BSH Fund Fellow 2025
I am currently a PhD candidate at Northwestern University in the United States, working under the supervision of Kyla Ebels-Duggan. My dissertation is about the place of the imagination in moral psychology and ethics. In my dissertation, I do not aim to offer a unified theory of the imagination or defend that there is a singular act of mind which underlies the range of mental phenomena we might associate with the imagination (such as dreaming, memory, pretending, creativity, and so on), but rather to point to various phenomena that we can identify as imaginative activities and to think about the place they have in ethical life.
My way into this topic is through the work of Iris Murdoch, for whom the notions of imagination and fantasy are central. Murdoch describes human beings as 'fantasizing imaginative animals'; I view my dissertation as trying to think through one way of understanding this remark. The first part of my project is historical: I situate Murdoch’s early work within a broader climate of Oxford moral philosophy and philosophy of mind, a milieu in which the exercise of the imagination largely falls out of view. This primarily involves a discussion of Hare and Ryle, but also how various historical figures (such as Aristotle and Baumgarten) have conceptualised the imagination more broadly. It will come out that Ryle’s picture of mind and Hare’s emphasis on decisions resolving in publicly observable action naturally dovetail together. This will become significant when I turn to Hepburn and Murdoch’s discussion of 'Vision and Choice in Morality' further below.
An examination of how both Murdoch’s contemporaries and earlier figures have conceptualised the imagination provide two conceptions of what imaginative activity is like: either as phantasia, which disconnects imagination from reality, or as a sensory mental picturing largely irrelevant to the dominant Oxford picture of mind. Murdoch will ultimately dissent from both conceptions. To further get to this into view, I turn to R.W. Hepburn and Murdoch’s discussion of imagination and inner life in their symposium, 'Vision and Choice in Morality'. In that discussion, Hepburn rightly notes how the dominant Hare-Ryle conception of mind and action fails to discuss what he calls 'creative' language in ethics, such as the use of parables, symbols, and fables. Such a view about moral language and action is reinforced by Ryle’s picture of the mind. Hepburn ultimately concludes that the exclusion of such imaginative thinking in ethics is accidental, even if understandable: views like universal prescriptivism can take such creative uses of language on board, since (for instance) fables can be interpreted as offering a universal prescription for action.
Against Hepburn, Murdoch argues that imaginative aspects of our life, such as our 'personal vision', cannot be so easily assimilated to her contemporaries’ picture of moral thought and mind. I develop a view which shows how imaginative modes of thought – the kind which employ Hepburn’s 'creative' use of language – are ethically significant because of the way they shape our personal vision of human life and value. The interest in this view is not merely of historical. I ultimately argue that the kind of imaginative activities Murdoch centres in 'Vision and Choice in Morality' still fall from view for a great deal of contemporary ethical theory.
To see this, a distinction needs to be drawn between the moral imagination (which emphasises the place of the imagination in practical reason and action), and what I am calling the ethical imagination (which involves us imaginatively entering into a way of seeing human life). While the moral imagination is occasionally discussed by philosophers, I maintain that what I call the ethical imagination is not adequately considered by contemporary ethical theory. Part of Murdoch’s continuing contribution to contemporary philosophy is therefore how she continues to make us sensitive to ethical phenomenon that various theories are prone to make us insensitive to, including our imaginative activities.
After developing a view of the ethical imagination from Murdoch’s early work, I turn to Murdoch’s discussion of fantasy. Fantasy, Murdoch claims, prevents us from getting in touch with other people; it 'imprisons' the mind from their reality (1). She maintains that the human psyche is 'naturally and largely given to fantasy' (2). A central chapter of my dissertation considers what kind of fantasies imprison the mind and how they do so. To think through this problem, I draw on the work of Sigmund Freud, who divides fantasies into the conscious and the unconscious. While it is clear that conscious fantasy amounts to a familiar kind of daydreaming, the contours of unconscious fantasies are less clear. I claim that what Freud calls transference and what I call structuring fantasies should be understood as unconscious fantasies. I argue that both transference and structuring fantasies distort the individual reality of other people.
An adjacent concern of mine is how we should think about the ethical significance of literature, an interest sparked by reading Murdoch when I was an undergraduate. Philosophers and literary critics concerned with the ethical import of literature, such as Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, tend to stress how reading fiction well is a kind of moral activity. Works of literature, these writers tell us, direct our attention to ethical phenomena we are typically insensitive to. On this view, reading well can be thought of as a kind of precursor to accurate moral perception and virtuous action. Such reading is, as Murdoch puts it, 'a completely adequate entry into the good life' (3). I argue that the relationship we have towards fictional characters provides a poor ethical model for the kind of relations we have with other persons. Given various asymmetries between fictional characters and real persons, it becomes hard to see how attention to the former can help cultivate virtuous attention to the latter.
This suggests that we should reject a broader view of how sensitive reading of literature connects with ethical life. I contend that, if we are to think of literature as being ethically significant, we should locate that significance in a different place. The view that I developed is inspired by Murdoch’s remark that metaphors are 'not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness' (4). I argue that literature can be ethically significant in the sense that embedded features of literature like figurative language, narrative, symbol, and image can be brought into practical life in particular ways, ways that help us see the world in a distinctive light, opening up (or closing off) different modes and structures of valuing, none of which need immediately have anything to do with the cultivation of virtue, practical deliberation, or attention to persons. Literature therefore becomes ethically salient by our own acts of the imagination – of finding ways in which it can be brought into contact with ethical life.
I am honoured to have been awarded the Barbara Stevens Heusel Research Fund for Early-Career Scholars. With this grant, I’ll not only be able to present my work at various universities in the United Kingdom, such as Chichester and Oxford, but will also be able to visit the Murdoch archives at Kingston University. At the archives, I’m hoping to look closely at discussions of imagination and fantasy in Murdoch’s Gifford Lectures, which serve as the basis for Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.
Notes
1. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 322.
2. Ibid.
3. 'On "God" and "Good"', 352.
4. 'The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts', 363.