Yanni Ratajczyk

In this article, I argue that there is such a thing as moral creativity with a little c, namely when agents realize innovative moral improvement in a particular context. This claim is meant as an addition to the growing field of philosophy of creativity that mainly discusses artistic and scientific creativity or historically unprecedented cases of moral creativity. With the help of two examples, I show that moral creativity also occurs in a non-historical, small-scale variant that is innovative given the particularity and expectations of a specific context. Unlike other moral-philosophical accounts that focus either on groundbreaking or revolutionary moral achievements or understand moral creativity in terms of moral imagination, this paper emphasizes the significance of everyday, context-sensitive innovations in moral practice. Cases of creativity with a little c illustrate that moral progress does not always require large-scale transformation. Rather, moral improvement can emerge from adaptive and genuinely creative responses to local challenges.

Philosophers have attempted to define creativity in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. From Kant to contemporary cognitive scientists, creative acts are often characterized as “valuable novelty.” But what happens when creativity takes a dark turn—when novelty emerges in the service of immoral aims? This article explores the philosophical responses to this paradox, often involving refinements or revisions of the definition of creativity. However, it argues that the paradox may be better addressed not by redefining creativity, but by rethinking philosophy’s deep-seated impulse to define broad concepts like creativity in the first place. Instead, it proposes a phenomenological methodology focused on exploring individual cases of creativity.

This essay explores Iris Murdoch’s unique image-based moral-philosophical methodology. Drawing on Murdoch’s early, middle, and late work, it illustrates how her early writings on metaphor and philosophical images foreshadows her later pluralist pictorial metaphysics. With this pictorial metaphysics – her wide-ranging collection of philosophical, religious or artistic images – Murdoch aims to provide us with the representations to guide and illuminate the moral life, serving as open sources for the continuous processes of moral orientation and interpretation.

In this chapter I discuss the relation between imaginative perception and moral creativity. I focus on three authors that have explained moral imagination as imaginative perception. Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and Cora Diamond have all argued how we use imagination to transform our perspective of moral situations. However, their central examples demonstrate the importance of morally inventive action as well. I argue that this reveals another mode of moral imagination: moral creativity. While a creative process might build on imaginative perception, moral creativity includes inventive responses to moral problems that are not necessarily given by seeing the world in another way.

Moral perception is typically understood as moral properties perception, i.e., the perceptual registration of moral properties such as wrongness or dignity. In this article, I defend a view of moral perception as a process that involves imaginative apprehension of reality. It is meant as an adjustment to the dominant view of moral perception as moral properties perception and as an addition to existing Murdochian approaches to moral perception. The view I present here builds on Iris Murdoch’s moral psychology and holds that moral perception is an imaginative exploration of the particularity of concrete objects of moral reality (e.g., persons, situations, and events), rather than a registration of moral properties. I argue that such imaginative apprehension includes direct and reflective uses of imagination and that this process grounds experiential moral knowledge that serves the ultimate role of moral perception: getting a better grip on concrete objects of moral reality.

An imaginative attitude: On metaphors, ethics and poetry In this article, I describe how moral understanding, moral philosophy, and poetry are connected through our use of the imagination. From insights of the pragmatic tradition, I derive the existence of an imaginative attitude that steers us towards imaginative moral interpretation and action. I show how such an attitude not only develops through our personal ethical experience but is also nurtured and shaped by poetry. Finally, I will argue that moral philosophy can make use of this attitude to provide clear ethical theory and that it should stimulate its ethical development.

Sophie-Grace Chappell’s recent book Epiphanies is wide-ranging and illuminating, just like its central subject. One basic motif is the ubiquity of value and value expe- rience in the ethical life: we are immersed in a value-laden reality and morality is rooted in this often epiphanic value experience. This results in an emphasis on a broad receptiveness to the surrounding world. One possible pitfall of such an approach could be the reduction of human beings to ethically passive perceivers, waiting for epiphanies to strike them. However, I think such a reading of Epiphanies would be incorrect. Chappell realizes how the ethical life entails more than just passive reception and contemplation; that both the passive and the active parts of the ethical life are important and related. In this article, I aim to avoid the suggested misreading by focussing on one phenomenon that is a good illustration of this interrelation and that is strongly related to epiphanies: creativity.

This article confronts two different evaluations of the narrative identity paradigm in order to examine the possibility of a minimal narrative, practical identity without excessive stress on psychic unity and moral wholeness. It consists of three sections. The first part explains the criticisms of Lippitt and Quinn. Both authors warn of the MacIntyrean narrative model's emphasis on psychic unity and moral wholeness and argue for an ethical thinking that is built around concepts of psychic disunity and moral openness. The second section introduces thoughts of Korsgaard and Frankfurt as having one important intuition in common: both their insights express the idea that our identity conceptions are intimately connected with processes of practical and moral reasoning; the ways in which we see ourselves are significant for the ways in which we act. Their sort-like conclusions are linked to the insights of Kennett and Matthews, who argue with help of empirical research on Dissociative Identity Disorder and psychopathy that we should understand our practical identity conceptions narratively. The third and last section shows how the insights of the first and second sections can be brought together in a truthful vision of moral reasoning and the moral person. It argues for a more realistic perspective on morality without altogether banishing narrative thinking, centred on the concept of moral responsiveness. This results in the affirmation of a basal practical, narrative identity and the acceptance of qualities as improvisation and imagination in moral reasoning.