Like many of you, I am sure, my first encounter with the term “the moral imagination” came through reading Russell Kirk.
Such imagination lacking, to quote another passage from Burke, we are cast forth “from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.” Burke implies that there exist other forms of imagination than the moral imagination. Moral imagination, in ethics, the presumed mental capacity to create or use ideas, images, and metaphors not derived from moral principles or immediate observation to discern moral truths or to develop moral responses. Moral imagination--the phrase, first used by Burke, may not strike us as odd at first, but David Bromwich begins with its strangeness. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Edmund Burke believed that one must see the human being not for what he is, or the worst that is within him, but rather as clothed in the “wardrobe of moral imagination,” a glimpse of what the person could be and is, by God, meant to be. "A historically informed examination of moral imagination and human sympathy, as seen through the lives of such figures as Edmund Burke, Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Rev.
Moral imagination, according to philosopher Mark Johnson, means envisioning the full range of possibilities in a particular situation in order to solve an ethical challenge.
Excerpt: Although the term “moral imagination” originated with Edmund Burke, much Burke scholarship fails to mention it.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."—Sewell Chan, New York Times "[T]hey shed much light on the frame of mind in which Bromwich approached the ambiguous figure of Burke in his biography, and even more on how Bromwich is … Johnson emphasizes that acting morally often requires more than just strength of character. Morality has to do with real situations, real action; imagination, with what could be. The two concepts do not intuitively go together. So what, then, is moral imagination? The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke … In an attempt to make better sense of what, for me, was a problematic concept, I followed Kirk back to his admitted predecessors on this matter, Irving Babbitt and Edmund Burke. For example, moral action requires empathy and the awareness to discern what is morally relevant in a […] The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling [Himmelfarb, Gertrude] on Amazon.com.