Imagining the Consequences | Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics

book: Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics | Mark Johnson

books:


	• Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics Mark Johnson University Of Chicago Press, 1994 - 302 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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no demonstration

Mark Johnson is a capable writer, who demonstrates the weaknesses of any moral theory that insists on absolutes. In a redundant manner most of the book is about this weakness. However, didn't we already know this? That absolutes were guidelines, helpful rules of thumb, but not always completely applicable. Still it is a very good review (why I gave it three stars). Yet Johnson does not demonstrate that "moral imagination" really gets us anywhere. Is it really any more insightful than the old rules? Johnson takes us up a flight of stairs only to find the door at the top locked.

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Imagining the Consequences

This is a very important book; though aimed at philosophers and the cognitive science communities, most general readers should enjoy it. Here are several quotes:

"[There is] a deep tension and dissonance within our cultural understanding of morality, for we try to live according to a view that is inconsistent with how human beings actually make sense of things, I am trying to point out this deep tension, to diagnose the source of the dissonance, and to offer a more psychologically realistic view of moral understanding -- a view we could live by and that would help us live better lives." (p.19). "Narrative is not just an explanatory device, but is actually constitutive of the way we experience things. No moral theory can be adequate if it does not take into account the narrative character of our experience." (p. 11

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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.

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