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STORIES ON MY MIND: NARRATIVE ETHICS, COGNITIVE SCIENCE,
AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION

presented by

Gregg K. VandeKieft

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STORIES ON MY MIND: NARRATIVE ETHICS,
COGNITIVE SCIENCE, AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION

By

Gregg K. VandeKieﬁ

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
Interdisciplinary Program in Health and Humanities

2001

ABSTRACT

STORIES ON MY MIND: NARRATIVE ETHICS,
COGNITIVE SCIENCE, AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION

By

Gregg K. VandeKieﬁ

“Narrative ethics” is a recent manifestation of the ancient debate over the roles of
moral principles versus the narrative context of one’s life in ethical deliberation. Most
discussion examines the relative merits of principles versus stories in ethical analysis or
in moral education - there has been less inquiry into the epistemological character of
narrative. Some commentators propose that our fundamental modes of reasoning have
inherently narrative features. Until recently, there has been little empirical support for
this proposal. However, research in cognitive science has redeﬁned traditional
conceptions of brain function, particularly regarding the rational processes that underlie
personality, socialization, and the basic decision making that comprises a life plan. This
paper explores the implications of cognitive science for philosophical ethics. Based on
this exploration, I propose that the purported dichotomy between principles and narrative
is a fallacy and that they are, in fact, mutually interdependent components of moral

reasoning.

Copyright by
GREGG K. VANDEKIEF T
2001

Dedicated to:

Lynette VandeKieﬁ
Who made it all possible

Emily, Luke, and Joel VandeKieﬁ
Who give it all context

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge my thesis committee — Howard Brody, Tess Tavormina,
and Fred Gifford — for guidance and forbearance beyond the call of duty. In particular, I
cannot overstate my debt to Howard Brody. As a mentor in Bioethics and the Medical
Humanities, as a peer in Family Medicine, and as a mensch, Howard’s contribution to my
personal and professional growth is immeasurable.

I also wish to acknowledge Bill Wadland and Karen Ogle for understanding the
value of leavening their mentoring with the giﬂ of friendship. Their gentle but persistent

encouragement was instrumental in bringing this project to fruition.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW ............................................................ 1

CHAPTER 1

“WHAT’S COG SCI GOT TO DO WITH IT?” ................................................. 4
The Curious Case of Phineas Gage (or, a blast from the past) ........................ 5
Gage’s Modern Counterparts ............................................................... 7
The Moral Prototype Theory ............................................................... 9
Cognitive Science’s Contribution to Moral Theory .................................... 13

CHAPTER 2

MORAL IMAGINING ............................................................................. 17
Moral Judgment ............................................................................ 18
The Moral Imagination .................................................................... 21

CHAPTER 3

HOW IS NARRATIVE ETHICS CURRENTLY CONCEIVED? ........................... 25
What is Narrative’s Role in Ethics? ...................................................... 26
Current Conceptions of Narrative Ethics ................................................ 27

CHAPTER 4

MORAL INTELLIGENCE ........................................................................ 36
Narrative Imagining ........................................................................ 38

WORKS CITED .................................................................................... 46

vi

Introduction and Overview

Philosophy and religious doctrines are means by which humankind has
historically attempted to achieve a more meaningful understanding of relationships
among individuals and the world in which they live. These disciplines generally rely
upon systematized rules or principles to govern their application to one’s daily life. In
recent years, substantial attention is being focused on the less formally structured and
more context-dependent ways that “narrative” guides the application of one’s most basic
values in daily life. Numerous proposals regarding the role of narrative in ethics have
emerged under the rubric of “Narrative Ethics.” As an evolving ﬁeld of scholarly inquiry,
however, narrative ethics has not yet established an agreed-upon conceptual foundation.

Many commentators argue that narrative has always done the real work of ethical
deliberation, but we lost sight of this by mistakenly accepting the positivist claims of
traditional analytical philosophy. Principlist ethical deliberation, the argument goes, is
really accomplished via narrative but principlists have inappropriately denied narrative’s
role. In this View, narrative ethics as a formal discipline has simply not matured
sufﬁciently to have fully clariﬁed its unique methodology. As the ﬁeld undergoes a more
rigorous scholarly debate and its deﬁning theories are more clearly articulated it will
either supplant principlism or, in less ambitious proposals, will at least acquire equal
stature.

Critics of narrative ethics suggest that the lack of a clear identity for the ﬁeld
stems from a more fundamental deﬁciency: namely, that narrative ethics is a chimera, an
attractive notion but ultimately lacking substance. In this view, narrative frames the

context in which a given ethical dilemma is formulated and communicated, but when all

is said and done normative ethical theories still provide an adequate account of ethical
reasoning.

A third position holds that both strong narrativist and strong principlist positions
are not only reductionistic but are, in fact, a false dichotomy. In this view, principles and
narratives are both necessary components of ethical deliberation and cannot function in
isolation from the other.

In this thesis, I will argue ﬁ'om the third position. My exploration opens with a
review of recent ﬁndings from cognitive science that reframe our understanding of the
neurological processes mediating the basic reasoning involved in ethical deliberation. I
will ﬁrst explicate recent discoveries from neurological research that redeﬁne traditional
conceptions of “the neurobiology of rationality” (Damasio 51). The following section
correlates these ﬁndings with theories from research in cognitive psychology and
artiﬁcial intelligence. Taken together, these areas of study comprise contemporary
cognitive science. I will argue that current understandings in cognitive science support a
theory of rationality, including moral reasoning, that is inherently narrative.

In the following sections I will argue that this model of rationality accounts for
the ability of individuals and societies to adapt to a continuously changing environment.
When confronted by new information or concepts that conﬂict with one’s deeply held
understandings, some means of reconciling the conﬂict is necessary to maintain a
coherent worldview. This is accomplished primarily by the moral imagination. The
moral imagination is the process within ethical deliberation where conceptions from

cognitive science are most readily demonstrated. I will propose that the moral

imagination is a narrative form of imagining, supporting my argument with the preceding
discussion of “the neurobiology of rationality.”

This explication of the moral imagination will be followed by an overview of
current conceptions of the role of narratives in ethics, framed by the earlier discussion of
the moral imagination. I will then bring these considerations to bear on key questions
that continue to vex narrative ethicists and their critics: If narrative is truly a necessary,
constitutive component of ethics, what is its epistemic function in ethical perception and
reasoning? How is narrative distinct from, or similar to, the application of ethical
principles? Finally, what is the relationship between narrative and ethical norms?

In the concluding section, I will propose that narrative serves a necessary, rather
than a merely complementary, epistemic role in ethics. However, I will not make claims
for an exclusive or superior role for narrative over traditional normative moral reasoning.
Rather, I will argue that narrative and ethical principles are deeply integrated and
interdependent and that each is necessary for ethical inquiry, but not sufﬁcient by itself—
they are, in essence, different facets of a common rational process. Narrative ethics, in
this view, cultivates the moral imagination to consider ethical norms and the contextual
particularities relevant to speciﬁc cases as a form of dialectic. A rich store of basic moral
principles, derived from moral education as summary representations of more expansive
moral narratives, work in concert with a well-developed moral imagination to provide a

highly malleable and adaptive model of morality.

Chapter 1: “What’s Cog Sci Got to do With It?”

Moral reasoning is one of the most complex and diﬂicult forms of reasoning, and any
robust theory of reasoning is going to have to confront it eventually. It is one thing to
show how a mind can calculate sums, but quite a diﬂerent matter to show how a mind
forms a judgment in a moral dilemma.

Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy Clark
In Mind and Morals

My proposal for narrative ethics will rely on speciﬁc conceptions of how human
reasoning occurs. I will, accordingly, begin by exploring research into the basic
neurological processes that underlie rational deliberation. This exploration opens with a
post-mortem of sorts—I will revisit a lSO-year-old case of brain injury that, strangely
enough, played a pivotal role in a series of studies on modern patients with comparable
brain injuries. These studies, by renowned neurologists Antonio and Hanna Damasio and
their colleagues, lay the foundation for a narrative conception of rationality.

In this chapter, I will correlate the Damasios’ studies with work in cognitive
psychology and artiﬁcial intelligence, paying special attention to the moral prototype
theory. These concepts support the contention that cognitive science does more than
“show how a mind can calculate sums”——it also offers a robust theory on “how a mind
forms a judgment in a moral dilemma.” My review of cognitive science will also support
the claim that narrative serves an epistemologically necessary role in ethical

deliberation—a key assertion for my proposal for narrative ethics.

