Imaginative Resistance

This is a contribution to what later came to be called the problem of "imaginative resistance."  But the most interesting resistance is not to imagining certain things, e.g. moral principles one disagress with, but to allowing them to be true in a fiction.

In this paper, I examine two related puzzles in Hume's essay "Of The Standard of Taste" (1987). The first puzzle is that Hume identifies the aesthetic merit of a work of art with the consensus of expert judges, whose opinions are to be relied on, in part, for their absence of prejudice, particularly when it comes to evaluating works of different ages or cultures. However, Hume also writes that artworks of this sort that exhibit incompatible moral values ought to be exempt from this requirement, and that an expert judge is at no fault for taking moral defects in a work of art to be aesthetic flaw. The second puzzle is that on the one hand, Hume expresses doubt that anyone, even an expert judge, could achieve authentic engagement with artworks exhibiting incompatible moral values due to what is now called ‘imaginative resistance’. On the other hand, Hume recommends against the very attempt to do so on the basis that the judge risks some degree of moral corruption from engaging with morally flawed artworks. In other words, it appears that Hume believes that our moral sentiments are at once extremely resilient and strikingly fragile. As a resolution to both of these puzzles, I argue against readings of Hume that emphasize the inability of the expert judge to engage with morally flawed artworks and suggest, instead, that his true concern lies with with adverse effects such artworks may inflict on the judge’s sentimental disposition. In particular, I argue that it is the unique sentimental disposition of the expert judge that produces a kind of moral vulnerability that does not afflict ordinary viewers of art. Hume combines a sensitivity for beauty and a sensitivity for morality in the first criterion of the expert judge: ‘delicacy of taste’. In “The Delicacy of Taste and Passion” (1987b), Hume claims that delicacy of taste exerts a moderating influence on the passions, which, I argue, includes our moral sentiments. In this role, the delicate taste of the expert judge would function to moderate the sentiments of righteousness and outrage arising from intensely held moral convictions, thereby allowing the judge to more easily engage with morally flawed artworks and evaluate them without prejudice. On this reading, Hume’s cautionary remarks toward the prospect of the expert judge setting aside his or her own moral values for the sake of unprejudiced artistic evaluation are well founded and compatible with the rest of his account.

The purpose of this research was to explore the association between preferences for dark fictional characters, such as villains or morally ambiguous protagonists, and individual differences in related variables, particularly Machiavellianism and imaginative resistance (a reluctance to imaginatively engage with immoral fictions).  Past research suggests that liking for morally ambiguous and evil fictional characters is a function of identification and moral disengagement (e.g., Janicke & Raney, 2017; Sanders & Tsay-Vogel, 2016), but does less to address why some people are more likely to successfully morally disengage and identify with such dark characters.  Here, in a series of three studies, we found a robust association between liking for dark characters, self-reported imaginative resistance, moral purity concerns, and Machiavellianism.  Such results suggest a need to include these constructs in models of fictional engagement.

In the past few decades, a growing number of philosophers have tried to explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance (IR), or why readers often resist the invitation of authors to imagine morally deviant fictional scenarios. In this paper, I critically assess a recent proposal to explain IR in terms of a failure of empathy, and present a novel explanation. I do so by drawing on Peter Goldie’s narrative account of empathic perspective-taking, which curiously has so far been neglected in the IR-literature. I argue that, in some cases, IR is due to a partial confusion of two kinds of imaginative perspective-taking towards a fictional character: an internal, genuinely empathic, perspective-taking, on the one hand, and an external, crypto-empathic, stance that can be characterized as in-her-shoes-imagining, on the other. I argue that, in the cases at issue, IR is not so much a resistance to imagining but, rather, to empathically enacting an evildoer’s moral and phenomenal first-person perspective. I conclude by considering some more general lessons that follow from my account for what has recently been called sadistic empathy and point to an unresolved issue for future thinking about IR.

The classical "laws of thought" (such as the law of non-contradiction) do not describe the way we always think but denote the way we ought and ought not to think. Likewise, moral, legal, and prudential laws do not describe the way we always feel, intend, and act but the ways we ought and ought not to feel, intend, and act. Are there parallel laws of imagination? I hypothesize that there are. These laws -- which I call "imaginative norms" -- denote the ways we ought and ought not to imagine. The Imaginative Norm Hypothesis explains of the phenomenon of "imaginative resistance" (that is, resistance to imagining gross immorality). My primary thesis is that an agent's entertaining thoughts or images with grossly ugly or immoral mental contents -- irrespective of whether these thoughts influence action -- tend to detract from the highest moral character and healthiest overall psychology. Thus, the mental attitude of imaginative resistance can be explained: it is a peculiarly moral mental attitude arising from the aspiration to high moral character. As a corollary, we might expect those who (for whatever reason) are less worried about strictly protecting their mind pure and spotless will report less imaginative resistance; and second, that the mental attitude of resistance will not appear as strongly -- or not appear at all -- when an agent entertains thoughts or images that are less morally objectionable. Both of these corollaries turn out to be true.

