David Egan Philosophy

This past Thursday, I tried an experiment. I’ve been holding occasional philosophy happy hour events online (let me know by replying to this email if you’d like to be on the mailing list for future events) where we discuss some short philosophical text together. This time, instead of a text, I gave the participants a presentation about the topic I was planning for this monthly newsletter. And I proposed to include some of the subsequent discussion in my newsletter.

So consider this my first collaboratively written monthly newsletter, with many thanks to Bruce, Erik, Nila, Roger, and Steve for their contributions.

The topic I presented to the group is known as the puzzle of imaginative resistance. The basic thought is this. When engaging with a fictional story, we can happily imagine worlds that are factually very different from our own. Science fiction, fantasy, utopian and dystopian fiction: all of these present no significant hurdle to the imagination. But we seem to strongly resist imagining worlds that are morally very different from our own. A story in which infanticide is described as natural and normal, or in which mass killing is presented in a favourable light, repels imaginative engagement. Tamar Gendler summarizes the puzzle as follows:

We make sense of stories where characters travel back in time, where spaceships go faster than the speed of light, where wizards turn straw into gold, and where lonely geniuses prove the continuum hypothesis. So, given that imagination is such a powerful and agile capacity, it seems extraordinary that little old morality could stop it in its tracks.

Let me take a step back and say something about fiction and imagination. The puzzle of imaginative resistance is downstream from a different philosophical problem, which is what happens when a person engages with a work of fiction. To the extent that it’s fiction that we’re dealing with, we know the story isn’t true. And yet, in some respects, we react to it as if it were true: we laugh, we cry, we root for the heroes and hate the villains.

We don’t believe the story is true but rather we imagine the story to be true. The difference is significant. Belief, for the most part, isn’t subject to the will. I can’t (again, for the most part) choose what to believe. Belief aims at truth and truth is independent of the will. Imagination, on the other hand, isn’t constrained by the truth, and that makes it subject to the will. Much as I might want to, I can’t believe that I own a waterfront property, that peace reigns in Gaza, that a cure has been found for cancer. But I can imagine these things and imagine my reaction to them.

Some philosophers say that fiction is a practice of prescribed imagining. When I sit alone and daydream, I’m doing the imagining for myself. When I pick up a novel or watch a movie, I’m letting someone else tell me what to imagine. My job as audience is to imagine the imaginings that the author prescribes.

As I said, there are hardly any limits to what I can imagine in collaboration with a fictional storyteller. But morally deviant scenarios seem to be an exception. When philosophers try to explain this exception, they tend to divide into one of two camps, which Gendler dubs “cantian” and “wontian.”

Cantian theories argue that we can’t imagine these morally deviant scenarios. The guiding thought is that a world in which, say, infanticide is morally good is impossible and no more imaginable than a world in which one and one equals three. One version of this argument claims that moral truths, like mathematical truths, are necessarily true and so must be true in every possible world, including fictional ones. Another version claims that the moral facts depend on the physical facts. For instance, the wrongness of infanticide isn’t some further fact in addition to the physical act of baby-killing. The killing of babies is the moral wrong of infanticide and you can’t stipulate that infanticide isn’t morally problematic any more than you can stipulate that infanticide doesn’t result in the death of a baby.

Wontian theories argue that we can imagine morally deviant scenarios but refuse the storyteller’s invitation to do so. The reason we resist, according to wontian theorists, is that real world and its fictional counterparts aren’t strictly impermeable. On one hand, I export all sorts of facts about the real world into the fictional worlds I imagine. Nowhere in The Lord of the Rings are we told that gravity on Middle Earth works the same as in our world, nor that Aragorn has five fingers on each hand. But unless we’re told otherwise, we’re licensed to imagine that the world of Middle Earth resembles ours in certain basic respects. On the other hand, I import knowledge from fictional worlds into the real world. I can learn about my own world by reading historical fiction because I can safely assume that the hats that people wear in a Victorian novel resemble the hats that people actually wore in Victorian times. Because we tend to think of moral facts as less variable than physical facts, we’re inclined to interpret an invitation to imagine morally deviant claims about a fictional world as an invitation to import that claim to our own world. The wontian interprets imaginative resistance as a refusal of that invitation.

