[lit-ideas] Re: Moral Imagination
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2011 16:46:45 +0100 (BST)
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>Hence, by reductio ad absurdum, the misuses, literary and other, of that
morally VERY AMBIGUOUS character, E. M. Forster, the closet gay who wrote a
boring unpublished novel about coming out!>
It was boring, as with all coming out stories* - tell us, Ernie, something we
didn't already know years ago. Ironically, all his unpublished scripts were
also kept in a closet, except this one, which he kept in a safe deposit box in
the bank where Eliot worked.
As to the argument that a problem with a clear-cut answer is less of a problem
than one less 'black and white', it seems to me that ethics is the field where
this is most dubious. If we take it as clear cut that genocide is morally wrong
(for example, murdering people in the interests of ensuring racial purity) that
may not make it less of a problem when we are forced to go to war to oppose
such genocide. In fact, we might say that - for practical reasons - we should
focus our ethical energies, especially in the public sphere, on the more
clear-cut evils of the world rather than those where the ethics are much
greyer. More generally, going beyond the field of ethics, it is often important
to make sure we get the supposedly clear cut correct, for if we get the more
simple and obvious case wrong we are not likely to get right more difficult
cases [the legal expression "Hard cases make bad law" may be understood as
expressing the wisdom of starting-out from
the apparently straightforward and clear cut before addressing harder cases].
JLS's deprecatory remarks on the use of "imagination" are also questionable:
for philosophers like Popper "imagination" is a most important requirement for
understanding, in part because what is understood is not a "given" but a
construction, and a theoretical one at that. Without "imagination", for
example, how I can ever know that genocide is wrong by imagining what it is
like to be a victim of it?
Donal
*This is an over-generalisation: counter-examples may include Rock Hudson,
Freddie Mercury and others who never properly came out
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