"The puzzle of imaginative resistance: the puzzle of explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant." (Tamar Gendler, The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 97, 2000, p. 56)
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Of the Standard of Distaste [I have written a sequel of sorts to this post]

Tamar Gendler cites the following passage, from Hume's "Of The Standard of Taste", as the earliest statement (to her knowledge) of the puzzle:

Where speculative errors may be found in the polite writings of any age or country, they detract but little from the value of those compositions. There needs to be but a certain turn of thought or imagination to make us enter into all the opinions which then prevailed and relish the sentiments or conclusions derived from them. But a very violent effort is requisite to change our judgment of manners, and excite sentiments of approbation or blame, love or hatred, different from those to which the mind from long custom has been familiarized ... I cannot, nor is it proper that I should, enter into such [vicious] sentiments.

Now I haven't gone back to check the context, but Hume does not seem to be stating the puzzle Gendler is interested in. How not?

Well, first of all, Hume isn't discussing intentional fiction at all but sincere attempts at non-fiction that fail in either of two ways. The first half of his point is, basically, we can take failed science and enjoy it as successful science-fiction. OK, that's clearly consistent with Gendler's point. In fact, it implies part of her point. (Hume didn't have so much intentional sci-fi to read, back in the day, so he focusses on the accidental variety. Fair enough.) But the second half of the passage raises a very different point than Gendler's. Here Hume is talking, not about the difficulty of imagining that moral views other than those one takes to be true might be true, counterfactually; he is talking about the psychological naturalness of repulsion from morals (and manners) one takes to be wrong, or that are merely not one's own. He is saying, to pick an illustratively extreme case: if you are reading a book written by a member of a warlike tribe that savagely slaughters and cannibalizes the children of its innocent, vanquished foes, you will be disgusted and put the book down rather than continue reading graphic passage after passage after passage of enthusiastic boosterism for this stuff. And this is a good thing because it's a bad thing to become (as we say today) desensitized to violence. (I don't say it's so myself, but we are, I trust, familiar with this line of media criticism.)

Another example that combines the two points. Hume is saying something like: we can delight in reading about the odd, mystical beliefs of the ancient Pythagoreans. It is charming to think, 'all is number', and imagine where one would take it from there, how things would look, how one might attempt to overcome possible counter-examples. It is fun to role-play Pythagoras, as an intellectual game, even if you are a stalwart empiricist. But all that stops, Hume is saying, at the point where the Pythagoreans throw the poor guy down the well for having the temerity to reveal to the unwashed masses the divine glories of the dodecahedron (or icosahedron, whichever.) We are not inclined to role-play murder.

Now, I think either Hume is rather different than most of us today, or else he is wrong about this - I expect a bit of both.

Taking these points in order, Hume was a very urbane, cosmopolitan figure by the standards of his day; but for better and/or worse we today far exceed him, on average, in our breadth of ethico-ethnographic imagination and tolerance. (Big vague, ambiguous, sweeping, tendentious point, that; not going to argue it.) But we all have our limits. Let me pick a likely limit. William S. Burroughs writes lots of books in which there are lots of lurid, explicit decriptions of rough homosexual sex, and sundry associated drugs-takings and grotesqueries and people turning into bugs and consuming each other. The whole kit and kaboodle. Lots of folks would find it pretty hard to, er, swallow Naked Lunch cover to cover. (Not Dan Savage, and not me, but lots of folks.) Anyway, Hume is just saying there is a reason certain loves dare not speak their names. Their names bother people, in point of psychological fact, because they remind people of them. And, by the by, please note: lots of people who don't even believe homosexual sex is immoral can be made very uncomfortable by especially graphic and extreme representations of it. I suspect in Hume's day - what with so little Jerry Springer on TV to desensitize them - it was a lot easier to make people genuinely uncomfortable just by telling them about places and cultures in which people walk around all day without any pants on.

