Imagination in Moral Judgment

Many of the most popular recent moral theories (e.g., those of Hare, Rawls, Nozick, Gewirth, Donagan) share the Kantian view that moral philosophy must supply a systematic exposition of rational rules governing morally correct human action. All of these theories, insofar as they are indebted to Kant, inherit the same problem of moral judgment that he struggled with. The problem is to explain how it is possible to apply rationally derived general rules to specific actual situations encountered in our daily experience. We all know, as Kant knew, that deciding how we ought to act requires imagination and wit, if we are to determine which precepts are relevant to the case at hand and how those moral principles apply in the present context. We know, that is, that there are not rules for applying rules when we make moral decisions. There is no algorithm for weighing likenesses and differences between a hard case we are now considering and some apparently similar previous case where we have more confidence about what we ought to do. It is this imaginative process of deliberating on specific cases that I want to' explore in the context of Kant's view of moral judgment. I want to argue that, in spite of his repeated insistence on the purely rational nature of moral judgment, Kant recognized the need for imagination in order to apply moral rules to specific cases. In his theory of morality proper, however, Kant does not give an adequate account of how imagination operates. For this, we must go outside his moral philosophy to the more fully developed view of imagination in the Critique of Judgment. I will thus suggest that only by drawing on this richer account of imagination can we begin to be true to the actual process of moral deliberation. Furthermore, I hope it will become clear that the view of imagination sketched out here bears directly on contemporary theories that also treat morality as a system of rules discernible by human reason, as well as theories of practical judgment in science, politics, etc.