The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace

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Agreement between different world views from the perspective of the moral imagination

The reason for the conflicts and disagreements inherited in the fabric of society is often the inability to recognize the authenticity of the actions or ideas of others if they go beyond the accepted framework. In reality, every person has moral judgement and values that cannot be identical to other people. In such a case, the only thing we can do at least to try to imagine that all the morals are equally authentic. Lederach (2005) defines the moral imagination as a key concept in understanding the reasoning behind other people’s perspectives of the world:

It [moral imagination] is built on a capacity to imagine that it is possible to hold multiple realities and world views simultaneously as parts of a greater whole without losing one’s identity and viewpoint and without needing to impose or force one’s view on the other (p. 62).

The author distinguishes that the roots of the conflicts lie in the assumption that everyone in the world thinks and in the same moral framework. People understand that they perceive the world differently, remember things and events differently, and form different opinions and feelings about them. However, when some events happen, we still look for one true explanation, we expect that only one version of events was real, and there is only one authentically moral way to feel about those events. The author pays specific attention to the fact that challenges and problems that people face in life and communication are not dilemmas. From this perspective, with the use of moral imagination, there are no dualistic polarities. On a greater whole, each moral judgement is equally valuable, and common welfare depends on each member of society (Lederach, 2005).

In terms of resolving conflicts, would not the communities with moral imagination be in a disadvantaged position compared with the communities without it? If the latter neglects the welfare of the first ones, how can they respond to that?

Constructive social change

People tend to look at conflicts from the geographical point of view and associate them with physically perceptive factors, such as political situations, economic conditions, ethnic motivations, etc. Therefore, the acceleration of any social change or resolution of any conflict is transferred to the field of negotiating, making compromises for cohabitation. Even though in our everyday life we emphasize that we believe actions more than words, the peace-building processes rely almost exclusively on language persuasion. Lederach (2005) expands on this in the following way:

While language and words are and will remain a mainstay of how social change is understood, shaped and conveyed, unilateral dependence on one faculty of perception creates narrowness and weakness (p. 110).

The author supports the idea that language as a means of communication between the representatives of different cultures, different communities, or even different people distances them rather than unites. Therefore, in peacebuilding, we need to relate to other experiences that we share. For resolving conflicts, we need to think about the interconnections rather than communication. The first one includes considering consequences from the perspective of the moral imagination, whereas the latter only protocols things that already happened that lead to no social change.

The sense of empathy to another human being in some difficult situation occurs even without using language, and sometimes cannot be described with words. How shared experiences, such as this, can be theoretically used in conflict solving and peacebuilding?

References

Lederach, J. (2005). The moral imagination. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

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The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace

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