The Curious Case of Phineas Gage (or, a blast from the past)’

In the summer of 1848, Phineas P. Gage was a successful and highly valued
construction foreman for the Rutland and Burlington (Vermont) Railroad. In addition to
supervising a work gang, Gage’s duties involved setting the explosives needed to blast
the railroad’s path across the mountainous terrain. By all reports, he was a man of
upstanding moral character and was liked and respected by his employers and his peers.

The course of Phineas Gage’s life was irrevocably altered by a freak accident one
September aﬁemoon. As he set a routine charge, a premature explosion drove a four-foot
long iron rod through his left check; it exited through the top of his skull with sufﬁcient
velocity that it landed over one hundred feet away. Gage never lost consciousness, and
was rushed to the nearest town for the limited medical care available in the mid-19th
century. After surviving an initial infection, Gage’s physical recovery exceeded even the
most optimistic expectations. In less than two months, his only signiﬁcant remaining
physical deﬁcit was blindness in his left eye. However, in less tangible ways, Gage’s
recovery was not—and would never be—complete.

Despite a history of exemplary work habits and upstanding moral character, Gage
became listless, profane, and generally a social misﬁt. He never again sustained long-
terrn employment and repeatedly made disastrous decisions regarding his ﬁnancial
interests and general welfare. His problems did not seem to arise from the changes in

intellectual capacity one might expect following a brain injury—indeed, most reports

 

‘ The case of Phineas Gage is presented in extensive detail in Antonio Damasio’s book, Descartes’ Error.
The opening chapters of the book review Gage’s case and provide a framework for Damasio’s
consideration of how contemporary neuroscientiﬁc research informs cognitive theory. My description
provides only a cursory review of Damasio’s detailed and elegant case presentation.

suggest that Gage’s basic intellectual functions were, like his physical capacity, well
preserved. Rather, his problems stemmed from a dramatic change in personality. In the
words of his physician, John Harlow, “the ‘equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between
his intellectual faculty and animal propensities’ had been destroyed” (Damasio 8).2 He
had, in essence, lost his capacity for moral judgment.

Antonio Damasio observes: “Gage’s story hinted at an amazing fact: Somehow,
there were systems in the human brain dedicated more to reasoning than to anything else,
and in particular to the personal and social dimensions of reasoning. The observance of
previously acquired social convention and ethical rules could be lost as a result of brain
damage, even when neither basic intellect nor language seemed compromised” (10).

Five years after his death Gage’s body was exhumed and his skull, along with the
infamous iron bar, were placed on display at Harvard University’s Warren Medical
Museum—only to come under medical scrutiny one hundred and twenty years later.
Hanna Damasio and her colleagues studied Gage’s skull, the iron bar, and the medical
descriptions of Gage’s injuries. They used modern forensic and neuroimaging techniques
to generate three-dimensional computerized reconstructions of the range of possible
injuries to Gage’s brain. These models demonstrated that Gage’s injuries were localized
to speciﬁc areas of the frontal lobes of the brain. Despite the limitations of such a
retrospective analysis, “Hanna Damasio and her colleagues could say with some
foundation that it was selective damage in the prefrontal cortices of Phineas Gage’s brain

that compromised his ability to plan for the future, to conduct himself according to the

 

2 Much of Damasio’s account derives from notes and published reports from Dr. Harlow and Dr. Edward
Williams.

social rules he previously had learned, and to decide on the course of action that
ultimately would be most advantageous to his survival” (33).

The story of Gage makes for an interesting read, but by itself is hardly sufﬁcient
to make substantive claims about the nature of human cognition—let alone moral
philosophy. This sad tale, however, serves as an important starting point for
contemporary studies that have elucidated the changes in Gage. These studies shed new
light on the basic neural mechanisms underlying the decision making and planning

necessary for a “lived life,” including moral judgment.

Gage ’s Modern Counter-parts

Antonio Damasio noted striking similarities between the behavioral changes in
Phineas Gage and patients he studied with injuries to the prefrontal cortex. His attempt to
understand these cases led him to explore what he terms “the neurobiology of rationality”
(51). Damasio and his colleagues performed an exhaustive array of tests of intellectual
and psychological function on “modern Phineas Gages” and found a remarkably similar
proﬁle. He summarizes as follows: “[I]n none have we failed to encounter a combination
of decision-making defect and ﬂat emotion and feeling. The powers of reason and the
experience of emotion decline together,3 and their impairment stands out in a
neuropsychological proﬁle within which basic attention, memory, intelligence and

language appear so intact that they could never be invoked to explain the patients’

 

3 Damasio’s observation that “reason and. . .emotion decline together” contrasts with the classical notion
that they exist in a reciprocal relationship (i.e., as one becomes more emotional reason declines, and vice
versa). Damasio notes limitations in the correlation between reason and emotion, thus a powerful
emotional experience might indeed inhibit rational decision-making, or an overly analytical approach might
overrule ones correct emotional impulses.

failures in judgment” (54).

Damasio and his colleagues determined that individuals whose basic neural
mechanisms for processing emotions are compromised show a corresponding decline in
their ability to rationally formulate a life plan. “In short, there appears to be a collection
of systems in the human brain consistently dedicated to the goal-oriented thinking
process we call reasoning, and to the responsive selection we call decision making, with a
special emphasis on the personal and social domain.” (70). Reasoning in the personal
and social domain, Damasio postulates, is directed by the particularities that make up the
story of one’s life, providing the topographical landmarks that guide basic decisions for
formulating a life plan. Merely having the relevant facts at hand is not sufﬁcient—
additional factors, derived from the details of one’s experiences, goals, emotional state,
and intuitions guide the integration of the relevant facts into a coherent life plan. Phineas
Gage and his modem-day counterparts lacked the ability to integrate relevant facts with
the contextual landmarks necessary to make decisions. One could say the landscape of
their moral reasoning was ﬂat, depriving them of the contours of a lived life that are
essential guides for mapping out one’s future or discerning appropriate social behaviors.

The moral implications of these ﬁndings are intimated when Damasio theorizes
about the underlying defects in Phineas Gage and Damasio’s patients: “One way of
describing their predicament is by saying that they never construct an appropriate theory
about their persons, or about their person’s (sic) social role in the perspective of the past
and the ﬁiture. And what they cannot construct for themselves they also cannot generate
for others. They are bereft of a theory of their own mind and of the mind of those with

whom they interact” (58). After losing the capacity to conceptualize a fundamental moral

framework, these individuals’ behavior also contradicted the social and moral standards
to which they previously adhered.
But are Damasio’s ﬁndings really relevant to ethics? I will now turn to proposals

from cognitive science that link Damasio’s neurological ﬁndings to moral theory.

The Moral Prototype Theory

Cognitive scientists have explored how new understandings of basic brain
functions affect traditional concepts of moral reasoning. May, Friedman, and Clark note
that the prototype theory of concepts, which derives from research in cognitive
psychology, stands out in cognitive science’s development as a discipline. The
“prototype-based model of knowledge of concepts and categories casts doubt on classical
models of the structure of concepts.” In the classical model of cognition, “grasping a
concept. . .was depicted as involving knowing (perhaps unconsciously) a set of necessary
and sufﬁcient conditions for its application.” Cognitive psychology, however, fails to
support the classical model and instead proposes that “we organize our knowledge not
around quasi-linguistic deﬁnitions but around stored knowledge of prototypical
instances” (5).

But what do cognitive scientists mean by prototype? Mark Johnson explicates the
prototype theory of concepts as follows:

Psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists have discovered that most

categories used by people are not actually deﬁnable by a list of features.

Instead, people tend to deﬁne categories (e.g., bird) by identifying certain

prototypical members of the category (e.g., robin) and they recognize

other nonprototypical members (e.g., chicken, ostrich, penguin) that differ

in various ways from the prototypical ones. There is seldom any set of
necessary and sufﬁcient features possessed by all members of the

category. In this way our ordinary concepts are not uniformly or
homogeneously structured (Moral Imagination 8-9).

Johnson further observes, “Not every member is equally central to our understanding of a
given category. . .. In most cases there will not be a single deﬁning set of features
possessed by each member of the category. Different members will be related by what
Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblances,’ rather than by their sharing of a set of
essential properties” (Moral Imagination 78-79).

Prototypical members of a category are developed experientially via exemplars,
“the concrete instances we encounter during training or learning.” With experience, one
identiﬁes “which features are most common to the exemplars of some class. . .. The idea
of prototype is thus the idea of a body of features united as the most. . .common
characteristics of the exemplars to which [one] has been exposed. And there is no bound
on the kinds of thing, process, or event for which we may command a prototype” (May,
Friedman, and Clark 5-6).

