Moral Imagining and Children

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Abstract
The use of ‘imagination’ that I discuss is ‘freedom of description’ and I take moral imagining to be the putting to one side of one's own descriptions of the world in order to understand a situation in the terms of another person. This imagining is a necessary condition of acting from a moral point of view, though it does not have to characterize the earliest stages of moral development. A critical attention to moral principles makes extensive demands of a child's moral imagining. It is exhibited in universalizing moral principles and attempting to understand the circumstances of others, and characterized by finding oneself as an instance of a possible description that does not, in fact, apply. The conditions of learning to be imaginative are discussed as are the relations of moral imagining to sympathy, compassion and concern.

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