Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:13:13.821Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Radical Moral Imagination: Courage, Hope, and Articulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Mavis Biss
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper develops the basis for a new account of radical moral imagination, understood as the transformation of moral understandings through creative response to the sensed inadequacy of one's moral concepts or morally significant appraisals of lived experience. Against Miranda Fricker, I argue that this kind of transition from moral perplexity to increased moral insight is not primarily a matter of the “top‐down” use of concepts. Against Susan Babbitt, I argue that it is not primarily a matter of “bottom‐up” intuitive responsiveness to experience. Beyond courage and hope, radical moral imagination involves the articulation of inchoate experience, which allows individuals to make new kinds of moral moves and to lay claim to others' acknowledgment of the meaning of these moves.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , Fall 2013 , pp. 937 - 954
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I thank two anonymous Hypatia reviewers for their valuable suggestions for revisions and additions. I am also very grateful to Claudia Card, Paula Gottlieb, and Emily McRae for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this work, which especially influenced my discussion of the story of Yentl and my use of the notion of paradigm failure.

References

Babbitt, Susan. 1996. Impossible dreams: Rationality, integrity and moral imagination. Oxford: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Cavell, Stanley. 1976. Aesthetic problems of modern philosophy. In Must we mean what we say? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Collingwood, R. G. 1958. The principles of art. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Eldridge, Richard. 2003. Cavell on American philosophy and the idea of America. In Stanley Cavell, ed. Eldridge, Richard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eldridge, Richard. 2008. Literature, life, and modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herman, Barbara. 2007. Moral literacy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1790/2000. Critique of the power of judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pfau, Thomas. 1999. The voice of critique: Aesthetic cognition after Kant, part I. In Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Romanticism and philosophy in an historical age. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/philosophy/pfau1/tp1.html (accessed October 5, 2012).Google Scholar
Sherman, Nancy. 1997. Making a necessity of virtue. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, Isaac Bashevis. 1996. Yentl the yeshiva boy. In The collected stories. New York: The Noonday Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1995. Explanation and practical reason. In Philosophical arguments. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Walker, Margaret Urban. 1998. Review of Impossible dreams: Rationality, integrity and moral imagination, by Susan Babbitt. Hypatia 13 (3): 168–73.Google Scholar