II. Imaginative Resistance

When we read fiction, we tend to accept the author's authority to establish truth within the text, yet we also tend to reject claims made by the author that are morally outrageous. The attempt to reconcile these two tendencies presents us with a puzzle. After all, the author seems to have authority when it comes to descriptively outrageous claims—so why not morally outrageous claims as well? We happily go along with talking mice and time-travel tales, but we balk if recreational torture is endorsed, or presented as truly permissible within the story. This does not demonstrate that there is an essential difference between the nonmoral and the moral. It simply shows that there are two issues at stake: first, understanding imaginative resistance; and, second, coming up with an explanation of why, as readers of fiction, we have much more resistance to things we deem immoral, as opposed to things we deem impossible (but are able to imagine, at least for the purposes of going along with the fiction). In response to the first issue, I would say that what some writers have referred to as imaginative resistance is a specific instance of a more general phenomenon; and, in response to the second, I would say that the difference in fictional interpretation between descriptive outrageousness and normative outrageousness is tied to different standards for appropriate storytelling in each case. We learn from fictions, just as we learn from considering some possibilities even if, at first, they seem outrageous. But in the case of moral outrageousness, as Tamar Gendler notes, we shy away from it because we don't want to consider the immoral as moral even within fictional works, where we normally think the author authoritative.Footnote ² The reluctance has to do with there being no acceptable moral reasons provided within the story for switching perspectives between the real world and the work of fiction. Further, moral reasons are taken, generally, to have a special authority over our actions, a practical significance that other reasons lack. As we read a work of fiction, we may well have strong views about what a character ought to do—views that would be contradicted by the supposed immoralities of the plot. This is an additional source of the resistance to accepting those immoralities.

Let us consider the puzzle of imaginative resistance as it has been discussed in the literature. The puzzle has to do with the fact that we refuse to play along when reading fictions in which normative claims that we do not share are put forward as true. Brian Weatherson asks us to consider a story he calls Death, in which two people, Jack and Jill, are killed by a fellow named Craig because they are blocking traffic while having an argument. The story contains the claim “So Craig did the right thing, because Jack and Jill should have taken their argument somewhere else where they wouldn't get in anyone's way.”Footnote ³ The puzzle here arises when we are asked to imagine that it is fine for Craig to have killed Jack and Jill for blocking traffic. We just can't do this—which seems odd because we are willing to play along with authors of fiction when it comes to all kinds of other weird things (e.g., magic rings and the like). Of course, we do not think there could be such things as magic rings, but we are willing to imagine them. We are even willing to go along with logical impossibilities, such as the adventures of Hal the round square, whose curvy points get him into all kinds of amusing scrapes. However, we are not willing to go along with imagining that it is fine to kill people simply because they block traffic.

I think that a friend of necessity in ethics should be cheered by this phenomenon, at least initially. In moral phenomenology, people often point to the fact that we feel a kind of necessity when faced with moral claims we take to be true.Footnote ⁴ It is not just that claims like “Torturing kittens for fun is wrong” can be true, or just are true; such claims must be true. Likewise, in the case of the Death story, it seems that we simply cannot imagine that it is okay to kill for such a trivial reason. Might imaginative resistance signal a kind of necessity for moral commitments? Perhaps, but it would depend on how we understand the workings of the puzzle. Gendler argues that “the primary source of imaginative resistance is not our inability to imagine morally deviant situations, but our unwillingness to do so.”Footnote ⁵ It is not, presumably, that we can't go along; we just won't. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to go along with Hal the round square's adventures either. Hal is an impossible object. But note that we do, I believe, tend to edit out features of the fiction that are descriptively outrageous and not necessary to advancing the plot. If one knows that one cannot hear explosions in space, one might just ignore that feature in the movie Star Wars. This indicates, I think, a tendency even to resist claims in stories that are descriptively false (in the sense of violating a law of nature, for example). It depends on the purposes of the storytelling. Sometimes an author will intentionally flout norms; that is, the author, in a very obvious way, will ignore or counter some norms or conventions so as to point out their absurdity. For example, the movie Blazing Saddles flouts conventional Western storytelling norms. However, if (as in the Hal story) it is clear that these norms are being flouted, we go along out of amusement, or out of a desire to see where the story takes us. Perhaps the point of the Hal story is to illustrate some lessons concerning impossibility, for example. Even so, one could hold that in the moral cases the resistance is more extreme.

