Have You Ever Created a Solution No Rulebook Covered?

Chapter 12 in the Structure of the Book

Chapter 12 of "The Philosophy of Freedom" is titled "Moral Imagination (Darwin and Morals)" in Michael Wilson's standard English translation. It appears in the book's second part, "The Reality of Freedom," which builds on the epistemological foundation of Part One ("Knowledge of Freedom") to develop the ethical implications.

By the time the reader reaches Chapter 12, Steiner has established two foundations. Epistemologically, he has argued in Part One that thinking is the self-grounding activity through which the human being has direct access to conceptual reality, that concepts are not subjective impositions on an unknowable thing-in-itself but genuine aspects of a single reality that presents itself to perception as appearance and to thinking as conceptual content. Ethically, he has established in the earlier chapters of Part Two that genuine freedom consists in acting from moral intuitions grasped through free thinking rather than from external authority, biological drive, or social convention. He has also established the threefold structure of free moral action: moral intuition, moral imagination, and moral technique.

Chapter 12 takes this framework and extends it in two directions. First, it asks: given that moral action requires both general moral intuitions and specific imaginative responses to concrete situations, what is the relationship between the general moral norms that human communities have developed over centuries and the specific creative responses that individual free agents must produce? This is the question that the Darwin analogy addresses. Second, it asks: is the ethical individualism that Steiner describes compatible with the existence of a shared moral world, or does it dissolve into a chaos of incompatible individual moral universes? This is the question that conceptual monism addresses.

The chapter is relatively short (as are most chapters in the book) but it is densely argued. Its apparent brevity is characteristic of Steiner's philosophical writing style: he states positions with compression that can make them seem simple, but the density of the argument rewards sustained engagement and re-reading.

The Darwin Analogy: Moral Evolution

The chapter's title announces the Darwin analogy as central. Steiner invokes Darwin not to endorse social Darwinism (which was being developed in the same period by Herbert Spencer and others, and which Steiner explicitly opposes) but to make a specific point about the evolution of morality.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection explained how species adapt and develop without any external designer or pre-given plan. Individual variations arise; those that prove adaptive survive and reproduce; over time, new forms emerge from the accumulated selection of adaptive variations. The key point for Steiner's analogy is that evolution is driven forward by individual variation, not by the average of the existing population. The next step of evolution comes from the individual that departs in some productive direction from the norm.

Steiner applies this structure to morality. Existing moral norms (honesty, fairness, non-maleficence, the various formulations of the Golden Rule) represent the accumulated moral learning of human communities over historical time. They are not arbitrary: they have developed because they have proven, through long communal experience, to support human flourishing. In this sense they are analogous to the existing adaptations of a species: not arbitrary features but features that have been selected for because they work.

But just as biological evolution cannot proceed from the average alone (a species that only reproduced the average of its current generation would stagnate), moral evolution cannot proceed from the application of existing norms alone. Each genuinely new moral situation that humanity faces (and history continually produces new situations for which no adequate norm exists) requires something that goes beyond the existing consensus. That something is provided by individuals with developed moral imagination who can perceive what the new situation morally requires and bring that perception into concrete action.

Historical examples illuminate the argument. The moral case for abolishing the transatlantic slave trade was not immediately derivable from the existing moral consensus of the eighteenth century, which accepted slavery as a given social institution. It required individuals whose moral imagination could perceive the humanity of the enslaved person with sufficient vividness and depth that the conclusion became inescapable: this situation demands abolition. The legal and social change followed from the prior moral perception and imagination of specific individuals. The abolitionist movement was, in Steiner's terms, an instance of moral evolution driven by individual moral imagination.

The Limits of Moral Codes

One of the central arguments of Chapter 12 is that no moral code can be sufficient for genuine moral action. This is not an argument against moral codes. Steiner explicitly values the accumulated wisdom they encode. His argument is about the inherent structural limitation of codes as guides to action in specific situations.

A moral code is a generalisation: it applies to a class of situations that share relevant features. "Do not lie" applies to all situations in which one person is asked for information by another. "Treat people as ends, not merely as means" (Kant's formulation) applies to all situations involving the treatment of persons. These generalisations encode genuine moral insight about what typically promotes human flourishing.

But every specific situation I actually face is not merely a member of a class of situations. It is this situation: with these specific people, these specific relationships, this specific history, these specific possible consequences. The general rule tells me something about the class of situations my situation belongs to. It does not tell me specifically what to do in this situation. That requires a further act: the perception of what this situation specifically requires (moral intuition) and the creative envisioning of the response that would answer that specific requirement (moral imagination).

