Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T14:11:45.276Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Sympathy for the Devil: The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance, the Role of Fiction in Moral Thought, and the Limits of the Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2020

Edmund Dain
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

What are the limits of the imagination in morality? What role does fiction play in moral thought? My starting point in addressing these questions is Tamar Szabo Gendler's ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’, the problem of explaining the special difficulties we seem to encounter in imagining to be right what we take to be morally wrong (or vice versa) in fiction, and Gendler's claim that those difficulties are due to our unwillingness to imagine these things, rather than our inability to imagine what is logically or conceptually impossible. Using a wide range of examples, I argue that there is no puzzle of imaginative resistance and that to think that there is such a puzzle is to miss almost entirely the role fiction plays in moral thought. That, however, does not mean that there are no limits to what we can imagine in morality. In fact, I argue, the imagination is limited in morality, as elsewhere, by what is logically or conceptually possible. Together, those claims suggest that fiction and the imagination play a fundamental role in shaping our conception of the moral landscape. The paper concludes by drawing some of the consequences of these views for the nature of moral thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 96 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 253 - 275
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2020

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.)

References

Aeschylus, , Oresteia, trans. Shapiro, and Burian, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Ostwald, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999).Google Scholar
Conant, James, ‘The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus’, Philosophical Topics, 20 (1991), 115–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conant, James and Dain, Edmund, ‘Throwing the Baby Out’, in Read, and Lavery, (eds.), Beyond the Tractatus Wars (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 66–83.Google Scholar
Crary, Alice, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Dain, Edmund, ‘Wittgenstein, Contextualism and Nonsense’. Journal of Philosophical Research, 33 (2008), 101–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dain, Edmund, ‘Eliminating Ethics: Wittgenstein, Ethics, and the Limits of Sense’, Philosophical Topics, 42:2 (2014), 1–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dain, Edmund, ‘Wittgenstein's Moral Thought’, in Agam-Segal, and Dain, (eds.), Wittgenstein's Moral Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 9–35.Google Scholar
Dain, Edmund, ‘Zalabardo on Wittgenstein and the Unity of the Proposition’, Australasian Philosophical Review, 2:3 (2019), 333–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diamond, Cora, ‘Anything but Argument?’, in Diamond, (ed.), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1996a), 291–308.Google Scholar
Diamond, Cora, ‘Missing the Adventure: Reply to Martha Nussbaum’, in Diamond, (ed.), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1996b), 309–318.Google Scholar
Diamond, Cora, ‘We are perpetually moralists’, in Antonaccio, and Schweiker, (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996c), 79–109.Google Scholar
Diamond, Cora, ‘Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus’, in Diamond, (ed.), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1996d), 179–204.Google Scholar
Diamond, Cora, ‘Riddles and Anselm's Riddle’, in Diamond, (ed.), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1996e), 267–89.Google Scholar
Diamond, Cora, ‘What Nonsense Might Be’, in Diamond, (ed.), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1996f), 95–114.Google Scholar
Diamond, Cora, ‘Ethics, Imagination, and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus’, in Crary, and Read, (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 149–73.Google Scholar
Gendler, T. S., ‘The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’, Journal of Philosophy, 97:2 (2000), 55–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gendler, T. S., ‘Imaginative Resistance Revisited’, in Nichols, (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 149–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gendler, T. S. and Liao, Shen-yi, ‘The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’, in Gibson, and Carroll, (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 405–418.Google Scholar
HBO, Game of Thrones (Television series)(Los Angeles, CA: HBO, 2011).Google Scholar
Herodotus, The History, trans. Grene, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Homer, , Iliad, trans. Lombardo, (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997).Google Scholar
Homer, , The Iliad, trans. Fagles, (London: Penguin, 1998).Google Scholar
Hume, David, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Copley, and Edgar, (eds.), David Hume: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 133–53.Google Scholar
Levin, Janet, ‘Imagination, Possibility, and the Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 41:3 (2011), 391–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marvel, , Avengers: Endgame (Film) (Burbank, CA: Marvel Studios, 2019).Google Scholar
MHZ, Spiral (Television series) (Falls Church, VA: MHZ Networks, 2013).Google Scholar
Monterroso, Augusto, Complete Works and Other Stories (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Moran, Richard, ‘The Expression of Feeling in Imagination’, Philosophical Review, 103:1 (1994), 75–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murdoch, Iris, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 30 (1956), 32–58.Google Scholar
Murdoch, Iris, ‘Ethics and the Imagination’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 52:1–2 (1986), 81–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1993).Google Scholar
Nesbø, Jo, Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder: Time-Travelling Bath-Bomb (London: Simon and Schuster, 2014).Google Scholar
Plato, , Republic, trans. Grube, , revised by Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992).Google Scholar
Plato, , Crito, in Grube, (ed.), Plato: Five Dialogues (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 45–57.Google Scholar
Priest, Graham, ‘Sylvan's Box: a Short Story and Ten Morals’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 38:4 (1997), 573–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sauchelli, Andrea, ‘On the Study of Imaginative Resistance’, Analytic Philosophy, 60:2 (2019), 164–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stock, Kathleen, ‘The Tower of Goldbach and Other Impossible Tales’, in Kieran, and Lopes, (eds.), Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 106–123.Google Scholar
Stock, Kathleen, ‘Resisting Imaginative Resistance’, Philosophical Quarterly, 55 (2005), 607–624.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Todd, C., ‘Imaginability, Morality, and Fictional Truth’, Philosophical Studies, 143 (2009), 187–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuna, E. H., ‘Imaginative Resistance’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2020), URL <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/imaginative-resistance/>Google Scholar
Universal Studios, Jurassic Park (Film) (Washington, DC: Universal Studios, 1993)Google Scholar
Walton, Kendall, ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LXVIII, (1994), 27–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walton, Kendall, ‘On the (So-called) Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’, in Nichols, (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 137–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weatherson, Brian, ‘Morality, Fiction, and Possibility’, Philosopher's Imprint, 4:3 (2004), 1–27.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, William and Beardsley, Monroe, ‘The affective fallacy’, The Sewanee Review, 57:1 (1949), 31–55.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Pears, and McGuinness, (London and New York: Routledge, 1974).Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition, trans. Anscombe, , Hacker, and Schulte, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).Google Scholar