The imaginative resistance we feel in moral cases reflects our deeply held moral commitments, ones that we reflectively endorse. We cannot go along with moral claims we take to be false, because that would seem to involve a rejection of something we care very much about; after all, we generally take moral reasons to be much more serious than other sorts of reasons, even if we do not actually regard moral reasons as overriding. Humean sentimentalism ties this to our feelings of dismay at the thought of gratuitous harm. We cannot just excise that from our reaction to the fiction, except under circumstances where the dismay is avoided by the clear flouting of norms in the fiction. Thus, we “cannot” take the morally outrageous claims seriously.

Recall that Gendler explains imaginative resistance in terms of our desires. On her view, what we are resisting in these cases is being manipulated by the author—“manipulated into taking points of view that we would not reflectively endorse as our own.”Footnote ⁶ I believe Gendler's desire model is substantially correct, though it can be spelled out differently. A move that Weatherson makes is helpful in this regard. He urges that the following principle, Virtue, is what underlies imaginative resistance:

On Weatherson's view, Virtue is a “strong default principle of fictional interpretation.”Footnote ⁸ I think Weatherson has a good basic approach in that, on his view, it is understood that for a claim to be true in a story there must be something in the story making it true. My gloss on Weatherson's view is that there is in the story an implicit commitment to underlying reasons that are the justifiers of the claim in question. When this commitment is flouted, as it can be in some fictions, the result is like a Monty Python skit: some kind of absurdity is communicated. We do not resist this; indeed, we may go along with it quite happily, precisely because we are picking up on the absurdity that is the result of flouting the commitment.

When someone judges something to be wrong, they view it to be wrong for certain reasons. People may differ on whether the reasons need to be internal or external, but, whatever the details, there are reasons. And those reasons can be essentially very different, and yet we still believe that when John says X is wrong (because it displays a lack of respect) and Mary says X is wrong (because it causes unnecessary suffering), they are agreeing that X is wrong. In any case, there are reasons that agents are responding to when they make moral judgments. These reasons may not be foremost in their minds, and under normal circumstances such reasons will not be; but acceptance of them still underlies moral judgment. Weatherson alludes to this when he claims: “We are not imagining [the story] Death if we imagine that Jack and Jill had just stopped arguing with each other and were about to shoot everyone in sight when Craig shot them in self-defense.”Footnote ⁹ To imagine this is to imagine a different story, one that does provide some justification for Craig's action.Footnote ¹⁰

Weatherson is trying to motivate the assumption that stories typically should be read with a “that's it” clause in mind. In other words, it is reasonable to assume when reading a piece of fiction that all relevant facts—particularly any facts that deviate from what the audience would be used to or familiar with—have been provided in the story. I believe this points to the fact that at least one factor underlying imaginative resistance in moral cases is that, when we believe something is right or wrong, we typically believe this is the case for some reason—at least in concrete situations. Further (and I take it this is Weatherson's point), when we read a work of fiction, we understand, as part of the background, that the world described by the author is complete for the purposes of understanding the story. What counts as “understanding” is very loose. When I watch an old episode of Star Trek, I cannot understand Scotty's explanation of why the engines have failed. But the author of the script is simply trying to convey that there is some explanation or other. The same point can be made with respect to justification. Presumably we do not imagine the story Death if we imagine that there is some justification for Craig's action, but we don't know what the justification is. I cannot speak for everyone here, but I would have trouble going along with this. It may be that (again) because of the peculiar authority of moral reasons we believe it incumbent upon the author to provide the justification, just as we would call on an agent to provide it. So we don't go along with outrageous normative claims even though we let the outrageous descriptive ones slide by (and even enjoy them if they are absurd enough).