Cantian or wontian: which is it? Roger leaned in a cantian direction, arguing that moral truths are objective—after all, how could we talk about moral progress if we didn’t believe that we were progressing toward the truth? One point that emerged from his contribution is that our response to the puzzle of imaginative resistance might depend on our meta-ethics. Someone who is more inclined to see ethics as objective is likelier to be a cantian, whereas someone who’s more of a moral relativist might see more value in the wontian position.

Bruce was inclined to agree with Roger but Steve pushed in a more wontian direction. Invoking Immanuel Kant’s claim that we have duties to ourselves, Steve argued that we need to safeguard our imaginative and moral well-being by resisting imaginative flights that are bad for us. In advocating a kind of imaginative hygiene, Steve came out more Kantian than cantian.

Erik and Nila both pushed us to investigate the psychological dimension of fictional imagining. Erik spoke about a subconscious moral framework that structures our imagining and Nila linked our imaginative capacity to the development of symbolic thinking. She suggested a psychological defense mechanism may inhibit certain acts of imagination—a psychological wontian theory, if you will.

To tell you the truth, I’m a little skeptical of the framing of the puzzle. What does it mean for an author to prescribe moral imagining? If a story wants you to imagine that it was a dark and stormy night, it tells you so straightforwardly: “It was a dark and stormy night.” By contrast, the moral viewpoint of a story usually doesn’t come out quite so bluntly. The author is more likely to make a moral viewpoint salient in a roundabout way, by controlling the point of view of the narration, its emphasis and focus. When it comes to the moral imagination, storytellers show rather than tell.

The puzzle of imaginative resistance is normally framed in terms of a parallel between physical and moral propositions. The puzzle is why some propositions—like “talking pigs had invented faster-than-light travel”—don’t meet with resistance while others—like “infanticide is good”—do. But if my show-rather-than-tell point is right, then the parallel between these two kinds of propositions doesn’t hold. Storytellers advance a moral viewpoint in a very different way from the way that they describe their fictional world. There might still be a question about why and how we resist certain moral viewpoints, but framing this question in terms of a contrast with the physical facts of a fictional world seems to me to be misleading.

One reason the puzzle of imaginative resistance has attracted such interest from philosophers in the last two decades is that it casts light on a range of other issues—about the nature of fiction, imagination, moral psychology, and the relation between ethics and aesthetics, among other things. I’m not entirely sold on the puzzle as presented but I was very glad to have the opportunity to think it over a little more, and in such excellent company.

And if there’s one thing I can’t resist, it’s a good philosophical discussion with thoughtful conversation partners. 

1. The global amount of warehouse space devoted to refrigerating and freezing food on its way to market increased by 20% between 2018 and 2020. (source)
2. It turns out that Inuktitut—and a number of other indigenous languages from North America—really do have more ways of talking about snow than most other languages, although it’s a little more complicated than just having more words for the one English concept. It’s rather that there are more words that have some essential connection to what we in English call “snow.” Maybe unsurprisingly, the languages with the most distinct words for smell are clustered in the tropics. And apparently the Scots have many different words for oatmeal. (source)
3. You burn about 86 kcal per hour by reading—this is the activity of reading specifically, above and beyond the calories you burn just sitting in a chair doing nothing. I’m happy to contribute to your daily workout by providing this list. (source)
4. In the 1930s the Soviet Union experimented with a five-day and then a six-day week. Part of the aim was to improve efficiency with a “continuous workweek” that staggered days off for different classes of worker. But its other purpose was the abolition of Sundays as a way of undermining Christian worship. (source)
5. Insects generate a positive electric charge by flapping their wings—and many spider webs have a negative electric charge to literally pull the insects in. (source)
6. Koalas are the only non-primates with fingerprints, and they’re so similar to human fingerprints that they’ve allegedly confused crime scene investigators. (source)
7. Like humans, chimpanzees have a favoured hand when it comes to manipulating tools like sticks. But chimps are split evenly between favouring their left and right hands whereas only 10% of humans (myself included) are lefties. There’s evidence that Neanderthals similarly had a 90/10 split. On the other hand, humans with Down Syndrome, epilepsy, and cerebral palsy are all evenly split between right- and left-handed. (source)