L’etica e la concezione espressivista della mente

The article examines two views of imagination in connection with ethics. Adam Smith considers imagination natural yet conceives what’s inside the mind as hidden and thus given and universal. A different concept of imagination comes with an expressivist notion of the mind, such as Wittgenstein’s, which conceives it as entering in the social and personal worlds which shape people’s inner life. Both notions of imagination are helpful in order to criticize a contemporary view such as R.M. Hare’s, which considers imagination as a properly impossible task for human beings and which thus places moral reflection at a distance from ordinary thought and human relations which cannot be bridged. Smith and Wittgenstein are both helpful in order to dismantle this sort of unrealism in contemporary ethics.