What are the limits of the imagination in morality? What role does fiction play in moral thought? My starting point in addressing these questions is Tamar Szabo Gendler's ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’, the problem of explaining the special difficulties we seem to encounter in imagining to be right what we take to be morally wrong (or vice versa) in fiction, and Gendler's claim that those difficulties are due to our unwillingness to imagine these things, rather than our inability to imagine what is logically or conceptually impossible. Using a wide range of examples, I argue that there is no puzzle of imaginative resistance and that to think that there is such a puzzle is to miss almost entirely the role fiction plays in moral thought. That, however, does not mean that there are no limits to what we can imagine in morality. In fact, I argue, the imagination is limited in morality, as elsewhere, by what is logically or conceptually possible. Together, those claims suggest that fiction and the imagination play a fundamental role in shaping our conception of the moral landscape. The paper concludes by drawing some of the consequences of these views for the nature of moral thought.

中文翻译：

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对魔鬼的同情：想象力抵抗之谜、小说在道德思想中的作用以及想象力的局限

道德想象的极限是什么？小说在道德思想中扮演什么角色？我解决这些问题的出发点是 Tamar Szabo Gendler 的“想象力抵抗之谜”，这个问题解释了我们在想象小说中我们认为道德错误（反之亦然）时似乎遇到的特殊困难，以及Gendler 声称这些困难是由于我们不愿意想象这些事情，而不是我们无法想象在逻辑上或概念上不可能的事情。使用广泛的例子，我认为不存在想象抵抗的谜题，认为有这样一个谜题几乎完全错过了小说在道德思想中所扮演的角色。然而，这并不意味着我们对道德的想象没有限制。实际上，我认为，想象力在道德上受到限制，就像在其他地方一样，受到逻辑上或概念上可能的限制。总之，这些主张表明，小说和想象力在塑造我们对道德景观的概念方面发挥着重要作用。本文最后得出了这些观点对道德思想本质的一些影响。