The Role of Courage Within Moral Imagination: A Critique

Moral imagination and moral courage are vital themes in business ethics education, yet their intimate relationship has been a subject of little conceptual study. This paper argues, following Kant as well as the insights of social psychology, that moral courage provides the key constitutive condition for moral imagination to work, particularly in business settings. On the other hand, while thinkers of moral imagination such as Patricia Werhane write admiringly of moral courage from time to time, they spend little time on developing the latter concept in its intimate and constitutive relationship with moral imagination. This paper proposes that the pedagogical approaches of moral imagination and moral courage should be integrated with special reference to Mary Gentile’s Giving Voice to Values Approach, a pedagogical method which provides the crucial tools to build the ‘moral muscle’ for exercising ethical action in hierarchically organized firms.