Imaginative Resistance and Empathic Resistance
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Imaginative Resistance and Empathic Resistance Thomas Szanto1,2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract In the past few decades, a growing number of philosophers have tried to explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance (IR), or why readers often resist the invitation of authors to imagine morally deviant fictional scenarios. In this paper, I critically assess a recent proposal to explain IR in terms of a failure of empathy, and present a novel explanation. I do so by drawing on Peter Goldie’s narrative account of empathic perspective-taking, which curiously has so far been neglected in the IR-literature. I argue that, in some cases, IR is due to a partial confusion of two kinds of imaginative perspective-taking towards a fictional character: an internal, genuinely empathic, perspective-taking, on the one hand, and an external, cryptoempathic, stance that can be characterized as in-her-shoes-imagining, on the other. I argue that, in the cases at issue, IR is not so much a resistance to imagining but, rather, to empathically enacting an evildoer’s moral and phenomenal first-person perspective. I conclude by considering some more general lessons that follow from my account for what has recently been called sadistic empathy and point to an unresolved issue for future thinking about IR. Keywords Imaginative resistance · Imagination · Fiction · Empathy · Empathic perspective-taking · Peter Goldie
1 Introduction When reading fiction or watching a movie, we are often invited to imagine strange, puzzling or outright counterfactual events, objects or characters. However unfamiliar the imaginative territory, if authors, directors or narrators do their job well, normally we readily accept the invitation to make ourselves believe in the fictional reality of time-travel, aliens, or discoursing mice. But the situation is quite different when it comes to scenarios that have a certain moral weight, or when it comes to imagining what is right or wrong. We seem to have a hard time imagining morally evil deeds or facts, say female infanticide, to be right and consequently resist imagining them. Importantly, what is at issue is not simply making oneself believe that female infanticide would happen, or picturing it to be real, but making oneself believe that it would be a moral fact or the right thing to do. And this seems to be the case even if we remind ourselves, * Thomas Szanto [email protected] 1
Department for Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, København, Denmark
2
or are reminded by authors or narrators, that those evils are only supposed to be right in the fictional world. Even if we remind ourselves that ‘it’s just fiction’, not everything goes. This, as a first gloss, is the so-called puzzle or paradox of imaginative resistance (henceforth: IR). As so often, Hume (1757) was the first to have noticed that phenomenon (cf. Gendler 2006a, b). After more than two centuries of relative silence,1 in the wake of
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