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Imagination, Fantasy, Wishful Thinking and Truth: Life is translation and we are all lost in it. (Clifford Geertz)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2020

Joanne B. Ciulla
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Extract

In “Moral Imagination and the Search for Ethical Decision-Making,” Patricia H. Werhane observes that people and institutions sometimes do unethical things because they have a narrow perspective on their situation and little in the way of moral imagination. She defines moral imagination as “an ability to imaginatively discern various possibilities for acting in a given situation and to envision the potential help and harm that are likely to result from a given action.” Werhane’s paper focuses on how the conceptual schemes of people and organizations hinder the exercise of moral imagination. She develops two key concepts for understanding moral imagination, memory or moral amnesia and empathy. Both of these give us a better picture of how imagination bridges the gap between moral principles and actions.

Type
Section III
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue S1: The Ruffin Series Special Issue No.1 , 1998 , pp. 99 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Business Ethics Quarterly 1998

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References

Endnotes

1 Geertz, Clifford, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983).Google Scholar

2 Werhane uses Mark Johnson's definition from, Moral Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) p. 202.

3 Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, Essays on Moral Realism (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. ixGoogle Scholar. Also see, Lovibond, Sabina, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

4 Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Press, 1993), p. 315.Google Scholar

5 Murdoch, Iris, The Sea, The Sea (London: Penguin Books, 1978).Google Scholar

6 Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Press, 1993), p. 325.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., 347.

8 Stephen Spender, “The Making of a Poem,” in The Partisan Review, Vol. XIII, No. 3, 1946.

9 See Freeman, R. Edward and Gilbert, Daniel R., Corporate Strategy and the Search for Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988)Google Scholar.

10 Sartre, Jean Paul, Being and Nothingness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), pp. 89–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Furse, Margaret Lewis, Nothing But the Truth (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1981), p. 53.Google Scholar

12 See, Williams, Bernard, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 “Wall Street Shokku,” The Economist, September 30, 1995, p. 83.

14 See, Howard G. Chua-Eoan, “Going for Broke,” Time, March 13, 1995, pp. 42-43.

15 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 3rd edition tr. E.M. Anscombe, (New York: Macmillan Publishing, Inc., 1968) pp. 213e-214e.

16 This is akin to what Martha Nussbaum calls “moral obtuseness.”

17 Geertz, Clifford, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 54.Google Scholar

18 Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Allen Lane Penguin Books, 1993), p. 310.Google Scholar

19 Warnock, Mary, Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 206-7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Trilling, Lionell, The Last Decade (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 212.Google Scholar