Abstract
Creativity has been defined as the ability to generate ideas that are original and unexpected, but are considered useful or important (Sternberg, 1999). Moral imagination involves not only the ability to generate useful ideas, but also the abilities to form ideas about what is good and right, and to put the best ideas into action for the service of others. This involves sensitivity to the people and lifescapes at hand. The everyday world is populated with opportunities to steer consciously through the shoals of social relationships and decide what sort of agent to be. Research into mental preoccupations indicates that individuals ponder moral and relational issues much of the time (Klinger, 1978). Thus, on a daily basis, people employ one of humanity’s greatest gifts: moral imagination. But what fosters the development of moral imagination and determines to what extent it is used to benefit humanity? How does the morally imaginative individual utilize emotional and social experiences, reasoning, and selection to produce imaginative moral action? These are the questions that this chapter addresses.
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of many others... the great instrument of moral good is the imagination. Percy Bysshe Shelley 1821, p. 13
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© 2014 Darcia Narvaez and Kellen Mrkva
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Narvaez, D., Mrkva, K. (2014). The Development of Moral Imagination. In: Moran, S., Cropley, D., Kaufman, J.C. (eds) The Ethics of Creativity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333544_2
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