Initial proposals regarding category structure simply addressed the basic ways in
which categories are cognitively conceived. Johnson and others expanded this work into
the realm of moral philosophy. Conceptions of morality, including broad categories of
moral understanding (e. g., lying is wrong), are not deﬁned by meeting a simple list of
necessary and sufﬁcient conditions, but have a basic internal structure around which
variations of the concept are built—i.e., moral prototypes. Since moral deliberation
commonly involves dilemmas that cannot be reconciled with one’s established beliefs, a
robust theory of morality must account for an individual’s ability to adapt to the situation
at hand without undermining the integrity of his basic value system. Johnson argues that

the classical theory of category structure is inadequate in this regard because it requires

10

that “concepts deﬁned by necessary and sufﬁcient conditions directly ﬁt states of affairs
that exist objectively in the world.” Moral prototypes, he counters, are more ﬂexible and
allow for such adaptability. “[T]he prototype structure of our fundamental concepts
allows us to expand them to ﬁt new cases, while still retaining a certain part of the
conceptual structure as relatively stable and unchanged. This would be impossible on the
classical view” (Moral Imagination 9).

As an example of the moral prototype theory in action, Owen Flanagan examines
the process by which a child learns to tell the truth. He cites the process of distinguishing
a joke or fairytale from a lie, situations that calls for tact or “kind falsehoods/white lies”
to protect others’ feelings, and situations that call for overt lying to protect one’s own
safety or the well-being of another.

How exactly a child or adult responds to a novel moral situation ‘will be a

function of which of her many prototypes that situation activates, and this

will be a matter of the relative similarity of the new situation to the various

prototypes on which she was trained.’ Situations will occasionally be

ambiguous and there will be disagreements about what is occurring. . ..

Moral ambiguity creates moral cramps of various sorts that lead to

reﬂection, discussion, and argument, as does disagreement among persons

about how to describe a certain act or situation. These, in turn, lead to

prototype adj ustrnent (28-29).

Damasio describes a parallel neurological process in human cognition by the
formation of perceptual images—visual, auditory, or conceptual images. The formation
of perceptual images is more than simply recalling a facsimile from a repository of stored
images. Studies of cognitive processing consistently demonstrate that perceptual images
are interpretive, momentary constructions—replications of previously experienced

patterns, or imagined projections based on previously experienced patterns. Perceptual

images are directed by dispositional representations. “Dispositional representations exist

11

as potential patterns of neuron activity in small ensembles of neurons I call ‘convergence
zones’. . .. What dispositional representations hold in store in their little commune of
synapses is not a picture per se, but a means to reconstitute ‘a picture’. . .. The acquisition
of new knowledge is achieved by continuous modiﬁcation of such dispositional
representations” (96- l 08).

The brain works by reconstructing prototypes, stored as perceptual images.
Variations on a prototype are controlled by dispositional representations—someone with
a broader range of dispositional representations will correspondingly comprehend a wider
array of variations on a prototype. Using Johnson’s earlier example of the prototype
“bird,” most people will have a stronger baseline dispositional representation for a robin
than for a blue-footed booby. Prototypes are recalled as perceptual images under the
direction of dispositional representations, which are context-dependent. Thus, a
reference to “bird” during a discussion of fauna native to the Galapagos Islands might
indeed bring a blue-footed booby to mind before a robin.

Learned prototypes are not stored as ﬁxed images in some speciﬁed locus in the
brain. Instead, trained-up networks of neurons—Damasio’s convergence zones—recreate
prototypes when activated by a relevant input. However, this process is not localized to
one speciﬁc brain center—when properly orchestrated, numerous loci within the brain act
in concert to produce a seemingly uniﬁed whole: “[B]ecause of the brain’s design, the
requisite broad-based knowledge depends on numerous systems located in relatively
separate brain regions rather than one region. A large part of such knowledge is recalled
in the form of images at many brain sites rather than at a single site. Although we have

the illusion that everything comes together in a single anatomical theater, recent evidence

12

suggests it does not. Probably the relative simultaneity of activity at different sites binds
the separate parts of the mind together” (84).

However, speciﬁc neurological structures are essential for coordinating and
communicating neural activity among the various participating brain centers.
Furthermore, certain neurological structures—such as the prefrontal cortex—are essential
to processing emotions as well as the type of reasoning involved in moral judgment. So
damage to discrete regions of the brain can disrupt not only cognitive processing
generally, but can also trigger speciﬁc social and moral deﬁcits.

Thus Phineas Gage’s injury to the prefrontal cortex, and the similar injuries in
Damasio’s patients, left basic intellectual and language functions intact but severed
crucial communication networks among the convergence zones involved in “the personal
and social dimensions of reasoning.” This, in turn, disabled these individuals’ ability to
formulate a life plan or to frame their social interactions within the larger scope of their

life.

Cognitive Science ’3 Contribution to Moral Theory

The experience of Phineas Gage offers a cogent case study demonstrating the
devastating moral consequences of losing the ability to create a coherent life narrative.
My refrarning of Gage’s experience demonstrates the relevance of cognitive science to
moral reasoning. However, thus far I have only highlighted the need to update classical
moral theories. The preceding examples and arguments do not, by themselves, provide a
more contemporary theoretical framework. In consideration of this question, May,

Friedman, and Clark observe:

13

Cognitive science brings to the ethical arena a developed interest in the

kinds of internal states and resources that subserve thought and action.

Our general understanding of the nature of these inner states and resources

has undergone a rather dramatic shiit in recent years.... The interest of

this alternative vision for ethics and moral philosophy lies in its

implications for an empirically well-grounded conception of moral

reasoning. Such implications...concern a variety of speciﬁc issues, such

as the nature of moral knowledge, argument, and expertise...the role of

summary rules and maxims...and the evolution and growth of moral

understanding (4-5).

This passage articulates precisely the sensibility that underlies this thesis. My
interest is to advance “an empirically well-grounded conception of moral reasoning”
concerning principlist versus narrativist models of ethics. The prototype theory of
concepts plays a crucial role in this exploration, as it provides an alternative to classical
models of category and concept structure and corollary rule-based theories of ethics.

Churchland proposes one way in which the prototype theory of concepts advances
our understanding of moral reasoning:

[T]he alternative to a rule-based account of our moral capacity...is a

hierarchy of learned prototypes, for both moral perception and moral

behavior, prototypes embodied in the well-tuned conﬁguration of a neural
network’s synaptic weights. We may here ﬁnd a more fruitful path to
understanding the nature of moral learning, moral insight, moral
disagreements, moral failings, moral pathologies, and moral growth at the

level of entire societies (101).

Johnson asserts that “rule-based account[s] of our moral capacity” derive from
moral law theory, which claims that solutions to moral dilemmas result from deducing
the most correct rule to apply to a given situation. Johnson proposes that moral law
theories are inadequate because they work only for “prototypical, nonproblematic cases.
What we regard as ‘moral laws’ should be construed as useful rules of thumb that

summarize the collective experience and wisdom of a moral tradition concerning

prototypical situations...” (Moral Imagination 187-188). Johnson endorses the moral

l4

prototype theory as an alternative to moral law theory, integrating cognitive science and
moral philosophy at both the theoretical and practical level.

If learned prototypes derive from well-recognized patterns, how does one deal
with “new, previously unconsidered, or problematic situations” (Benjamin and Curtis
41)? Andy Clark addresses this problem while discussing a connectionist concept that
Churchland terms “conceptual redeployment”:

Imagine someone trying to solve a problem. To solve it. . .is to activate an

appropriate explanatory prototype. Sometimes, however, our attempts to

access a satisfying (explanatory) prototype fail. One diagnosis may be

that we do not command any appropriate prototype, in which case there is

no alternative to slow, experience-based learning. But an alternative

possibility is that we do command just such a prototype but have failed so

far to call it up. This is where a good piece of context ﬁxing can help.

The idea is that a bare input that previously led to the activation of no fully

explanatory prototype may suddenly, in the context of additional

information, give rise to the activation of a developed and satisfying
prototype by being led to exploit resources originally developed for other

purposes (1 17).

Conceptual redeployment allows one to integrate new knowledge or concepts
within our existing conceptual prototypes by applying contextual clues—“context
ﬁxing”—to activate existing prototypes that satisfactorily accommodate the new material.
In the next chapter, I will explore the role of the moral imagination in creating new moral
prototypes, or substantially modifying existing moral prototypes, when conceptual
redeployment fails to activate “a developed and satisfying prototype” during moral
deliberation. I will also argue that “context ﬁxing” is a narrative process.

In summary, Phineas Gage and his modem-day counterparts demonstrate the
existence of neurological structures, such as the prefrontal cortex, that are crucial for
mediating moral judgment. Cognitive psychology redeﬁnes how we conceive of

category and concept structure, laying the groundwork for the moral prototype theory.

