermediary step between active warfare and reconciliation. Social healing focuses on the lived experience of those who have suffered protracted violence and their need to give voice to that experience, both individually and collectively. Giving voice, speaking the unspeakable, in words and sounds that echo throughout traumatized communities, can have enormous healing power. Indeed, the Lederachs stress the remarkable effects of sound and vibration through tales of Tibetan singing bowls, Van Morrison's transcendent lyrics, the voices of mothers in West Africa, and their own personal journeys. And they include inspiring stories of transformation: a mass women's protest movement in Liberia that forces leaders to keep negotiating until a peace agreement is signed; elders in Somalia who walk between warring clans year after year to encourage dialogue; former child soldiers who run drum workshops and grow gardens in refugee camps; and rape victims in Sierra Leone who express their pain in poetry. With equal measures of insight and compassion, When Blood and Bones Cry Out offers a promising new approach to healing traumatized communities.

Metaphor, as an act of human fancy, combines ideas in improbable ways to sharpen meanings of life and experience. Theoretically, this arises from an association between a sign—for example, a cattle car—and its referent, the Holocaust. These “sign-vehicles” serve as modes of semiotic transportation through conceptual space. Likewise, on-the-ground vehicles can be rich metaphors for the moral imagination. Following on this insight, Vehicles presents a collection of ethnographic essays on the metaphoric significance of vehicles in different cultures. Analyses include canoes in Papua New Guinea, pedestrians and airplanes in North America, lowriders among Mexican-Americans, and cars in contemporary China, Japan, and Eastern Europe, as well as among African-Americans in the South. Vehicles not only “carry people around,” but also “carry” how they are understood in relation to the dynamics of culture, politics and history.

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."

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 idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed “the ideal of moral imagination,” emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science.