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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Uses of the Imagination in Moral Neuroeducation

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In contrast to influential theories that focus on top-down, deliberative reasoning, triune ethics theory seeks to gather findings from neurobiology, affective neuroscience, and cognitive science and integrate them into a bottom-up theory that focuses on that motivational orientations that are rooted in experientially formed, evolved, unconscious emotional systems. Triune ethics theory identifies three basic attractors for moral functioning based on brain evolution: safety, engagement and imagination. It proposes an integrative ethical education model based on the notion of a moral imagination, which can enhance moral development. It integrates, on the one hand, John Dewey’s theory of moral imagination, which focuses on the social nature of moral imagination, the ability to think in a flexible way, and the role of reason and emotion in self-regulation; and, on the other, Mark Turner’s theory of conceptual blending, which provides us with a broader cognitive tool that enables us to understand how human thought operates in conceptual networks, and performs a variety of discourse functions, from event integration, conceptual change, and metaphor projection to humour, literary invention, and the transfer of emotions and attitudes. Over the course of this chapter I will discuss the understanding of moral imagination as set out in triune ethics theory, and argue that the literary mind is an indispensable tool of everyday reason and moral imagination, one which permits participants in a discourse to construct mental spaces for the purpose of understanding and acting.