15

Taken together, these ﬁndings from neurology and cognitive science provide a highly
contextual and adaptive model, amenable to subtle discrimination, growth and ﬂexibility.
They also offer compelling evidence that traditional rule-based accounts for moral

reasoning are inadequate. I will now turn to alternative models for moral reasoning.

l6

Chapter 2: Moral Imagining

[ T ]he central purpose of moral theory should be the enrichment and cultivation of moral
understanding and ...moral psychology is essential to the development of our moral
understanding... This means that that we cannot do good moral theory without knowing
a tremendous amount about human motivation, the nature of the self the nature of human
concepts, how our reason works, how we are socially constituted, and a host of other
facts about who we are and how the mind operates.

Mark Johnson, “How Moral Psychology Changes Moral Theory”
In Mind and Morals

In the preceding chapter, I explored new understandings of cognitive theory. But
does cognitive science really have anything to offer ethics? Virginia Held argues that, as
far as ethics is concerned, cognitive science is interesting—but not really relevant (69-
87). Mark Johnson, however, challenges “the moral philosophy versus moral psychology
split.” He deﬁnes moral psychology as “the psychology of human moral understanding,
which includes empirical inquiry into the conceptual systems that underlie moral
reasoning” (“Moral Psychology” 45-46). My position concurs with Johnson: moral
philosophy cannot be reduced to cognitive psychology, but we need to take into account
how new ﬁndings in cognitive theory alter our view of the basic mechanisms of
rationality, and how those new understandings transform the assumptions underlying our
traditional views of moral reasoning.

Having outlined ﬁndings from cognitive science that reﬁ'ame our basic
understandings of both non-moral and moral perception and reasoning, I will now look at
how these ﬁndings manifest themselves practically in moral judgment. Speciﬁcally, I
will propose that moral judgment is dependent on the moral imagination. The moral

imagination is, in turn, profoundly informed by the prototype theory of concepts. A

17

consideration of the ways in which the moral imagination is inherently narrative will

follow.

Moral Judgment4

The goal of ethical deliberation is, ultimately, to make a moral judgment: i.e., to
choose a morally correct course of action in a given situation, all things considered. In a
community of shared values, moral judgment may be unproblematic. Since the
participants in ethical deliberation share relatively similar worldviews and ethical
frameworks, they can evaluate the situation at hand within their shared framework and
reach a mutually satisfactory conclusion with relative ease. However, in a moral
dilemma—when individuals with different ethical ﬁ‘ameworks encounter moral
disagreement or one simply encounters a situation far removed from her previous
experience or moral education—one needs a means to “compare and evaluate ethical
frameworks” (Benjamin and Curtis 39). Ethical deliberation frequently requires
grappling with ethical frameworks that are new or that conﬂict with one’s own ethical
framework.5

How do individuals resolve conﬂicts when they encounter “new, previously
unconsidered, or problematic situations” (Benjamin and Curtis 41) that cannot be

reconciled within their existing ethical framework? One classical approach to resolving

 

4 I was aided in this section by Matthew S. Ebert’s “Moral Judgment: Action Beyond the Limits of
Deduction,” a masters thesis for the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University, spring 1997.
5 John Kekes devotes an entire book to the question of moral pluralism (1993). Although I will not
elaborate on the topic of moral pluralism, an underlying assumption for this discussion is that we live in a
morally pluralistic society and no single moral viewpoint (or ethical framework) holds trump over others.
This position is not an endorsement of indiscriminate moral relativism—Kekes argues that there are both
“primary” moral values which are, “under normal circumstances, universally human,” and “secondary”
values which “vary with persons, societies, traditions, and historical periods” (18-19).

18

ethical conﬂicts derives from John Rawls’s notion of wide reﬂective equilibrium (WRE).
Martin Benjamin and Joy Curtis describe WRE as a model of ethical deliberation
comprised of three main components: “Ethical frameworks are evaluated by comparing
the extent to which the ordered set of principles that constitute them give consistent and
comprehensive guidance while cohering with two other sets of beliefs: the pretheoretical
moral judgments in which we have the greatest conﬁdence (e. g., torturing children is
wrong) and well-grounded background beliefs and theories about the world” (39-40).6

Utilizing this model of deliberation, when one encounters a conﬂict between two
or more ethical frameworks she simply evaluates the competing ethical frameworks as
outlined above. The ethical framework whose ordered set of principles resonates most
fully with her pretheoretical moral judgments and her background beliefs and theories is
said to maintain “equilibrium.” As an example, consider the issue of physician-assisted
suicide (PAS). Some patients experience severe suffering, physical as well as
psychological or spiritual, that cannot be completely alleviated with even intensive
therapy. On occasion, a patient will ask his physician to prescribe or administer
medication to intentionally hasten the patient’s death. The resulting dilemma: the
physician either allows a patient to suffer against his wishes, or she prescribes or
administers a lethal dose of medication to relieve the suffering but, in doing so, causes
the patient’s death.

Proponents of PAS argue that death is an acceptable means of relieving suffering

if other means have failed—causing the patient’s death is tolerated if the intent is to

 

6 I am presenting an abbreviated description of WRE, based on Benjamin and Curtis’s account. For a more
comprehensive discussion, see Benjamin and Curtis, 39-43.

19

relieve preventable suffering. The physician essentially prioritizes her principles so that
relief of suffering takes precedence over the preservation of life. Many physicians are
unwilling to cross that threshold, based on the belief that the sanctity of life is
paramount—even if the patient experiences preventable suffering.7 In either case, the
moral deliberation does not occur in a vacuum. It is directed by the physician’s
pretheoretical moral judgments and background beliefs (e. g., suffering should be
prevented, life is sacred) and the physician’s moral principles (e. g., physicians have a
moral obligation to relieve their patients’ suffering, physicians have a moral obligation to
preserve life).

If WRE provides an adequate basis for moral judgment, is the whole question of
narrative’s role irrelevant? Narrative, it could be argued, merely provides the context for
determining the most appropriate ethical principle(s) to apply to the situation at hand. If
WRE is simply working through one’s ordered set of principles, narrative might
supplement the process but does not really do the work.

The above account, however, does not explain how one resolves a situation in
which equilibrium cannot be maintained by one’s own established ethical frameworks.
Benjamin and Curtis observe, “Once we apply our principles to new, previously
unconsidered, or problematic situations, we must trace the implications for our fairly
secure pretheoretical moral judgments and our background beliefs and theories. If these

are all fairly compatible, the equilibrium is maintained. But if there is tension or

 

7 For the sake of illustration, this dilemma is presented in its most basic iteration. More complex
permutations range from autonomy-based arguments that patients should be granted the right to PAS even
if suffering is negligible, to the notion that all suffering can be controlled without resorting to PAS—even
if it takes placing the patient under “terminal anesthesia.” Within this range of considerations, I have
attempted to distill PAS to its most fundamental dilemma.

20

inconsistency, we must try to restore the equilibrium. This may involve modijying any of
the three central components or withdrawing the applications of the principles in this
instance” (41, emphasis added).

But how does one modify any of the three central components—by what means,
and on what basis? And if resolution requires modifying our most basic ethical tenets or
“withdrawing the applications of the principles,” then WRE involves more than simply
ﬁguring out which ordered set of principles to choose. A more dynamic and adaptive
form of moral deliberation is called for. In the next section, I will explicate what I

consider to be the fundamental tool for moral deliberation: the moral imagination.

The Moral Imaginations

Moral judgment takes place in the context of lived lives. Thomas Nagel states
that judgment is “essentially the faculty Aristotle described as practical wisdom, which
reveals itself over time in individual decisions rather than in the enunciation of general
principles” (180). But before one acts, or makes the judgment upon which action is
based, she must consider the myriad possible consequences of her decision. Thus some
form of “thinking before acting” (Turner 4) is required: the moral imagination.

John Kekes describes the moral imagination as “a psychological process involved
in the mental exploration of our possibilities” (99). Paul Churchland describes how the
moral imagination manifests itself in moral judgment:

People with unusually penetrating moral insight will be those who can see
a problematic moral situation in more than one way, and who can evaluate

 

8 I was aided in this section, and the previous section, by Mike Pardales’s “The Moral Imagination and
Moral Judgment: Critical Connections,” a term paper for Philosophy 870: Seminar in Value Theory (taught
by Martin Benjamin, Ph.D.) at Michigan State University, spring 1997.

21

the relative accuracy and relevance of those competing interpretations.

Such people will be those with unusual moral imagination, and a critical

capacity to match. The former virtue will require a rich library of moral

prototypes from which to draw, and special skills in the recurrent

manipulation of one’s moral perception (103).

