Book Review: Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics

not require the subordination of passion to reason, or the reverse. Moral progress involves neither getting closer to a preestablished pattern nor removing obstacles to conformity to it, because there is no pattern" (141). Similarly, certain analyses of adherence to moral values are strongly subjectivist. "Conceptions of a good life are intended to select those values of the tradition whose possession would best fit the agents' character and circumstances" (97). In such passages, the validity of moral judgments appears to rest upon personal preference and internal coherence alone. If K.'s version of pluralism is not always consistent, his ambitious work successfully treats several problems in contemporary moral theory. He painstakingly analyzes the radicality of moral conflict, which cannot be masked by resort to facile monisms. Further, he carefully sketches a reasonable approach to the practical resolution of value conflicts in the individual and the political orders. An astute psychologist, he provides a remarkable analysis of moral imagination as the locus of possible moral and aesthetic values, the rich horizon of our actual pluralism.