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

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.

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.

This guide discusses some of the most controversial moral questions of the day, including abortion, euthanasia, suicide, community racial justice, and capital punishment, opening up ways to think about them and expand the moral imagination.

"John Paul Lederach's work in the field of conciliation and mediation is internationally recognized. He has provided consultation, training and direct mediation in a range of situations from the Miskito/Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua to Somalia, Northern Ireland, Tajikistan, and the Philippines. His influential 1997 book Building Peace has become a classic in the discipline. In this book, Lederach poses the question, "How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?" Peacebuilding, in his view, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, he says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act-an exercise of what Lederach terms the "moral imagination." This imagination must, however, emerge from and speak to the hard realities of human affairs. The peacebuilder must have one foot in what is and one foot beyond what exists. The book is organized around four guiding stories that point to the moral imagination but are incomplete. Lederach seeks to understand what happened in these individual cases and how they are relevant to large-scale change. His purpose is not to propose a grand new theory. Instead he wishes to stay close to the "messiness" of real processes and change, and to recognize the serendipitous nature of the discoveries and insights that emerge along the way. overwhelmed the equally important creative process. Like most professional peacemakers, Lederach sees his work as a religious vocation. Lederach meditates on his own calling and on the spirituality that moves ordinary people to reject violence and seek reconciliation. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in the field he explores the evolution of his understanding of peacebuilding and points the way toward the future of the art." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0616/2004011794-d.html.

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.

Introduction -- Imagining the imagination -- What do we make of fantasy? -- Imagining ethics -- Eating the liver, killing the tortoise: the ethical and the imaginal -- A dream of the desiring imagination -- The law of the (imaginal) land -- Conclusions.

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.

It is essential for those employed within the justice system to be able to competently and confidently work at the borders between ethics and the law. Criminal Justice Ethics offers a fresh new approach to considering ethical issues in a criminal justice context. Starting from a consideration of the major ethical theories, this book sets the framework for an expansive discussion of ethics by moving from theory to consider the just society and the role of the justice professional within it. Each chapter provides detailed analysis of relevant ethical issues, and activities to engage students with the content, as well as review questions, which can be used for revision or examination.

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.