As a person confronts an ethical dilemma and works through the process outlined
in WRE, she does not merely work through some calculus of variably weighted moral
rules. Rather, she considers how various possible actions cohere with her existing ethical
framework and how her actions will operationalize the ordered principles within that
ﬁamework. In short, she imagines the most likely outcome of her action, considering the
array of possible action options from which she can choose. Furthermore, her options
may not all be readily evident—by the process of imaginatively considering desired
outcomes, she may be able to work back to previously unconsidered options which she
can then enact to hopefully achieve these outcomes, perhaps by conceptual redeployment
as described by Churchland in the previous chapter.

In the epi graph for this chapter, Mark Johnson asserts moral theory’s reliance on
narrative. He proposes that a sound moral theory requires knowledge about “human
motivation, the nature of the self, the nature of human concepts, how our reason works,
how we are socially constituted, and a host of other facts about who we are and how the
mind operates” (“Moral Psychology” 46). I would argue that an understanding of human
motivation, the nature of the self, or how we are socially constituted is narrative in
nature. And not merely narrative in the service of concepts or principles—my discussion
in the previous chapter and earlier sections of this chapter maintains the inadequacy of

such a reductionistic understanding of basic concepts and categories, let alone human

morality. Rather, moral prototypes and moral reasoning rely on a mode of reasoning

22

coordinated by the narratives that unify our basic understandings of who we are and how
we should act—i.e., the moral imagination is a narrative form of imagining.

How might the physician in my earlier example work through the dilemma of
either hastening her patient’s death or allowing him to experience preventable suffering?
In a classically principlist matrix, she simply weighs the facts of the case against her
ordered set of principles, determines which principle should be honored (preserving life
or preventing suffering), and acts accordingly. The process of weighing the facts of the
case, however, involves a number of narrative features: the patient’s values and desires,
the clinical history of the patients illness, the relationship of the physician with the patient
and his family, the culture of the patient and the institution, biases ﬁ'om the physician’s
training and specialty choice, just to name a few. These considerations could all be seen
as nothing more than framing devices for the real work of weighing ethical principles—in
which case narrative is merely in the service of principles. But the very process of
weighing these considerations cannot be extricated from their particularities—in both
form and content, the principles cannot function independent from their contextualizing
narratives.

Furthermore, the physician will imaginatively undertake “a mental exploration of
[her] possibilities.” She will, accordingly, envision the suffering that might ensue if she
cannot relieve her patient with standard therapies, the legal consequences if she agrees to
PAS, how the family will respond to either course of action, and how her actions will
affect her own personal and professional development. This exercise in the moral
imagination will invoke her ordered set of principles, but is not necessarily beholden to

them. She may well modify her principles, or even her pretheoretical moral judgments or

23

her background beliefs and theories, in response to lived experience of grappling with the
dilemma. For example, virtually every physician that I have heard argue in support of
legalizing physician-assisted suicide cited a speciﬁc, emotionally wrenching case that
was pivotal in his moral deliberation. In any case, narrative imagining will be at the
center of her deliberation.

The question then arises: are principles and narrative simply “separate but equal,”
or are they related in some deeper way? Few current proposals for narrative ethics have
engaged the more radical claim for the moral imagination. In the following chapter, I
will examine contemporary proposals for narrative ethics and propose that a more

comprehensive conception of narrative ethics is still needed.

24

Chapter 3: How is Narrative Ethics Currently Conceived?

. . . there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry . . .

Plato, Republic (Book X)

The philosopher therefore and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one
by precept, the other by example. But both, not having both, do both halt. For the
philosopher, setting down with thorny argument the bare rule, is so hard of utterance,
and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him
till he be old before he shall ﬁnd suﬂicient cause to be honest. For his knowledge
standeth so upon the abstract and general, that happy is the man who may understand
him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand. 0n the other side, the
historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but what is, to the
particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, that his example
draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. Now doth the
peerless poet perform both: for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he
giveth a perfect picture of it in someone by whom he presupposeth it was done; so as he
coupleth the general notion with the particular example.

Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poem:

In the ﬁrst chapter, I reviewed how cognitive science alters traditional
conceptions of rationality, including the contribution of the prototype theory of concepts
and connectionism to moral theory. In the second chapter, I explored moral judgment,
including the proposal that the moral imagination is a fundamentally narrative process.
In this chapter, I will look at current conceptions of narrative ethics and how they are
informed by the proposals from the ﬁrst two chapters. The ﬁrst part of the chapter
provides an overview of current conceptions of narrative ethics—starting with a brief

review of different conceptions for the term “narrative.”

25

What is Narrative ’s Role in Ethics?

The lack of a uniﬁed conceptual foundation for narrative ethics stems, in part,
from the wide variety of meanings implied by the term narrative. Some cognitive
theorists, such as Mark Johnson, intentionally use the term to encompass the most basic
cognitive processes by which humans order the experiences and direction of their lives.
Narrative ethicists more typically use the term to formally denote some type of story—a
literary story, a case history, or the biographical background and circumstantial details
that provide the context for an individual’s unique life story.

Wallace Martin separates modern narrative theories into three groups, “depending
on whether they treat narrative as a sequence of events, a discourse produced by a
narrator, or a verbal artifact that is organized and endowed with meaning by its readers”9
(82). My use of the term narrative derives primarily from the ﬁrst of Martin’s three
groups of theories: those that treat narrative as “a sequence of events.”10 However,
Martin’s third group of theories also contains an integral concept for my understanding of
narrative—the process by which “a verbal artifact is organized and endowed with
meaning.” This hybrid use of the term encompasses more than the literary realm,
allowing for the notion that the sequence of events that comprise one’s life can be
considered a “lived narrative.”

But what is narrative’s role in ethics? Torn Tomlinson explores different

proposals for narrative ethics and ﬁnds himself “perplexed.” His primary interest is in

 

9 In recognition of oral narrative traditions, I would include “listeners” in this third group.

'0 Certain features are implicit in this understanding of narrative: at least one central actor or agent, a point
of view (which, in “stories,” may distinctly differ for the author, the narrator, and the central character or
characters), a setting, some sequence of events occurring over time (i.e., with a beginning, middle, and
end), and conﬂict or action which generally brings about some change in the central character(s).

26

the claim that “narrative serv[es] a central epistemic function in the discovery,
justiﬁcation or application of ethical knowledge—a role that ﬁll the gaps inherent in any
analytical, rule-based method” (124). His emphasis on the “central epistemic function”
of narrative delves deeper than the usual considerations of narrative as an adjunct to
principles in teaching ethics or enhancing moral understanding. Tomlinson’s challenge
elicits more fundamental questions: Does narrative underlie moral perception and
reasoning in some inextricable and, at present, poorly understood way? What makes
narrative a necessary, rather than complementary, component of ethical deliberation?

An overview of current conceptions of narrative ethics, framed by the earlier
discussion of cognitive science’s contribution to moral theory and the moral imagination,

will offer an initial attempt to answer some of these questions.

Current Conceptions of Narrative Ethics

A primary difﬁculty in investigating the role of narrative in ethics stems from
nascent stage of narrative ethics as a ﬁeld of scholarly study. Narrative ethicists have not
articulated an agreed-upon conceptual foundation. John Arras offers a typology for
differing approaches to narrative ethics. Like Tomlinson, Arras wants narrative ethicists
to clarify the epistemic function of narratives in ethics: “[T]he connection between
narrative and moral justiﬁcation remains maddeningly obscure. What, one wants to ask,
is the relationship between narrative and the achievement of moral justiﬁcation, between
the telling of a story and the establishment of a warrant for believing in the moral

adequacy or excellence of a particular action, policy, or character” (67)?

27

Arras prefaces his typology by observing that principlist models of moral
justiﬁcation “involved an effort to connect with a normative essence, idea, or norm
beyond the vagaries of actual human behavior” (67). This effort’s intent was to transcend
the inﬁnite array of personal, social, or historical contingencies that confound ethic
deliberation and develop a moral methodology by which to judge one’s actions or
precepts independent of time or context. Modern ethical theories evolved from an effort
to provide constancy amidst the relativism of individual life narratives.

Narrative ethicists criticize modernist ethics for taking a general descriptive
methodology and inappropriately generalizing it to situations, peoples and cultures for
which it has little relevance. Narrativist proposals in response to this criticism vary
substantially in both character and in scope. In general, however, most have not
distinguished themselves methodologically or conceptually as more than a ﬁne-tuning of
classical principlist ethics.

