How can moral imagination contribute to moral reasoning and deliberation?

"For a long time, the term ‘moral imagination’ was considered an ‘oxymoron’ (Johnson, 2016). Moral philosophy has traditionally—and increasingly so since modernity—placed rationality, rules, and principles at the heart of morality. Moral judgement and moral action are usually regarded as (the outcome of) a rational process that must not be tainted by the volatile and possibly illusory nature of imagination. However, several authors have challenged this view by stressing instead the need for imagination in morality. Most have done so by conceiving moral imagination in moral reasoning as (a) empathy, (b) imaginative perception, or (c) a phase of deliberation. The now quite popular idea of (a) empathy as an important moral tool stretches back to Adam Smith’s (1790) hypothesis that we need imagination to understand each other’s problems. In this vein, Martha Nussbaum described moral imagination as “the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself” (1997, pp. 19–11). Following Iris Murdoch ’s claim that “clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort” (2001, pp. 35–36), other philosophers have presented accounts of moral imagination as (b) an imaginative apprehension of reality through which we get a better grip on other persons and particular situations and events (see Nussbaum, 1985; Diamond, 1991; Chappell, 2017; Ratajczyk, 2024). From a very different pragmatist perspective, John Dewey (1922) regarded imagination as (c) a crucial phase of deliberation he called ‘dramatic rehearsal’. Scholars following Dewey regard such dramatic rehearsal as an experimental phase of action during which © 2025 Compost Collective, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0449.08"