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To act according to rules is to have disciplined behaviour and might be seen as ethical, but to be moral requires having an imagination through which to consider the possible consequences and ramifications of an action and so distinguish between what would be right and what would be wrong. It takes imagination to reach a judgement that can inform one's own actions or react or respond to other people's actions. This does not necessarily mean that moral reasoning requires a rational, conscious, cognitive act of weighing up pros and cons, calculating causes and effects. In the imagination, a person may see what the outcome will be and have the sense of simply knowing what is right or wrong. This capacity of the imagination often becomes habitual or routine and is the result of prior experience, of having learnt through seeing similar social situations followed through. Some situations may require a more conscious or semi-conscious process of deliberation and reasoning, especially when decisions have to be made collectively as, for example, in making a decision about the ethical consequences of how to treat an ill patient. For collective decisions, a discursive sharing of the process and the judgement will be necessary, but for the individual actor, moral decisions will usually be silent and intuitive. There is an emotional component to the individual process that makes it more fluid than the mechanical calculation of consequences, so that the person feels what would be the right thing to do.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137035554_8

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