Moral imagination

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.

The Enlightenment idea that reason creates fixed moral rules that specify "the right thing to do" is mistaken, according to Johnson, because it misses the ways in which human conceptual systems are grounded in bodily experience, and it ignores the expansive and constructive nature of our best moral thinking. Since new findings in cognitive science explain reasoning in terms of prototypes, frame semantics, metaphor, and basic-level experience, Johnson contends that we must revise our views of ethics and adopt an alternative conception of moral reflection - one that is thoroughly imaginative.

Johnson analyzes contemporary Western ethics as a complex interweaving of metaphors, images, and narratives that make up our shared "folk theory" of right and wrong, and he reveals that even though morality does not consist primarily of absolute principles, it is not totally relativistic. Johnson offers a new account of moral reasoning that avoids the pitfalls of absolutism and relativism by grounding morality in the evolving wisdom of our collective experience. On this view, we face moral dilemmas by 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.