One of the more widely touted narrativist proposals, Rita Charon’s notion of
“narrative competence,” asserts that a heightened literary consciousness augments moral
reasoning skills.11 Charon, however, makes clear that her narrativist proposal is not
intended to usurp the dominant position of principlist bioethics:

Although not an independent method that promises to replace all existing

efforts in the ﬁeld of medical ethics, a narrative approach can make

existing methods work more accurately and effectively. The principlist

methods of ethical inquiry remain as the structure for clarifying and
adjudicating conﬂicts among patients, health providers, and family
members at the juncture of the quandary. The principles upon which
bioethics decisions have been based—patient autonomy, beneﬁcence,

nonmaleﬁcence, and justice—continue to guide ethical action within
health care. Narrative competencies, however, have the power to

 

H Charon, a physician and literary scholar, works primarily in the medical humanities. Accordingly,
Charon’s descriptions use terminology speciﬁc to bioethics.

28

particularize such decisions, to increase involvement of both patients and

providers in clarifying ethical choices, and to take timely longitudinal

steps toward ethical recognition that will obviate quandary ethics (277).

Arras notes that in narrative competence and comparable proposals, “Principles
retain their normative force; narrative sensitivity makes them work better. ‘Narrative
ethics’ on this gloss is thus not a newer, better kind of ethics; it simply allows us to apply
principles with greater sensitivity and precision” (70). Although narrative competence
offers an optimized model of principlism, it does not promote a more ambitious role for
narrative in ethics. Efforts to ﬁne-tune principlism are laudable, but the claim that
narrative sensitivity enhances the process of principlist deliberation borders on self-
evident.12 Such a subsidiary role for narrative adds little to my thesis, so will not be
explicated in any further depth.

Martha Nussbaum makes a stronger claim for narrative as a form of moral
methodology in its own right. Her proposal is based, in part, on certain assumptions
about the relationship between the form and content of philosophical writing. According
to Nussbaum, the evolution of philosophical discourse itself has impeded the
development of a unique expression of narrative ethics:

[T]he conventional style of Anglo-American philosophical

prose. . .[became] correct, abstract, hygienically pallid, a style that seemed

to be regarded as a kind of all-purpose solvent in which philosophical

issues of any kind at all could be efﬁciently disentangled, any and all

conclusions neatly disengaged. That there might be other ways of being

precise, other conceptions of lucidity and completeness that might be held

to be even more appropriate for ethical thought...was, on the whole,
neither asserted nor even denied... (Love’s Knowledge 19).

 

‘2 In fairness to Charon, her proposal’s sense of “narrative” differs from my more general use of the term.
She bases narrative competence on the use of literary narratives for moral education, and explores
approaching ethical deliberation via the methodology of literary criticism, making her proposal a more
ambitious contribution to classical principlist ethics than my limited discussion suggests. She does not,
however, portray narrative competence as a moral methodology independent of (or that radically departs
from) classical principlism.

29

Nussbaum emphasizes that modes of philosophical expression emanate from
one’s moral methodology and, conversely, that an unreﬂective reliance on established
modes of discourse implies acceptance of established views and methodology. Nussbaum
further suggests that the dominance of “Anglo-American philosophical prose” was not a
considered acquiescence to a superior form of ethical inquiry but a byproduct of Western
philosophy’s increasing deference to the natural sciences.

The situation resulted in part from the long predominance of ethical views

that really did underwrite the conventional style—so that it had by then

become second nature, as though it was the style for ethics. It owed much,

as well. . .to the long-standing fascination of Western philosophers with the

methods and the style of natural science, which have at many times in

history seemed to embody the only sort of rigor and precision worth
cultivating, the only norm of rationality worth emulating, even in the

ethical sphere... But there is a mistake made, or at least a carelessness,

when one takes a method and style that have proven fruitful for the

investigation and description of certain truths—say the natural sciences—

and applies them without further reﬂection or argument to a very different

sphere of human life that may have a different geography and demand a

different sort of precision, a different norm of rationality (Love’s

Knowledge 19-20).

Nussbaum’s proposal, like Charon’s, does not intend for narrative to replace
principlist ethics. Nussbaum does, however, propose a more distinctive epistemological
role for narrative. Speciﬁcally, she proposes that ﬁctional literary narratives are a form
of moral methodology in their own right. Reading literary ﬁction, she proposes, engages
the reader’s sensibilities in a unique way that principlist ethics cannot. In a more general
way (i.e., in the broader sense of narrative outlined at the beginning of this chapter), one
can utilize the narrative of her lived experience or the narratives of other persons’

viewpoints and experiences to activate and modify moral prototypes relevant to the

situation at hand.

30

Nussbaum notes that “Aristotelian arguments against generality (against general
rules as suﬂicient for correct choice) point to the need for ﬁne-tuned concreteness in
ethical attention and judgment” (Love’s Knowledge 38). Elsewhere, Nussbaum builds on
practical reason to make a case for the moral imagination within the political realm—to
cultivate what she terms “poets as judges.” She traces a common thread from Aristotle,
“who developed a normative conception of equitable judgment to take the place of an
excessively simple or reductive reliance on abstract general principles,” to Walt
Whitman’s poet-judge, “the equable man” (Poetic Justice 80). She makes the strong
claim that “all of human life is a going beyond the facts. . .a projection of our own
sentiments and inner activities onto forms we perceive about us (and a reception from this
interaction of images of ourselves, our own inner world). We are all us, insofar as we
interact morally and politically, fanciful projectors, makers of and believers in ﬁctions
and metaphors” (3 8). Like Johnson, she construes all we do as being, in some elemental
way, imaginative. And, like Johnson, she sees the moral imagination as a necessary
component of moral reasoning: “[T]his ﬂexible context-speciﬁc judging is not a
concession to the irrational, but the most complete expression of the. . .rational. . ..”
(Love’s Knowledge 80).

Although Nussbaum proposes a more ambitious role for narrative than Charon, she
still views narrative and principles as separate, albeit more equal, forms of rationality.
Others argue for a more exclusively narrativist approach to ethics. Arras describes these
proposals as “a frontal assault on the so-called Enlightenment project of establishing a
rational basis for ethics beyond the constraints of tradition and culture” (73). In these

proposals, ethical theories are anchored within a given historical/cultural tradition. Other

31

communities or cultures may develop parallel moral traditions, but a radically different
morality may evolve just as readily. Echoing concerns that such approaches become
hopelessly relativistic, Arras notes that “reason and rationality will take on as many forms
as there are basic historical traditions; there is no one model of rationality that might be
used as a critical vantage point ﬁom which to pass judgment on the vast panoply of what
Wittgenstein called ‘forrns of life.’ The Enlightenment project of making ethics
‘scientiﬁc,’ objective, and rational by stripping it of all subjective elements borne by
narrative is. . .a philosophical dead end” (73-74). Instead, a historical “meta-narrative”
would emerge, in which ethics would be based on traditions and “foundational stories.”
Ethical justiﬁcation then becomes “a matter of squaring one’s actions with a social

role. . .that is, in turn, justiﬁed by a fundamental narrative” (74).

This approach has been heralded as a means by which one can “bridge the gap”
between the abstractness of moral principles and the particularities unique to a speciﬁc
ethical dilemma. Arras cites Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas as principal
proponents of this approach. MacIntyre notes: “I can only answer the question ‘What
am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I ﬁnd myself a

9”

part (216)? Brody also argues that one must consider salient moral principles within
the context of an individual’s life story, including consideration of the shared values of
the moral community in which the individual resides (e.g., what are the implications of
how and why one’s actions adhere to, or deviate from, the values of one’s moral
community in this situation). Tomlinson identiﬁes these proposals as “narrative

rationality” (129). Narrative rationality asserts that human lives, like narratives,

have meaning because of their place within a time sequence, a chronology,
and to alter the sequence is to alter the meaning... As soon as the

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narrative is told, one can construct a non-narrative exposition of the

content of the narrative. . .. That suggests in turn that if one simply had ‘all

the facts,’ one would have been able to predict whatever was important,

using the most suitable principles and theories, without the narrative. But

that is not the lived experience... [I]t makes a great deal of difference,

conceptually, whether one comes at a narrative from before or after it was

told (Brody 6-7).

Tomlinson ﬁnds this perspective lacking: “The fundamental fallacy in these views
is the inference from the claim that my life is best described by a narrative to the
normative claim that my life choices are best judged by their coherence within my life
narrative. . .. Unless we assume that our stories are being written by someone else (God
or the Fates), we don’t live out a narrative, we create one by living a life” (130).

