What Maisie Knew: Moral Imagination and Two Conceptions of Moral Thought

Abstract

Abstract According to a widely held view, moral thought essentially involves the survey of an array of independently specifiable morally relevant facts, on the basis of which an agent is to reach a judgment about how anybody in that situation ought to act. I argue, drawing on Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, that one thing that such a view discounts is the role of imagination in moral thought, and specifically in contributing to what Iris Murdoch has called someone’s personal vision of life.