Imaginative resistance can be overcome when a work of fiction provides reasons for a change in perspective that are good reasons. Sometimes a work of fiction will do this by providing information, or making information salient; but other times it will do this by working on our sympathies, by providing us with alternative points of view. In this way, fiction can be a source of actual moral education—as opposed to being simply a reaffirmation of already-held moral beliefs. (Of course, it can be that, too.) Consider the following review of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin:

This reviewer was merely speculating about the likely effects of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but another admirer of the novel wrote a letter to the editor of The National Era (which published the novel in serial form in 1851–52) that included the following claims:

It seems that this work of fiction galvanized previously hostile or indifferent people. Those who started out as indifferent or even hostile to the abolitionist movement were won over once they were presented with a story that made vivid for them all the wrong-making features of slavery.

What sense of necessity is at work here, then? I believe that the desire-based account of imaginative resistance—which, I argue, points to some kind of necessity attached to normative commitments—can give a good account of that necessity by taking a leaf from the “ought” implies “can” literature. There are many different senses of “cannot.” There is the “cannot” one uses to indicate logical impossibility, as in “two plus two cannot equal five.” There is the “cannot” of conceptual impossibility, as in “one cannot imagine a round square.” There is the “cannot” of physical impossibility, as in “one cannot fly to the moon.” There is the “cannot” of metaphysical necessity, as in “one cannot have had different parents.” For our purposes, though, the important senses of “cannot” are the two distinct senses associated with psychological possibility. Consider a case from the “ought” implies “can” literature: Mary does not know how to play chess. One might hold, then, that she cannot have an obligation to play chess, since she cannot play chess given that she doesn't know the rules.Footnote ¹³ It is understood that this is psychologically not possible for her. (She can, of course, move the pieces around the chessboard; she is not physically impaired.) That is, understood in one intuitive way, playing chess certainly seems psychologically impossible for her, since she just doesn't know the rules. However, in another sense, it is not psychologically impossible for her, since it is not something incompatible with the laws of psychology as such. In the second sense, Mary can play chess, since she has all of the cognitive architecture necessary; but, in the first sense, she cannot, since she doesn't know how to do it.

Now for necessity. If Mary cannot play chess, then there is a corresponding sense of necessity attached to her inability. For the sentimentalist, it is an interesting question as to which sense is operative with respect to our moral commitments (or whether, possibly, both senses are operative).

We could reasonably hold that both are operative, and this is the view that I favor. Thus, there are some things we are committed to given our psychological makeup as normal human beings, and then there are some things we are committed to through accidents of circumstance and upbringing. Contrary claims that seem outrageous in the first sense will be much more difficult, and perhaps even utterly impossible, to overcome. But contrary claims that seem outrageous in the second sense should be much easier to overcome. This picture is neutral on the issue of the truth of the claims in question. Moreover, we will need to tell a separate story about the appropriateness of some moral commitments over others (that is, the issue of commitment is distinct from the issue of truth).

A moral sentimentalist notes that what underlies our commitment to moral claims is some feeling we have, such as sympathy with other sentient beings. When it comes to the practice of moral judgment, a Humean sentimentalist would hold that we cannot overturn our basic, reflectively endorsed moral commitments at any given time. They are psychologically necessary for us. One cannot overturn them any more than one can make oneself into a true practicing skeptic. But here I would like to add a slight twist, borrowing from the work of Frank Jackson. The truth conditions of a claim are distinct from its acceptance conditions and from its assertability conditions. Some claims may be true, but not assertable or acceptable. Examples that Jackson discusses are non-robust conditionals.Footnote ¹⁴ Appeal to Jackson's analysis can shed more light on imaginative resistance and help sentimentalism handle a common sort of criticism.

III. Truth and Robustness

Robustness is a property that some material conditionals have. Generally, when one utters an indicative conditional, one is signaling confidence in the antecedent of the conditional (unlike a counterfactual). But this is not always the case. It is sometimes the case that if the antecedent were found to be true, the conditional would be rejected. In those cases, the conditional is not robust, though this is compatible with its truth.

Consider, as an illustration, the following conditional:

1. (1) If phosphorus does not exist, then neither does thought itself.

