Paweł Czarkowski

Imaginative resistance refers to the difficulty readers experience when attempting to imagine fictional worlds in which propositions that contradict their moral convictions are presented as true. While existing accounts have explained this phenomenon in terms of the cognitive architecture of imagination, the relationship between higher-order evaluative claims and descriptive facts, or the reader’s unwillingness to adopt certain perspectives, this paper proposes an alternative explanation grounded in moral psychology. I argue that moral imaginative resistance arises primarily from the automatic and intuitive character of moral cognition rather than from limitations of imaginative ability. Drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model of moral judgment, I suggest that moral evaluations typically precede conscious reasoning and are subsequently rationalized. Consequently, when a fictional moral proposition conflicts with a reader’s intuitive moral evaluation, it triggers an immediate evaluative response that makes adopting the fictional moral framework difficult, even when the reader fully recognizes its fictional status. On this basis, I introduce the Moral Congruence Model of Imaginative Resistance, according to which the occurrence of moral imaginative resistance depends on the congruence between fictional moral propositions and the reader’s moral intuitions. The model also accounts for individual differences in imaginative resistance and generates testable empirical predictions concerning the relationship between moral commitments and responses to fiction. The proposed account is deliberately restricted to moral imaginative resistance and does not claim to explain all forms of resistance encountered in fictional engagement.