Bridging Kant's abyss: developing the imagination in moral judgement

I argue a place for the imagination in Kant’s account of moral judgement. I then explore how the moral educator must aim to develop in the student the capacity to judge in this expanded sense. Recent scholarship has illustrated that Kant’s moral theory is more nuanced and wide-ranging than is often portrayed. It follows that moral judgement needs also be envisaged in a more expansive sense than portrayed by Kant in the second Critique. I contend that the imagination – as Kant described it – must be incorporated into our account of moral judgement, thus, making possible a judgement that is simultaneously reflective and determinate. This enlarged account of moral judgement, in turn, enables a revisiting of Kant’s problem as to how we can get from theory to practice, i.e., how there can be a connection between the supersensible realm of freedom and the actual material instance where moral action must unfold. Just as the imagination is essential to Kant’s explanation of how empirical judgements are formed and central to his explanation of aesthetic judgement, I argue that the imagination is also essential to an explanation of moral judgement, particularly, if it is to be capable of facilitating the transition from theory to practice. I propose that the imagination – at play in moral judging – enables a ‘seeing-as’ of a particular instance as rule-apt, makes possible a ‘seeing symbolically’, and, as a power of the mind, is associated with moral willing.