Moral imagination : implications of cognitive science for ethics /

Johnson (The Body in the Mind, CH, Dec'87) makes a sustained critique of Enlightenment ethics by showing that its conception of morality as following universal rational laws is a psychological and cognitive impossibility for humans. Using recent work in cognitive science, Johnson reveals how humans, as embodied beings, must use frame semantics, prototypes, and narratives (among other procedures) to comprehend moral situations and themselves as moral agents. These processes all rely on metaphor and, hence, morality cannot be a product of abstract reason but is a construction of moral imagination. Moral imagination is neither irrational nor a matter of personal feeling, as the Enlightenment thought, but a process that uses all of the cognitive and emotional powers of the mind and can be objectively (but not finally and absolutely) assessed on various grounds, including the wealth of imaginative possibilities opened up, how well its values meet basic human needs, how they fit into and extend the moral tradition of which they are a part, and whether they contain a concrete respect for all persons. Johnson's critique of Enlightenment moral theory from the perspective of cognitive science is acute and telling; his exploration of the possibilities of moral imagination promising. Highly recommended for college and university libraries. J. H. Riker; Colorado College