Adriana Clavel-Vázquez is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University. Her research focuses on the role imagination plays in our social interactions and engagement with art, and its consequences for the interaction of ethical and aesthetic values.
A post by Adriana Clavel-Vázquez
I’ve recently wrapped up a project on the ethics of imagination. After years of work, here is the gist of my final report: there’s no such thing as the ethics of imagination. While it might seem like some imaginings are ethically relevant, it is actually non-imaginative states that are amenable to ethical assessment. But qua imagination, there is nothing of ethical relevance to evaluate.
Motivating this claim about the amorality of imagination isn’t without problems. We seem to have a strong intuition that there is something bad in imagining things we would ethically condemn in non-imagined scenarios. Say George is trapped in an unwanted engagement. He is too much of a coward to break up with his fiancée. So, he likes to put himself to sleep by imagining Susan is the victim of a tragic accident that ends her life and saves him from marriage. It seems that we would want to condemn George just for engaging in this scenario in imagination.
But here is a curious asymmetry. Say George told us that he also likes to put himself to sleep by imagining he donates all his money to charity and quits his job to work in a soup kitchen. While we seem to have a strong intuition that George imagining that Susan’s death saves him from marriage is bad, we don’t seem to have the intuition that his imagining that he donates all his money to charity and quits his job is particularly good. What I think this asymmetry brings out is that, ultimately, imagination is a red herring. I think what worries us in both cases is what these imaginings tell us about George. The first one is revealing of his spiteful character. The second one seems revealing of his narcissistic and self-congratulatory nature. In both cases, it turns out, what really interests us are George’s non-imaginative states.
Coming to grips with the amorality of imagination requires us to first get clear on what we mean when we say that George’s imaginings are good or bad. Recent work on imagination shows that there are various different senses at play in imagination talk. First, “imaginings” could refer to the fact that George has certain sensory representations in his head. We might think that the fact that George has vivid visual representations of Susan being the victim of a tragic accident is of ethical relevance. Second, “imaginings” could refer to the fact that George recreates certain mental states he would have in a non-imaginative scenario. We might think that the fact that George recreates a regained sense of freedom or the belief that his life is better after the death of his fiancée is of ethical relevance. Third, “imaginings” could refer to the fact that George engages in a whole imaginative process enlisting not just propositional states, but conative and affective states as well. We might think that the fact that George engages in such a complex mental project around the tragic death of his fiancée is of ethical relevance. But let’s look at each of these alternatives to make the case that we aren’t really concerned with what George imagines at all.
On closer look, the first sense in which we might be using the term “imagination”, as sensory representations, turns out not to be about imagination at all. This first sense of “imagination” that focuses on pictures in George’s head takes the notion to refer to a specific type of content, namely, imagistic or quasi-perceptual content. Recent work has argued (e.g., Arcangeli 2020; Van Leeuwen 2016; Wiltsher 2019) that, if it is “imagination” in its content sense that concerns us, we really should dispense with “imagination”, and talk instead about mental imagery. Mental imagery might feature as the content of a variety of non-imaginative mental states, such as beliefs and desires.
So we might be right in being worried about George’s vivid images of the death of his fiancée. But what this recent work on mental imagery shows is that we are concerned because these imagistic representations might be the content of, for example, George’s actual desires. What is of ethical relevance in this case is that George has immoral desires, not that he engages in immoral imaginings. If what interests us is mental imagery, we are not really concerned with imagination at all. We are concerned with imagistic content that might be attached to all sorts of states that are of ethical relevance, like beliefs or desires. But this gets us nowhere if we are interested in the ethics of imagination.
The second sense in which we might be using the term “imagination”, as involving the recreation of other mental states, might seem to offer a more plausible candidate on which to build the ethics of imagination if only because it involves distinctively imaginative states. In its attitude sense, “imagination” refers to a distinctive cognitive attitude that recreates other sorts of non-imaginative mental states as if they were the case (e.g., Arcangeli 2020; Van Leeuwen 2013). Depending on the mental states being recreated, we can have a variety of different i-states, for example, i-beliefs and i-percepts. And while there is some debate about whether we should also allow for i-desires and i-emotions, where we choose to draw the line isn’t really relevant for my purposes. What matters is that sometimes we use “imagination” in its attitude sense to refer to i-states that recreate other mental states as if they were the case. We might be worried that George engages i-states that recreate, for example, relief or delight in the death of his fiancée.
