Joy Shim

Literary racial impersonation occurs when a narrative work fails to express the perspective of a minority ethnic or racial group. Interestingly, even when these works express moral themes congenial to promoting empathetic responses towards these groups, they can be met with public outrage if the group’s perspective is portrayed inaccurately. My goal in this paper is to vindicate the intuition that failure to express the perspective of a minority group well renders the work defective, both aesthetically and morally. I argue that available frameworks exploring the connections between aesthetic and moral realms of value are inadequate to analyzing this phenomenon and propose a novel connection between aesthetic and moral values. Specifically, I demonstrate that the primary defect of literary racial impersonation is aesthetic and contingently constitutes a moral defect in our current social context.

In this chapter, we identify and present predominant debates at the intersection of ethics and imagination. We begin by examining issues on whether our imagination can be constrained by ethical considerations, such as the moral evaluation of imagination, the potential for morality’s constraining our imaginative abilities, and the possibility of moral norms’ governing our imaginings. Then, we present accounts that posit imagination’s integral role in cultivating ethical lives, both through engagements with narrative artworks and in reality. Our final topic of consideration focuses on the possibility of imagination constituting or constructing new ethical or political frameworks.