Imagination as a reflection of value-commitment

Abstract

Hume remarked on how our moral value-commitments set limits for what we are willing to imagine. Moral values also guide imagination when we envision variant scenarios and options for action. How do values reveal themselves through imagining? What does the manner through which valuesappear tell us about the nature of values? Imagination furnishes a non-perceptual manner of arriving at moral determinations anchored to the irreducibly first-person experience of moral approval and disapproval. The commitment to one’s values, surviving through every willingly imagined alteration of perspective, indicates a subjective necessity to values. At the same time, the values leaving theirtrace in what we imagine, direct imagination to furnish reasons which necessitate belief and action. This subjective necessity generates an ideal of affective moral consistency and a criterion of suitability for proposed action.