Abstract
Imagination is critical to effective moral thinking. More than that, imagination is what completes our picture of the world – our experience needs imagination to cohere. It is required for empathy, fundamental to moral reasoning. The science of neurology now shows us that imaginative metaphor can give us vicarious experience that is substantively equal to the real thing: reading about a situation with a moral aspect is relevantly like being there ourselves. This is vital to moral education based on aesthetic experience.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
—Percy Shelley
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Rethorst, J. (2023). Imagination and Metaphor. In: Why Teaching Art Is Teaching Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19511-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19511-2_4
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Online ISBN: 978-3-031-19511-2
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