Given my belief that phosphorus is a key ingredient to the workings of the brain, I may utter (1) in full confidence. However, suppose someone were to show me that the element phosphorus does not in fact exist—that, like phlogiston, it has proved illusory. If one attaches to the antecedent the probability of 1, would one be willing to stand by the conditional? No. Therefore, it is not a robust conditional. Note, however, that it could still be true. My unwillingness to go along with the conditional, my unwillingness to pull the trigger on it, is not the same as its being false.

Frank Jackson's analysis of what is going on in the case of non-robust conditionals is the following: When an agent asserts the standard material conditional, she is signaling her confidence in the conditional; she is conventionally implying that it is robust with respect to the antecedent. So the truth conditions of the conditional are different from the conventional meaning of the conditional. Thus, a conditional like (1) can be true, but not robust—that is, it may not survive the assumption of the truth of the antecedent. The failure of survival will involve imaginative resistance with respect to the implication.

We can think of a piece of fiction as providing us with a set of claims that work as conditionals. Consider:

1. (2) If killing people merely because they are blocking traffic is permissible (in the story Death), then what Craig did was perfectly fine (in the story).

Note that in the story (if we go with Weatherson's “that's it” assumption), this claim is presented as part of the story. The antecedent is presented as true in the story. For the sake of reading the story, we are supposed to assume that it is true. As interpreters, however, we are quite unwilling to go along with the conditional. The conditional is not robust. But it may still be true (in the story). Gendler and Weatherson's type of account leaves it open to regard such conditionals as true in the story, even though interpreters are unwilling to accept such conditionals. I am not sure this does justice to the phenomenology of the puzzle of imaginative resistance. This is because it would run counter to the ordinary view that the truth of moral claims is constant as long as the underlying circumstances are constant.Footnote ¹⁵

Alternatively, consider the following conditional that appeals to the norms of storytelling and interpretation (and brings up factors external to the story itself):

1. (2a) If the story has been properly told and read (and the “that's it” condition is met, among other conditions), then what Craig did was perfectly fine.

Assign a probability of 1 to the antecedent, and we would not go along with this conditional either. Therefore, this conditional is likewise not robust, though it could be true. Standards for “properly told” and “properly read” remain open, but would include the “that's it” condition understood in reading a work of fiction, “coherence” for the story, and so on.

However, robustness only applies to material or indicative conditionals, not to subjunctive conditionals. With subjunctive conditionals, one is standardly signaling a belief that the antecedent does not obtain. The issue this presents for fiction is actually rather complicated. One might well argue that some fictions are presented more in the spirit of subjunctive conditionals, or counterfactuals.

In the fiction case, then, conditional (2) would need to be read in the following spirit: “Of course it isn't true (in the story), but if it were the case (in the story) that killing people because they are blocking traffic is permissible, then what Craig did was perfectly fine.”

To the extent that a person experiences imaginative resistance to a story, I believe that he or she is reading it as expressing an indicative conditional, where the speaker signals acceptance of the antecedent. This is because in stories like Weatherson's Death the author does not appear to be rejecting the claim—in the story—that “killing someone simply for blocking traffic is morally permissible.”

Now consider a claim that a sentimentalist (who believes something along the lines that it is the contents of our desire set, plus second-order attitudes toward features of the desire set, that determine the content of our moral commitments) would hold:

1. (3) If it is the case that it is normal for humans to feel approval at the prospect of killing and eating another human, then it is permissible to kill and eat another human.

This is rather crude, but what is important to my account is that the antecedent be something the utterer believes unlikely to be the case. Of course, we are horrified and repulsed at the thought of killing and eating other humans. For any of us to utter (3), we would have to utter it as a counterfactual. Suppose, however, that we somehow discovered the truth of the antecedent, or a good reason to accept it as true; then we could not utter it as a counterfactual. But what would that prove? Here we get back into imaginative resistance. Suppose the probability of the antecedent were 1. Suppose, for example, that I was able to show you poll after poll that demonstrated that human beings, as a whole, do feel it perfectly permissible to kill and eat other humans—that, in fact, their sympathetic engagement with others is very restricted in scope. We who talk about these issues just happen to be in the small percentage of people who don't feel right about it. If we accept that the antecedent of (3) is true, would we, even the sentimentalists, continue to accept the conditional and act on it? No. It is not robust. However, and this is an important methodological point, that does not mean that (3) is false. Conditional (3) could still be true. Just because a conditional is not robust does not mean that it is false.