Beyond this, specific situations often involve conflicting moral claims. Honesty and compassion may conflict: the completely honest statement may also be deeply harmful. The code-follower is helpless here: which code to apply? The morally imaginative person perceives the specific balance of values at stake in this particular situation and envisions a response that honours them as fully as possible. This response cannot be derived from either code; it must be created.

Steiner's argument here parallels arguments in twentieth-century ethical theory. W.D. Ross's theory of prima facie duties (1930) similarly holds that several moral principles are valid but can conflict, requiring practical wisdom (phronesis in Aristotle's term) to adjudicate in specific cases. Particularist ethics (Jonathan Dancy, 1993) argues that the moral relevance of a feature of a situation is not fixed but depends on the context: honesty is normally relevant to moral assessment, but in a situation where it would enable serious harm, the same feature of honesty may become morally irrelevant or even count against an action. Both positions converge with Steiner's: moral codes provide orientation but not determination; determination requires individual perception and creative response.

The Three Components of Free Moral Action

Steiner's account of free moral action has three components, introduced in Chapter 12 and the immediately surrounding chapters. The three components describe the complete movement from moral awareness to moral deed.

Moral intuition is the first component. It is a direct, cognitive insight into the moral character of a specific situation. This is emphatically not a feeling of what seems right (which would be acting from instinct or conditioning). It is a genuine act of knowing: the individual perceives, through free thinking, what the situation morally demands. Moral intuitions are not invented; they are discovered. They are genuine contacts with moral reality, just as perceptual observations are genuine contacts with physical reality. The development of the capacity for moral intuition requires the development of free thinking: a thinking that can encounter the specific situation without immediately filtering it through prior categories.

Moral imagination is the second and specifically creative component. Given a moral intuition (a cognitive grasp of what the situation requires), the morally imaginative person can form concrete mental images of actions that would actualise the moral demand in the specific circumstances. This is an act of creative visualisation in the moral domain. The content of the imagination is constrained by the moral intuition: not any action will do, only an action that corresponds to what the intuition has grasped. But within that constraint, the imagination is genuinely creative: it envisions possibilities that did not exist before the act of envisioning them. The moral imaginer is, in this sense, an artist in the moral domain.

Moral technique is the third component. It is the practical knowledge and skill required to execute the imagined action effectively in the world. A physician who perceives that a patient needs a specific treatment (moral intuition), envisions a treatment plan (moral imagination), but lacks the medical skill to carry it out (moral technique) is unable to complete the free moral act. This is why practical competence in one's domain of action is not separate from moral life but integral to it. Steiner's account of moral technique also includes social and communicative skills: the capacity to bring one's moral imagination into effect in the context of real social relationships and institutional structures.

Moral Imagination in Detail

The concept of moral imagination is the most original contribution of Chapter 12. It resolves a difficulty that all ethics based on principles faces: the gap between the general principle and the specific action in a specific situation. This gap is not a flaw in the principle but an inherent feature of the relationship between the general and the particular. No amount of refinement of the principle closes the gap; it can only be crossed by an act of imagination.

Steiner's use of the word imagination is precise. He does not mean wishful thinking or fantasy. He means the cognitive capacity to form concrete mental representations of what is not yet actual. The mathematician imagines a geometric construction; the architect imagines a building; the moral person imagines an action. In each case, the imagination creates something that exists as a mental reality before it exists as a physical reality. And in each case, the quality of the imagination determines the quality of what gets actualised.

Moral imagination is sensitive to the specific. This is its defining feature and what distinguishes it from the application of a moral code. A code applies in the same way to any instance of the relevant class. Moral imagination attends to what is specific in this instance: the particular history of the relationship, the particular vulnerabilities and strengths of the people involved, the particular constraints and possibilities of the concrete situation. This specificity is what allows moral imagination to produce a response that is genuinely adequate to the situation rather than merely adequate to the class.

The development of moral imagination therefore requires the development of genuine perception of specific persons and situations. This is the moral significance of art, literature, and biographical engagement. The reader of serious fiction who has genuinely encountered the inner life of a character very different from themselves has developed their moral imagination. The person who has made the effort to perceive someone they find initially antipathetic with genuine attention and openness has developed their moral imagination. The practitioner of the sympathy-antipathy observation exercise described in the Political Discernment article on this site is directly developing the perceptive capacity that moral imagination requires.

Conceptual Monism and Ethical Life

Chapter 12 introduces the term conceptual monism as a name for Steiner's philosophical position. Monism here means the view that reality is fundamentally one, not two separate worlds (a material world and a spiritual world, or a natural world and a moral world). The "conceptual" modifier specifies what kind of monism: reality presents itself to experience in two aspects (percept and concept), but these are two aspects of a single reality, not two separate realities.

