Mavis Biss

This paper argues that recent accounts of Kantian virtue as “strengthened” inner freedom apply much more clearly to the avoidance of violations of perfect duties than to the fulfillment of imperfect duties, leaving us with the question of how inadequate commitment to morally required ends impacts the exercise of inner freedom. The question is answered through the development of a model of inner freedom that emphasizes the relationship between moral self‐governance and participation in an ethical community.

To fulfill a perfect duty an agent must avoid vice, yet when an agent refrains from acting on a prohibited maxim she still must do something. I argue that the setting of morally required ends ought to consistently inform an agent’s judgment regarding what is to be done beyond compliance with perfect, negative duties. Kant’s assertion of a puzzling version of latitude of choice within his discussion of perfect duties motivates and complicates the case I make for a more expansive interpretation of the duty to pursue virtue.

Against the background of not-so-distant debate regarding “enhanced” interrogation techniques used by the United States during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which many understand to constitute torture, this essay explores the moral complexities of more “ordinary” interrogation practices, those that are clearly not forms of torture. Based on analysis of the written reflections of two United States interrogators on the work they did during the Iraq war, I categorize the roles played by multiple modes of empathy within interrogation and argue that empathetic responsiveness within the context of military interrogation poses a significant threat to the moral integrity of interrogators.

In this paper I argue that a dominant strand of Kant’s approach to moral striving does not fit familiar models of striving: Kant makes it very difficult to conceptualize a fit between the end of moral perfection and the means that could be taken to pursue “strengthened” maxims. I seek to address this problem in a way that avoids the flaws of synchronic and atomistic approaches to moral self-discipline by developing an account of Kantian moral striving as an ongoing contemplative activity complexly engaged with multiple forms of self-knowledge.

This paper develops an account of moral imagination that identifies the ways in which imaginative capacities contribute to our ability to make reason practical in the world, beyond their roles in moral perception and moral judgment. In §1 I explain my understanding of what it means to qualify imagination as ‘moral’ and go on in §2 to identify four main conceptions of moral imagination as an aspect of practical reason in philosophical ethics. I briefly situate these alternative ideas in relation to standard accounts of moral perception and judgment with reference to some guiding examples. In §3 I argue that the fourth conception of moral imagination, moral imagination understood as the capacity to generate new possibilities for morally good action, is not well accounted for within the standard categories of practical reason. §4 clarifies the scope and importance of this capacity and defends its claim to increased theoretical attention.

This paper develops the basis for a new account of radical moral imagination, understood as the transformation of moral understandings through creative response to the sensed inadequacy of one's moral concepts or morally significant appraisals of lived experience. Against Miranda Fricker, I argue that this kind of transition from moral perplexity to increased moral insight is not primarily a matter of the “top-down” use of concepts. Against Susan Babbitt, I argue that it is not primarily a matter of “bottom-up” intuitive responsiveness to experience. Beyond courage and hope, radical moral imagination involves the articulation of inchoate experience, which allows individuals to make new kinds of moral moves and to lay claim to others' acknowledgment of the meaning of these moves.

In her 1958 book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt points to the potential of human action to initiate new beginnings, a capacity she calls natality, as the source of political renewal that could save the modern age from ruin. The question of the relationship between natality and theological concepts is one of the most perplexing points of dispute in the Arendt scholarship of the last two decades. The overall function of the concept of natality in Arendt’s thought has been variously categorized as ontological, political, “covertly” theological and “inconspicuously” messianic. This essay addresses the question of whether Arendt’s understanding of the essential natality of human action should be read as straightforwardly philosophical, as secularized theology or as “covert” or “inconspicuous” theology with a focus on how textual and contextual elements might be assessed in a way that does justice to the complexity of Arendt’s thought.

Aristotle's emphasis on sameness of character in his description of the virtuous friend as "another self" figures centrally in all his arguments for the necessity of friendship to self-knowledge. Although the attribution of the Magna Moralia to Aristotle is disputed, the comparison of the friend to a mirror in this work has encouraged many commentators to view the friend as a mirror that provides the clearest and most immediate image of one's own virtue. I will offer my own reading of Aristotle's theory of friendship, suggesting that the friend constitutes "another self" not as a mirror image but rather as a partner in moral perception.

This retrospective essay is part of the Ethics 125th Anniversary Project and will be included in the journal issue commemorating the first quarter century of the journal. W.P. Ker’s article "Imagination and Judgment" (11 (4), 1901) remains of interest partly because it anticipates some of the most important contributions to moral theory made by philosophers, most notably Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum, who have developed conceptions of ‘moral imagination’ in more recent decades. More significantly, the less familiar aspects of Ker’s catalogue of the positive roles played by imagination in moral reasoning reveal that there is further work to be done in clarifying the concept of imagination in relation to practical reason.