I agree that “we don’t live out a narrative, we create one by living a life,” but I
want to argue that this supports rather than refutes narrative rationality as a credible
proposal for the central epistemic function of narrative. Tomlinson separates the role of
principles from that of narrative, with narrative in a subsidiary role: narrative may
contextualize the formulation of an ethical dilemma, but the actual work of ethical
decision making ultimately relies on balancing the principles most relevant to that
context. But, as Brody points out, this reductionistic approach assumes people articulate
their life’s narratives and then engage in some form of philosophical ethics.

In lived lives, however, ethics is more likely to reﬂect the Aristotelian notion of
ethics as action. Kathryn Montgomery Hunter elaborates on the Aristotle’s “practical
reason:”

Aristotle distinguishes practical reasoning or phronesis from scientiﬁc

knowing or epistime. . .. The distinction is essential to his account of

ethics as a rational endeavor and especially to its difference from science:

the knowledge of stable physical phenomena that can be generalized as

necessary and invariant laws. Phronesis, by contrast, is a means of
operating in the world, a matter of understanding how best to act in

33

particular circumstances that are not (and cannot be) thoroughly expressed

in general rules. . .. There is, as Aristotle declares, no science of

individuals. . .. Thus, in realms where knowledge is necessarily particular

and rules arise ﬁom individual instances of practice (rather than being

deduced from a general law). . .a different kind of knowing is called for. It

is not that abstractions. . .are irrelevant to practical reason, but that they

cannot go the whole way alone. (304-305)

Ultimately, however, we must confront the “question of what makes any story
[foundational or otherwise] morally compelling and worthy of our allegiance” (Arras 76).
One solution would be to set out criteria for the evaluation of stories. “Narrative ethics
must on this account have recourse to an independent set of abstract criteria bearing
either on the tightness of actions or on the kinds of characters that our stories ought to
foster. But the problem with this approach is obviously that it forfeits the supremacy of
narrative over abstract principle, thereby returning us to the more benign conception of
ethics as a supplement to (or dialectically incorporated ingredient of) principles and
theory” (77).

A more satisfactory approach is to claim that some stories have historically done a
better job than others in solving comparable problems. This approach is “more consonant
with the whole idea of a robust narrative ethics” (77). In an “epistemological crisis”—
when a narrative tradition’s resources no longer prove adequate to the task at hand—one
ﬁrst looks to other narratives for guidance. In this approach, the corrective for an
inadequate story is not recourse to abstract principles, but the formulation of a better
story. Of course, this assumes that the adaptation of an outside story, or the generation of

a new story, represents epistemological and moral progress—not merely the

abandonment of one story and accompanying social roles for another story and set of

34

social roles. In the following chapter, I will examine ways by which one might construct
“a better story,” including Wayne Booth’s notion of coduction.

In summary, most proposals for narrative ethics are either proposals for narrative as
means to ﬁne-tune classical principlist ethics or for narrative and principles as “separate
but equal” cohabitants in the ethical arena. In the ﬁnal chapter, I will argue for a deeper
relationship between narrative and principles—namely, that they are not separate but are

in fact components of a common mode of moral reasoning.

35

Chapter 4: Moral Intelligence

However, my topic is not ‘narrative ethics, ’ at least not in its broadest sense: It is rather
‘narrative (and norms) in ethics.’ I put matters this way to emphasize that I do not
conceive ethics to be exclusively norm-based or even norm-driven. Instead, I will focus
on the relations between norms and narratives in ethics. Both, properly understood, are
essential and indispensable to ethics—the dlﬂicult questions concern their relations.

James Childress, “Narrative(s) versus Norrn(s): A Misplaced Debate in Bioethics”
In: Stories and Their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Ethics

A theory of morality should be a theory of moral understanding. Its goal should be moral
insight and the guidance and direction that come from a deep and rich understanding of
oneself other people, and the complexities of human existence... [Moral reasoning]
involves an expansive form of imaginative reason that is ﬂexible enough to manage our
changing experience and to meet new contingencies intelligently. The key to moral
intelligence is to grasp imaginatively the possibilities for action in a given situation and
to discern which one is most likely to enhance meaning and well-being. The idea of
moral theory as providing governance through rules and principles is fundamentally
mistaken. In fact, it is counterproductive to the extent that it overlooks the changing
character of experience and does not allow us to see creatively new possibilities for
action and response.

Mark Johnson, “How Moral Psychology Changes Moral Theory”
In: Mind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and Cognitive Science

My proposal is that the persistent dichotomy between the narrative and the more
traditional rule-govemed aspects of ethics is a false one. These two methodologies are, in
fact, not an either/or proposition but are merely different facets of the cognitive processes
upon which moral reasoning is predicated. Furthermore, this assertion is supported by
new understandings of brain function from research in cognitive science, namely the
moral prototype theory. These concepts, in turn, correlate to human cognition’s

perceptual images and dispositional representations.

36

Mark Johnson’s proposes that moral prototypes are important in moral
deliberation in the following ways:

1) They represent experientially basic types of situations... 2) [B]asic
prototypes carry with them the affective dimensions of the concrete
situations in which they arise... 3) Prototypes are malleable and
ﬂexible... 4) The meaning, point, and force of a particular prototype will
also depend in part on the various narrative contexts in which it is
embedded... 5) Prototypes will be the basis for whatever moral

principles we have... 6) A central part of our moral development will be
the imaginative use of particular prototypes in constructing our lives

(Moral Imagination 190-192).

This description presupposes that the moral prototype theory is a fundamentally
narrative mode of understanding. Moral prototypes are founded on exemplars that are
learned by narratives—either in the form of moral education or from lived experience.
Moral prototypes subsequently give rise to, and are enacted in, the narrative features of
one’s life Speciﬁcally, a moral prototype may be perceived or enacted differently based
on the contingencies associated with the situational narrative that invokes or is generated
by the prototype. One might envision the likely outcomes of her possible actions,
imaginatively project how these outcomes cohere with relevant ethical framework, then
work to maintain integrity between her ethical framework, her actions, and the likely
consequences of her actions. Prototypes are not necessarily narratives, per se. Moral
concepts such as person, will, and duty are all understood as prototypes. But the
acquisition of each concept, and the apprehension their manifold variations, are narrative
processes.

Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner proposes two complementary but
epistemologically distinct modes of cognitive reasoning: the paradigmatic (or logico-

scientiﬁc) mode and the narrative mode. “Both can be used as means for convincing

37

another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one
of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one veriﬁes by eventual appeal to
procedures for establishing formal and empirical truth. The other establishes not truth but
veri similitude” (l l).

I am proposing that these two modes of thought, while distinct, are in fact
reciprocal elements of the way the human mind reasons—i.e., different facets of a
common rationality. The notion that narrative and principles are part of a common
process is not new. Aristotle’s concept of practical reason was predicated on such a
symbiotic relationship between narrative and principles—Bruner’s two modes of thought

roughly correspond to Hunter’s description of episisteme and phronesis.

Narrative Imagining

What makes the moral imagination inherently narrative? Johnson argues that “our
lives ultimately have a narrative structure. It is in sustained narratives. . .that we come
closest to observing and participating in the reality of life as it is actually experienced and
lived. We learn from, and are changed by, such narratives to the extent that we become
imaginatively engaged in making ﬁne discriminations of character and in determining
what is morally salient in particular situations” (Moral Imagination 196, emphasis
added)

Damasio’s work offers support for this contention in the form of cognitive theory.
“My view then is that having a mind means that an organism forms neural representations
which can become images, be manipulated in a process called thought, and eventually

inﬂuence behavior by helping predict the future, plan accordingly, and choose the next

38

action” (90). Damasio uses the term images to include perceived or imagined “shapes,
colors, movements, tones, or spoken or unspoken words.” Perceptual images, which are
images occurring at the time that they are perceived, include recalled images, which are
images reconstructed from one’s memory (96-97). Recalled images include not only
memories of actual events, but also imagined images that were

formed when you planned something that has not happened but that you

intend to have happen. . .. As the planning process unfolded, you were

forming images of objects and movements, and consolidating a memory of

that ﬁction in your mind. Images of something that has not yet happened

and that may in fact never come to pass are no different in nature from the

images you hold of something that has already happened. They constitute

the memory of a possible future rather than of a past that was (97,

emphasis added).

It is distinctly possible that the brain injuries of Phineas Gage, and Damasio’s
Gage-like patients, deprived them of the ability to coherently imify these images into a
life narrative. Devoid of the ability to imaginatively correlate the images of their past,
present, and possible futures, the “sustained narratives” of their lives were disrupted. As
a result, they could no longer “manage [their] changing experience and. . .meet new
contingencies intelligently” or “grasp imaginatively the possibilities for action in a given
situation and. . .discem which one is most likely to enhance meaning and well-being”
(Johnson, “Moral Psychology” 66-67). The injury to brain structures essential to
communicating and coordinating perceptual images from the diverse regions of the brain
created substantial social and moral deﬁcits. Absent the capacity for narrative imagining,
their moral reasoning was disabled.