The relevance to ethics is this: if the moral world were a separate realm of eternal ideals above the natural world (as in various forms of Platonism), the gap between the ideal and the actual would be unbridgeable in the natural direction. The natural human being could only receive moral demands from above, not generate them from within. If, on the other hand, the moral world were merely a projection of natural drives (as in evolutionary ethics or psychological egoism), morality would have no genuine binding force: moral claims would be nothing more than expressions of what certain people happen to prefer.

Steiner's conceptual monism allows a third position. Moral intuitions are genuine cognitive contacts with real moral demands, but these demands are not in a separate supernatural realm: they are the conceptual aspect of natural human reality, accessible through the activity of free thinking. The same reality that presents itself to perception as the behaviour of human beings in social relationships presents itself to free thinking as a moral field with genuine structure and demands. The moral world is not above nature but within it, and free thinking is the faculty through which its structure becomes accessible.

This means that ethical individualism does not produce a chaos of incompatible individual moral universes. The moral reality that different individuals access through their moral intuitions is the same reality. Two people of equally developed free thinking, encountering the same situation, should arrive at the same or compatible moral intuitions, just as two perceptive observers of the same physical object should arrive at compatible perceptual reports. The individuality lies in the specific moral imagination each brings to the task of envisioning the concrete response, not in inventing incompatible moral realities.

The Moral Artist: Action as Creation

Chapter 12 draws an explicit parallel between moral creativity and aesthetic creativity. Just as an artist brings an aesthetic vision into concrete material form through creative work, the morally free person brings a moral intuition into concrete action through moral imagination and moral technique. The parallel is deliberate and deep.

In aesthetic art, the artist has a vision (analogous to moral intuition), forms that vision into a specific concrete work (analogous to moral imagination), and executes it in specific material (analogous to moral technique). The resulting work is unique: no two genuine works of art are identical even if they treat the same subject with the same intention. The uniqueness is not a defect but a feature: it reflects the irreducible individuality of the artist's creative response to their subject.

The same is true of genuine moral action. The morally imaginative person's response to a specific moral situation is unique: it is the expression of this person's moral imagination in this specific situation. Two morally free persons may arrive at the same moral intuition about what a situation requires but may envision somewhat different actions as the appropriate concrete response, each reflecting the specific character of their individual moral imaginations. This is not relativism; it is the consequence of the fact that moral action, like art, is a creative act that expresses the individual while responding to a genuinely shared reality.

Steiner draws from this the conclusion that the moral hero of the future (his expression) is not the scrupulous rule-follower who never departs from the existing consensus. The moral hero of the future is the individual with sufficient moral imagination to perceive what genuinely new situations require and sufficient courage to act from that perception even before the community has caught up. This is a demanding standard, but it is the logical consequence of the evolutionary view of morality: progress requires departure from consensus by individuals who have developed beyond it.

Developing the Capacity for Moral Imagination

Steiner does not give a systematic programme for developing moral imagination in Chapter 12, but the broader context of his work provides the elements.

The development of free thinking is the foundation. The control of thinking exercise (sustained voluntary attention on a chosen object, gently redirecting wandering attention) builds the capacity to direct thinking voluntarily rather than being driven by whatever is most emotionally salient. This is necessary for moral intuition: the automatic emotional responses to a morally complex situation often obscure the genuine moral demand rather than illuminating it. The practitioner needs the capacity to hold the situation open, to observe it without immediately reacting to it, long enough for genuine moral perception to develop.

The development of genuine perception of other persons is the second element. Moral imagination responds to the specific person in the specific situation. The richer and more accurate one's perception of the other person, the more adequate the moral imagination can be. This is developed through the sustained practice of genuine listening (attending to what another person is actually saying and feeling rather than to one's own responses), through genuine engagement with lives and perspectives very different from one's own (serious literature, biography, cross-cultural encounter), and through the positivity exercise: deliberately finding what is genuinely valuable and coherent in the perspective of someone you find initially antipathetic.

The development of the capacity to form concrete mental images is the third element. This is developed through visualisation practices, through drawing and artistic work, and through the systematic study of the lives and decisions of others (historical biography and ethical case study) that builds a repertoire of moral imagination the practitioner can draw on in their own situations. Reading closely about how specific moral heroes (in Steiner's sense: people who perceived and acted on what others could not yet see) arrived at and executed their imaginative moral responses provides models for developing one's own moral imagination.

For those working through the Thalira framework, the complete Philosophy of Freedom analysis on this site provides the full context for Chapter 12's argument. The Political Discernment article applies the same framework of sympathy-antipathy, living thinking, and moral imagination to the specific domain of political engagement. The Living Thinking article addresses the development of free thinking that is the foundation for both moral intuition and moral imagination. And the Guardian of the Threshold series addresses the inner psychological obstacles (projection, the shadow, the encounter with the double) that block the development of the genuine moral perception that moral imagination requires.