Thus, sentimentalists who bite the bullet have this to fall back on. The feeling that there is something very wrong about conditional (3) is explained by its lack of robustness. But this does not keep it from being true. And this is the payoff of robustness in terms of practical deliberation and action.Footnote ¹⁶ We certainly would not act on (3).

The sentimentalist can argue that, given the way our brains work, we cannot practically question the status of the moral commitments we hold. The commitments impose demands or requirements on us that we, intuitively, feel to be externally imposed. But for the Humean sentimentalist, at least, there is a sense in which these requirements are externally imposed and a sense in which they are not. When a person experiences a certain situation as imposing a demand or requirement, what is responsible for that experience will be his or her desire set. It is because I am sympathetically engaged with others that I feel the requirement to help when I perceive the suffering of others. But there is nothing in their suffering itself that imposes a requirement. A rational creature with a relevantly different desire set will not experience the suffering of others as imposing a demand.

Of course, this does not mean that the sentimentalist has no standard to appeal to apart from the contents of an individual's desire set. Human nature (for example, the fact that sympathy seems to be a universal facet of that nature, at least for normal human beings) provides some standard of correctness. Of course, this contingency on human nature strikes many as deeply unsatisfying, to the point where people such as Richard Joyce hold that it is not what we mean by moral demands.Footnote ¹⁷ Moral demands, rather, are deeply categorical, holding not simply due to individual desires, or to desires typical of the normal human. It seems to me, however, that an error theory can be given for this sense of necessity just as easily as one can be given for the view that some moral claims are true. And it is here that the sentimentalist will appeal to psychological necessity, for which imaginative resistance provides some evidence. The sense of “cannot” here is not the sense of logical impossibility. The necessity is not nearly that strong. Certainly Gendler is right here. Instead, the fact that I cannot entertain a certain possibility (e.g., the possibility that killing simply to avoid a traffic jam is permissible) is a matter of its running against deep-seated desires that ground my moral commitments. I cannot do it in the same sense in which I cannot accept, in reality, someone's misuse of moral reasons in providing a pseudo-justification of his actions. Again, the issue is not whether the contents of the felt commitments indicate anything true or false about the world. It is a matter of having no choice but to regard them as true or false for practical purposes. But whatever sentimentalists think about the actual truth or falsity of the moral beliefs that form a part of our commitments, they will tend to agree that the sentiments upon which these commitments are based are subject to revision and correction for the individual; and there is even a possibility that these sentiments could be subject to revision for the species.Footnote ¹⁸ In the case of sentimentalists, my view is that they should opt for viewing the feeling of necessity that is associated with moral commitments (i.e., the phenomenology of the moral experience) as being something about us, not something about the external world. This view is supported by the account of imaginative resistance as an unwillingness, or a weak incapacity, to accept morally outrageous claims presented in fiction. As I noted earlier, there is a sense of psychological impossibility that corresponds to weak incapacity (this is the sense in which Mary cannot play chess, because she doesn't know how). Commitments may be psychologically necessary for us in that we are not simply unwilling to entertain their negations, but, rather, we do not now have the desires needed to do so. This may be due to a lack of relevant information. In any case, there will be cases where we are simply unwilling, and cases where a psychological deficit of some sort is responsible. If this is persuasive, then we have an account of the (purely psychological) necessity associated with moral commitments that gives us more information, really, about our desire set than about supposed deontic impositions from our environment.

IV. Conclusion

There are some propositions that we believe, that we are committed to for practical purposes, independent of any consideration as to their actual truth or falsity. Such claims may be psychologically necessary for us, even though these claims express neither logically nor metaphysically necessary truths. I have claimed that imaginative resistance points to the psychological necessity of claims we take to be morally true, and that imaginative resistance itself can be analyzed in terms of the non-robustness of certain conditional claims (an analysis which, again, is neutral on the issue of the truth of those claims). Moral sentimentalists, who appeal to psychological necessity in order to keep a sense of necessity attached to moral claims, can also appeal to the non-robustness of certain conditionals to counter some arguments that their views imply, in principle, results that are morally outrageous.