However, note that part of what characterizes these i-states is the fact that they are quarantined, in that they are isolated from our actual attitudes and don’t feed into action generating systems (e.g., Gendler 2003; Nichols 2006; Van Leeuwen 2014). If George is “imagining” in the sense of enlisting i-states, the fact that these i-states are quarantined removes the features that would make them amenable to ethical assessment: George is only proceeding as if he were relieved or delighted in the death of his fiancée. We might have concerns, nevertheless, that we can find some cases in which quarantine is broken and i-states begin to behave as non-i-states. While that might be the case, it is important to highlight two things. First, these cases are exceptions. Normally, i-states remain quarantined in virtue of being i-states. But second, when quarantine is broken and i-states begin to behave as non-i-states, they become ethically significant precisely in virtue of behaving as non-i-states. That is, when quarantine is broken and we seem to ethically assess these “imaginings”, we assess them qua non-i-states. “Imagination” in its attitude sense doesn’t have what it takes to ground the ethics of imagination either. What interests us in this second sense of “imagination” is whether George’s attitude imaginings cease to be attitude imaginings.
The third sense of “imagination”, as a process enlisting different types of mental states, raises more problems for the amorality of imagination than the previous alternatives. In its process sense, “imagination” involves putting together different sorts of mental states either to arrive at novel representations (e.g., Van Leeuwen 2013) or to attend to, focus on, distort, or clarify different aspects of the relevant scenarios (e.g., Wiltsher 2019; 2021). Both i-states and non-i-states can function as inputs in the imaginative process, so that “imagination” in this sense can involve not only i-beliefs, i-emotions, i-desires, etc., but also actual beliefs, desires, emotions, etc. If we take George’s “imaginings” to involve this kind of process, we might be worried that the non-i-states involved aren’t quarantined as it would be the case for attitude imaginings. The problem is, therefore, that in “imagining” the death of his fiancée, George is not only enlisting the i-belief that Susan is dead, but he is also engaging an actual desire to get rid of her, an actual delight in her death, or the actual belief that his life is better without her, etc.
The problem for the ethics of the imagination, however, is precisely that in order to justify the ethical assessment of George’s imaginative process, we need to attend to non-imaginative states. Ultimately, what is of ethical relevance if we are to assess imaginative processes are their non-imaginative inputs. Moreover, we can make the case that it’s not simply that non-imaginative inputs make imaginative processes ethically relevant, but that what is the proper object of the ethical assessment are the non-imaginative states involved. What worries us is not that George is putting together different kinds of mental states to, for example, clarify his feelings about his upcoming marriage. Instead, what worries us is that this imaginative process is deploying actual attitudes that are immoral.
In any case, having examined what we might mean by “imagination” when we ask about its ethical value, the conclusion about the amorality of imagination stands: While it might seem like some imaginings are ethically relevant, it is actually non-imaginative states that are amenable to ethical assessment.
References
Arcangeli, M. (2020). The Two Faces of Mental Imagery. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 101(2), 304–322.
Gendler, T. (2003). On the Relation between Pretense and Belief. In Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes (Eds.), Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts (125–41). Routledge.
Nichols, S. (2006). Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave Like Believing. Mind and Language, 21(4), 459–74.Van Leeuwen, N. (2013).
Van Leeuwen, N. (2013). The Meanings of “Imagine” Part I: Constructive Imagination. Philosophy Compass, 8(3), 220–30.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2014). The Meanings of “Imagine” Part II: Attitude and Action. Philosophy Compass, 9(11), 791–802.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2016). The imaginative agent. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination (pp. 85–109). Oxford University Press.
Wiltsher, N. (2019). Imagination: A Lens, Not a Mirror. Philosophers’ Imprint, 19(30). www.philosophersimprint.org/019030/
Wiltsher, N. (2022). Imagination as a Process. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12861