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.

Imagination and Ethical Ideals is an interdisciplinary work which investigates some of the links between moral philosophy and moral psychology, with implications for both personal ethics and social philosophy. Tierney begins with the argument that the widespread fascination with moral principles has led moral philosophers into a dead end, which is revealed both by their inability to deal with the problem of relativism, and by the felt irrelevancy of moral philosophy to the lives that people are actually striving to lead. He then offers an alternative account of the nature of ethical thought, grounded in a theory of imaginative ethical ideals. A psychological framework for ideals is then developed using the results of contemporary psychoanalysis and psychology, particularly the self psychology of Heinz Kohut.

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.

Imagination and Ethical Ideals is an interdisciplinary work which investigates some of the links between moral philosophy and moral psychology, with implications for both personal ethics and social philosophy. Tierney begins with the argument that the widespread fascination with moral principles has led moral philosophers into a dead end, which is revealed both by their inability to deal with the problem of relativism, and by the felt irrelevancy of moral philosophy to the lives that people are actually striving to lead. He then offers an alternative account of the nature of ethical thought, grounded in a theory of imaginative ethical ideals. A psychological framework for ideals is then developed using the results of contemporary psychoanalysis and psychology, particularly the self psychology of Heinz Kohut.

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.

Presents what philosophical ethics can be like if freed from the idealizing and reductive pressures of conventional moral theory, making the case that moral imagination is a key part of human virtue by showing the variety of roles it plays in our practical and evaluative lives.

Developing a boundary-crossing ethics by paying attention to our stories, myths, and moral intuition.

In this book Jane Kneller focuses on the role of imagination as a creative power in Kant's aesthetics and in his overall philosophical enterprise. She analyzes Kant's account of imaginative freedom and the relation between imaginative free play and human social and moral development, showing various ways in which his aesthetics of disinterested reflection produce moral interests. She situates these aspects of his aesthetic theory within the context of German aesthetics of the eighteenth century, arguing that Kant's contribution is a bridge between early theories of aesthetic moral education and the early Romanticism of the last decade of that century. In so doing, her book brings the two most important German philosophers of Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kant and Novalis, into dialogue. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in both Kant studies and German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Most of us care about being a good person. Most of us also recognize that we fall far short of our morals aspirations, that there is a gap between what we are like and what we think we should be like. The aim of moral improvement is to narrow that gap. And yet as a practical undertaking, moral improvement is beset by difficulties. We are not very good judges of what we are like and we are often unclear about what it would mean to be better. This book aims to give an honest account of moral improvement that takes seriously the challenges that we encounter--the practical and philosophical--in trying to make ourselves morally better. Ethical theories routinely present us with accounts of ideal moral agents that we are supposed to emulate. These accounts, however, often lack normative authority for us and they may also fail to provide us with adequate guidance about how to live in our flawed moral reality. Stohr presents moral improvement as a project for non-ideal persons living in non-ideal circumstances. An adequate account of moral improvement must have psychologically plausible starting points and rely on ideals that are normatively authoritative and regulatively efficacious for the person trying to emulate them. Moral improvement should be understood as the project of articulating and inhabiting an aspirational moral identity. That identity is cultivated through existing practical identities and standpoints, which are fundamentally social and which generate practical conflicts about how to live. The success of moral improvement depends on it taking place within what she calls good "moral neighborhoods." Moral neighborhoods are collaborative normative spaces, constructed from networks of social practices and conventions, in which we can articulate and act as better versions of ourselves. The book concludes with a discussion of three social practices that contribute to good moral neighborhoods, and so to moral improvement.

1 Reflective self-evaluation 3 2 Moral imagination 19 3 Understanding life backward 37 4 From hope and fear set free 55 5 All passion spent 75 6 Registers of consciousness 95 7 This process of vision 117 8 An integral part of life 134 9 Toward a purified mind 159 10 The self's judgment of the self 181 11 The hardest service.