Bring Moral Imagination Back in Style
I CAME back from the beach one day to find my grandmother and her nearly deaf friend Hilda playing gin and drinking vodka. “She’s Not There,” by the Zombies, was playing on the radio. This was a little strange. “Why is Hilda listening to WFIL?” I asked.
“Shh,” my grandmother replied. “She thinks it’s classical.”
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It wasn’t that I didn’t understand that she suffered, back when she was old and deaf and I was young and not. It’s that whatever she suffered from was something I didn’t need to be concerned with. It didn’t occur to me that imagining the humanity of people other than myself was my responsibility. And yet the root cause of so much grief is our failure to do just that.
Edmund Burke called this the “moral imagination,” the idea that our ethics should transcend our own personal experience and embrace the dignity of the human race.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/opinion/bring-moral-imagination-back-in-style.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-4&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article
Good article for thinking about over the weekend...