Johnson proposes that any meaningful moral theory must allow for the narrative

conceptualization of a lived life:

39

Tracing out over an extended period the consequences of various moral
deliberations is therefore crucial to our moral knowledge, and it is
essential for moral education. It is through sustained life narrative—
through the narratives we live out and construct, and through the ﬁctional
narratives we imaginatively inhabit—that we can perform these essential
reﬂections and moral inquiries. . .. The power of ﬁctional narrative to
develop our moral sensitivity, our ability to make subtle discriminations,

and our empathy for others, is thus the result of the narrative structure of

our lives (Moral Imagination 197, emphasis added).

He refers to this as the “experientialist” or “non-objectivist” view of the self. The
experientialist view of the self sees moral actions—including deliberation via moral
norms—as inextricable from the story of a life. For Johnson, this makes all of life
imaginative. It is the moral imagination that allows for discernment in moral judgment
and allows us to be “self-transforming beings” (160-161). Note that this conception of
narrative assumes that one is actively creating that narrative, and intimates the
development of moral character.

Johnson’s prioritization of experience over principlist deliberation will likely
trigger one of the most common criticisms of narrative ethics, namely that it attempts to
replace analytical, rule-based philosophy. And were he making that claim, the criticism
could be warranted. However, Johnson argues for the integration of these putatively
competing moral paradigms. Quoting John Dewey, he notes that “what moral principles
we have are not technical rules but rather ‘empirical generalizations from the ways in
which previous judgments of conduct have practically worked out.’ They are summaries
of strategies that have proved more or less useﬁrl for the kinds of situations previously

encountered. But they must never be allowed to solidify into absolute rules, for then the

opportunity for moral growth and progress is undermined” (“Moral Psychology” 67).

4O

But how does one integrate basic moral prototypes, ordered sets of principles, and
narrative experience during ethical deliberation and create a lived narrative? Merely
recalling facts, including summary principles, is insufﬁcient for a meaningful moral life.
Ethical deliberation may indeed involve an appeal to one’s ordered set of principles, but
my proposal argues that narrative does more than aid the “real wor ” of weighing and
choosing the most correct principle. Rather, the perception, reﬂective consideration, and
expression of real or ﬁctional narratives performs a central epistemic function in ethical
deliberation. The moral imagination requires more than a reﬁned ordered set of
principles. The moral imagination requires “skills in the recurrent manipulation of one’s
moral perception” (Churchland 103). It requires the ability to “construct an appropriate
theory about. . .their own mind and of the mind of those with whom they interact”
(Damasio 58).

In anticipation of charges that this proposal lends itself to rampant subjectivism, I
would counter that moral education and experience cultivates an array of moral
prototypes that cohere with one’s personal values—which have an intrinsic social
dimension. Wayne Booth’s notion of coduction offers a means of balancing the inherent
subjectivity of narrative with established ethical norms. He develops the concept as an
ethics for literary criticism, but the underlying premise extrapolates readily to narrative

approaches to ethics.

I suggest that we arrive at our sense of values in narratives in precisely the
same way we arrive at our sense of values in persons: by experiencing
them in an immeasurably rich context of others that are both like and
unlike them. Even in my ﬁrst intuition of ‘this new one,’ whether a story
or a person, I see it against a backdrop of my long personal history of
other stories and persons. . .. Thus the logic we depend on as we arrive at
our particular appraisals is neither deduction from clear premises, even of
the most complex kind, nor induction from a series of precisely deﬁned

41

 

and isolated instances. Rather it is always the result of a direct sense that

something now before us has yielded an experience that we ﬁnd

comparatively desirable, lovable or, on the other hand, comparatively

repugnant, contemptible, or hateful (71).

Coduction, as articulated by Booth, anticipates charges of relativism by appealing
to socially acquired norms of morality—not as “absolute rules” but as “summaries of
strategies that have proved more or less useful for the kinds of situations previously
encountered” (Johnson, “Moral Psychology” 67). Ethical deliberation involves a
dialectical process of evaluating the situation in terms of the particularities at hand and
normative guidelines derived from one’s moral education and experience. Norms are
contextually dependent—the particular features of the situation will determine which
ethical guidelines apply, how they apply, and possibly how they need to be modiﬁed
given the unique features of the situation. Furthermore, as discussed earlier, ethical
norms are learned, understood, and applied via cognitive processes that are
fundamentally narrative. In this process, narrative is not merely functioning as a
handmaiden to principles; it provides a central epistemic function to moral reasoning in
and of itself. But by appealing to the meta-narratives distilled from societal experience
(i.e., ethical principles), narrative can effectively “connect with a normative essence,
idea, or norm beyond the vagaries of actual human behavior” (Arras 67).

This approach coheres with the cognitive science proposals outlined earlier in this
thesis. One develops moral prototypes through experience and moral education. These
prototypes provide a basis for comparison—moral guides, or principles, that are the
summary representations of one’s own or one’s socially acquired precedents for

comparable situations. Thus, when one encounters a problematic situation, the solution is

not necessarily a simple appeal to principles. Rather, one correlates the particular

42

features and imagined possible outcomes of the situation at hand with her established
moral prototypes—such as the child in Flanagan’s example learning to distinguish a joke
from a white lie from a morally justiﬁed lie to protect another individual. This is, as
outlined before, a context dependent process—i.e., a process reliant on narrative
imagining to frame the situation with one’s established prototypes. If no amount of
“context ﬁxing” identiﬁes a satisfactory prototype, one can modify an established
prototype or develop a new prototype that satisfactorily integrates the situation in
question with one’s ordered set of principles, pretheoretical moral judgments, and
background beliefs and theories about the world.

Mark Johnson offers a perspective that broadens not only the role of narrative in
human rationality, but also the range of activities that one might classify as “moral.”
Johnson proposes that essentially all of our deliberate actions involve narrative
imagining. He describes the narrative nature of seemingly mundane everyday activities:

Most of the myriad acts we perform every day, from picking up coffee

cups to reading the newspaper to playing games with our children, are

done for some purpose or other. Most of the time, we pursue these

purposes with little or no conscious reﬂection or awareness, for the acts

we perform are mostly routine. Nonetheless, the purposive element is

ahnost always present, because we are constantly directing our energies
toward realizing goals that are means to our more comprehensive goals...

(Moral Imagination 164).

Johnson is sensitive to the charge that he is over-reaching, yet he wishes to clearly assert
that narrative serves a fundamental role in judgment beyond its communicative or
reﬂective component. “It most deﬁnitely does not follow from this use of ‘narrative’ that
every experience is a ‘text’ in the sense of a linguistic entity. . .. However, my sense of
narrative does indeed entail that we are fundamentally interpretive animals in everything

that we do” (153).

43

A credible criticism of this argument would be that everything we do is narrative
in the sense that it involves “a sequence of events” and that this is an unenlightening way
to cast events as “narratives.” Johnson does not claim that every prosaic action itself is
necessarily narrative. Instead, he claims that the underlying motivations, goals, and
understandings in which such events are embedded constitute an intrinsically narrative
way of perceiving and understanding the world and other people. That is, narrative
serves a central epistemic function even in basic, non-moral activities. That function is
more apparent and essential in “the discovery, justiﬁcation or application of ethical
knowledge.”

This coheres well with Damasio’s sense of how perceptual images are modiﬁed
and directed by dispositional representations—and, conversely, can modify and direct
relevant dispositional representations to adaptively respond to perceptions or imaginative
projections. From here, action ensues. Our actions are a part of the sustained narratives
of our life—as Tomlinson suggests, we creating our narratives by living a life.

It is the ability to envision our actions as a part of our sustained life narrative, to
imagine the moral other, to project how an ethical decision may play itself out in the
foreseeable future, that makes ethical decision making imaginative. And this imaginative
projection does not simply serve a subsidiary role in the weighting of competing ethical
principles. Principles derive from context-speciﬁc historical origins, and in an ethical
dilemma are considered within a context that can only be understood by grasping the
particularities embedded within the situation. These principles are then imaginatively

manipulated in a dialectical manner via the moral imagination. Ethics does not merely

44

need narrative to make it work better—narrative imagining is an integral part of ethical
deliberation.

After his injury, Phineas Gage continued to live out his life, but he was no longer
the author of a sustained, coherent life narrative. Instead, his narrative was limited to a
disjointed series of experiences without a unifying theory of himself or those around him.
He lost his capacity for moral imagination. Dr. Harlow observed that his “animal
propensities” had taken over. Perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to say that one needs

narrative to be fully human.

45

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