Second point: I think Hume is a bit naive (or politely dissembling) about human inclinations to relish representations of immorality. As any actor will tell you, it's more fun to play the villain. We love the Silence of the Lambs because we root for goody-goody Clarice, but also because we are fascinated by the contours of Hannibal's twisted morality. But I won't go there today.

Now none of this really matters, in a sense, because Gendler (and Weatherson) aren't concerned with doing history of philosophy. (It's nice to start with a little historical note, then get on to the timeless issues. I'm cool with that.)

But let me finish with the history; there is a point. There is, so it seems to me, a classic statement of this imaginative puzzle of Gendler's. Or, anyway, a recognition of it that's clearly implicit - in Plato's Euthyphro. (Here's a Euthyphro page I made for my students. I wanted a very readable, on-line version, couldn't find one. So I went to the inordinate bother of doing an English to English translation, as it were, quadrangulating from four different existing translations; then, when I was done, having Belle - who is fluent in ancient Greek - go over it once again; so it's not scholarly, but it's OK. Also, I got to indulge my cartooning instincts.)

Astounding Tales!

In the following passage Euthyphro has just explained that he is prosecuting his father in accordance with a time-honored principle for telling right from wrong: namely, ask WWZD. What would Zeus do? (And so we hear a lot about castrating one's father, who castrated his father, etc., etc.)

S: Indeed, Euthyphro, these are just the sorts of considerations that have landed me in legal trouble, for I find it hard to accept things like this being said about the gods. Probably this is how and why I shall be told I am in the wrong. Now, however, if you – who know all about it – believe reports of this sort, then I must too, it seems. For what else can I say, admitting as I do my lack of first-hand knowledge? Tell me, in the name of the god of friendship, do you really believe these things are true?

E; Yes, Socrates, and so are even more surprising things – things that must remain mysteries, concealed from the crowd.

S: So you believe that the gods really go to war, that there are hateful rivalries and battles between them such as are related by the poets? These scenes out of our sacred stories – the sort that get embroidered in the works of fine writers, and upon the robe of the goddess that is carried up to the Acropolos during the great Panathenaic festival; we’re supposed to believe it all really happened, Euthyphro?

E: Not only these things, Socrates. As I was just saying, I will, if you wish, relate many other things about the gods that I know will astound you.

S: I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Someday – when we both have lots of time on our hands – you really must tell me all about it.

Now here the focus, plausibly, is fiction. (Astounding tales!) Well, from Socrates' point of view anyway. At any rate, to make a long story short, the linchpin of Socrates' argumentative strategy against Euthyphro is to suggest that he (Euthyphro) can imagine all sorts of wild stuff about what gods might do and think (different gods, who fight according to Euthyphro); but Euthyphro isn't inclined - therefore - to imagine all sorts of wild stuff about right and wrong. Ergo, Euthyphro is wrong about WWZD being a good test of what is moral. This intuition-pump depends on Gendler's intuition to get pumping.

By coincidence, this is also the point of the thought-experiment implicit in Ted Chiang's novella, "Hell Is the Absence of God," which I have been blogging up occasionally, and just last night.

Well, actually, what I just wrote is seriously oversimple as an exegesis of the Euthyphro(and Chiang). But it's in the ballpark. (And I haven't even gotten started with Terry Pratchett's Small Gods.) I'll just conclude today, and pick up here tomorrow (if I feel like it): I think Hume's point - i.e. it is easy to find immorality (and alien manners) distasteful to the point of being unthinkable - gets crossed with the more Platonic one, which is something like: a world in which moral truths are different than those of our world is unthinkable. I don't think the Platonic point is quite right, by the by, but there's something to it.

Well, more tomorrow. Or not. And I don't think Gendler and Weatherson are barking up the wrong tree entirely. It may sound like I'm hinting that they have the undignified distinction of having botched the distinction between not liking things and not being able to conceive of things; not so. But I think this distinction is not perfectly kept track of. Starting with Hume is a symptom of getting off on the wrong foot in a certain way. Ah, well. Tomorrow.