The majority of philosophers of religion, at least since Plantinga's reply to Mackie's logical problem of evil, agree that it is logically possible for an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God to exist who permits some of the evils we see in the actual world. This is conceivable essentially because of the possible world known as heaven. That is, heaven is an imaginable world in a similar way that logically possible scenarios in any fiction are imaginable. However, like some of the imaginable stories in fiction where we are asked to envision an immoral act as a moral one, we resist. I will employ the works of Tamar Gendler on imaginative resistance and Keith Buhler's Virtue Ethics approach to moral imaginative resistance and apply them to the conception of heaven and the problem of evil. While we can imagine God as an omnibenevolent parent permitting evil to allow for morally significant freedom and the rewards in heaven or punishments in hell (both possible worlds), we should not. This paper is not intended to be a refutation of particular theodicies; rather it provides a very general groundwork connecting issues of horrendous suffering and imaginative resistance to heaven as a possible world.

Gendler takes 'the puzzle of imaginative resistance' to be that of 'explaining comparative difficulty imagining fictional worlds we take to be morally deviant.' Gendler follows Walton, who focuses on difficulties 'making true', where fictional morality is concerned. The puzzle seems real but is dissolved by reflections on genre. Absurdism is not the same as absurdity. Philosophers have wrongly conflated imaginative resistance with aesthetic failure. Further reflections solve the 'imaginability puzzle': much genre fiction invites morally deviant imaginings, yet without making deviant moralities fictionally true. Ethical escapism, of this sort, is of interest to moral psychologists, as well as students of genre. It seems neglected by both.

This is the original, longer draft for my entry on 'Hume' in the 'The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination' (Amy Kind (ed.), London: Routledge, 2016). — Please always cite the Routledge version, unless there are passages concerned that did not make it into the Handbook for reasons of length. — This chapter overviews Hume’s thoughts on the nature and the role of imagining, with an almost exclusive focus on the first book of his Treatise of Human Nature. Over the course of this text, Hume draws and discusses three important distinctions among our conscious mental episodes (or what he calls ‘perceptions’): (i) between impressions (including perceptual experiences) and ideas (including recollections, imaginings and occurrent beliefs); (ii) between ideas of the memory and ideas of the imagination; and (iii), among the ideas of the imagination, between ideas of the judgement (i.e. occurrent beliefs) and ideas of the fancy (i.e. imaginings). I discuss each distinction in turn, also in connection to contemporary views on imagining. In addition, I briefly consider Hume’s views on the imagination as a faculty aimed at the production of ideas, as well as on the role that imagining plays in the wider context of our mental lives, notably in the acquisition of modal knowledge and in the comprehension of, and resistance to, stories and opinions that we take to be false or fictional.

Imaginative resistance refers to a perceived inability or unwillingness to enter into fictional worlds that portray deviant moralities (Gendler, 2000): we can all easily imagine that dragons exist, but many people feel incapable of imagining fictional worlds in which morality works differently.  Although this phenomenon has received much attention from philosophers, no one has attempted to operationalize the construct in a self-report scale.  In Study 1, we developed the Imaginative Resistance Scale (IRS), investigated its relationship to theoretically related constructs, and confirmed its structure and reliability (rα = .92) in a large sample.  In Study 2, we asked participants to rate scenarios expected to provoke imaginative resistance and predicted these ratings from the IRS and its validity measures.  IRS scores accounted for variability in ease of imagining these scenarios over and above gender, political orientation, and three related measures.  The results are discussed in terms of theories of imaginative resistance and directions for future research.

This chapter argues that 'standard' feminist approaches to criticizing popular works such as Fifty Shades of Grey are unlikely to convince people that such works could harm women. It then draws upon research on the phenomenon of 'imaginative resistance' to show that a function of Fifty Shades of Grey's narrative is to disable readers' capacity to resist entertaining sexist beliefs. It, therefore, offers a novel, robust feminist critique of the novel.

It is commonly thought that authors can make anything whatsoever true in their fictions by artistic fiat. Harry Deutsch originally called this position the Principle of Poetic License. If true, PPL sets an important constraint on accounts of fictional truth: they must be such as to allow that, for any x, one can write a story in which it is true that x. I argue that PPL is far too strong: it requires us to abandon the law of non-contradiction and entails a radical revision of otherwise ordinary commitments about truth in fiction.

When we are invited to imagine an unacceptable moral proposition to be true in fiction, we feel resistance when we try to imagine it. Despite this, it is nonetheless possible to suppose that the proposition is true. In this paper, I argue that existing accounts of imaginative resistance are unable to explain why only attempts to imagine (rather than to suppose) the truth of moral propositions cause resistance. My suggestion is that imagination, unlike supposition, involves mental imagery and imaginative resistance arises when imagery that one has formed does not match unacceptable propositions.

What are the limits of the imagination in morality? What role does fiction play in moral thought? My starting point in addressing these questions is Tamar Szabo Gendler’s ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’, the problem of explaining the special difficulties we seem to encounter in imagining to be right what we take to be morally wrong (or vice versa) in fiction, and Gendler’s claim that those difficulties are due to our unwillingness to imagine these things, rather than our inability to imagine what is logically or conceptually impossible. Using a wide range of examples, I argue that there is no puzzle of imaginative resistance and that to think that there is such a puzzle is to miss almost entirely the role fiction plays in moral thought. That, however, does not mean that there are no limits to what we can imagine in morality. In fact, I argue, the imagination is limited in morality, as elsewhere, by what is logically or conceptually possible. Together, those claims suggest that fiction and the imagination play a fundamental role in shaping our conception of the moral landscape. The paper concludes by drawing some of the consequences of these views for the nature of moral thought.