"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) [Back] I’m trying to write a paper on ‘imaginative resistance’ and not getting very far. So let’s just see if I can blast through by composing a long post about a point that seem to me to have been missed in discussions to date. (I’m not exactly up to speed on the literature, so I could be wrong and am humbly amenable to correction.) It seems to me, in general, that ‘imaginative resistance’ easily becomes an accidental portmanteau term. And so my paper that isn’t going anywhere is tentatively titled, “The Varieties of Imaginatively Resistant Experience”. In “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance”, Tamar Gendler sets out to investigate, “the puzzle of explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant.” Not worlds in which people behave badly (that’s easy); nor ones in which people have deviant beliefs about morality by our lights (again, easy); nor ones in which peculiar conditions and situations make peculiar moral demands of characters; rather, worlds in which, counterfactually, moral truths are different than (we take them to be) in the actual world. The fact that Gendler’s statement of her puzzle is so readily misunderstandable is perhaps a mini-demonstration of its genuineness. If our imaginative faculty indeed has a ‘blind-spot’ hereabouts, one would expect it to be hard to make people aware of that fact. So, by way of making quite sure we apprehend the contours of the alleged puzzle, consider this sentence Gendler borrows from Kendall Walton: 1) “In killing her baby Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl.” Let 1) be the first sentence of a novel. Set it alongside these first sentences from Stephen Baxter’s sci-fi novel Flux: 2) “Dura woke with a start. There was something wrong. The photons smelled funny.” Now, to be sure, there is something aesthetically artificial about stopping right at the start and asking, ‘now what do you think?’ Standard practice dictates not a pause to take stock but a rush ahead to learn the answer. (This is not a completely trivial point, since many of our intuitions about such cases are grounded in ordinary aesthetic experience of things like novels.) Nevertheless, let us pause and take stock. Regarding 2), the first thing one thinks is that in this fictional world there is someone named Dura who may not be human, but is sufficiently human-like to be capable of sleeping and being startled, who is capable of smelling photons. It might, of course, turn out Dura is crazy or hallucinating; or perhaps ‘smelled funny’ is slang for ‘set off alarms on the detection equipment’, a.k.a. the ‘photon-sniffer’. But the reader most probably defaults to the ‘straight’ reading, even though it is, surely, the objectively least plausible in the actual world. Somebody smells light. Such, such are the wonders of fantastic fiction. The wildest impossibilities provoke no ‘imaginative resistance’ whatsoever. If anything, they provoke ‘imaginative attraction’, as it were. Turning to 1), I think we are likely to give about equal weight to three candidates. First, the narrator may be morally unreliable, i.e. for whatever reason the author has decided to speak in the voice of someone bad. Second, the narrator may be ironic, i.e. is half-stepping into Giselda’s character by way of informing us – in a rather bitter, morbid tone – that Giselda is bad. Third, the situation is not as it seems, e.g. we will presently learn that Giselda knows any baby girl of hers will suffer from an excruciating, debilitating, untreatable medical condition and die anyway. So she is, despite appearances, arguably doing the right thing by our lights. There are other possibilities, if one cares to stretch. It may turn out ‘baby’ means project, and Giselda works in an company in which it is an in-house joke that ‘it’s a girl!’ means ‘it didn’t work out.’ (It all goes back to the case of Smith, Giselda’s boss, who wanted a boy and whose wife had seven girls.) Not to harp unduly on the fact that first sentences of novels really are very open-ended affairs, the point is just this: in one case – the photon-smelling case - we comfortably settle into a ‘straight’ reading on which something arguably metaphysically impossible in the real world is simply and flatly true in the fictional world. In the other case – the baby-killing case - the strictly analogous ‘straight’ reading, on which something arguably metaphysically impossible is simply and flatly true is so far down the imaginative list we probably never get to it. Sooner would we speculatively redefine half the words in the sentence. It simply doesn’t occur to us to consider: perhaps the author has invented, and invited us to visit, a world unlike our own in this respect: here it is good to kill baby girls. We are so resistant to this reading that it does not readily occur to us that we are resistant it. So this is the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Worlds of hobbits and wizards – worlds in which space, time, causality, even mathematics, are casually warped for aesthetic purposes – are, both literally and metaphorically, imaginative child’s play. Whence the difficulty envisioning alternate moral worlds? A main source of difficulty unravelling this difficulty, it seems to me: conflation of two oppositions. We have, on the one hand, liking/disliking a given work; on the other hand, imaginatively resisting/imaginatively (we need an antonym) acquiescing to the fictional world of a work. I haven’t seen Gendler (or anyone else) flat-out declare these oppositions line up, but I think they are too-readily treated as if they do. Dislike is readily assumed to be an index of resistance, and vice versa. (It says something that when we dislike a work, we may indicate this, rather grandiloquently, by declaring, ‘I found it impossible to suspend disbelief’, which I suspect is usually not the case.) The twofold point I would make: 1) not only is it perfectly possible to dislike a work to which one is not at all imaginatively resistant; 2) it is also perfectly possible to be imaginatively resistant to a work one likes very much. Indeed, imaginative resistance – far from being in any way conceptually linked to negative aesthetic response – is possibly negatively correlated with it. I think most folks will grant 1) on a moment’s reflection. (Here’s a hint: imagine the dullest, dullest novel ever written, about every minute detail of the completely ordinary life of an ordinary man who never does anything but get up and go to his dull job every day. Confronted with such a work, a Wildean wit might quip: ‘I was unable to suspend disbelief.’ But of course that’s not the problem, of all things.) 2) is likely to be regarded as more paradoxical and doubtful, but actually it is the more clearly correct claim. Let me prove it, then recur to 1). In her paper, Tamar Gendler tries to show that resistance is not a function of conceptual impossibility. (Her thesis, overall, is that resistance is a function of unwillingness, not incapacity. But never mind about that just yet.) She comes up with what is really a very charming, well-written mock-theological fable or parable, “The Tower of Goldbach”, in the course of which – to make a short story so short as not to be a story anymore - 7 + 5 first is, then not, then is and not, equal to 12. Oh, all right. Here’s the story. Mathematicians prove Goldbach’s conjecture: every even the sum of two primes. God gets angry at this attempt to lift the skirts of bashful Creation and peer at her too-private mystery parts. He makes 12 not be the sum of two primes anymore, i.e. not the sum of 7 + 5. Folks are upset. If they can find 12 righteous men, will God relent? Yes. Seven righteous men, and five to go with, are found, but are unable to sum to 12 righteous men (see above.) More pleading. Solomon settles kerfuffle: it would be grandest for 12 to both be and not the sum of 7 + 5. God accedes. Chorus of 12 and not-12 voices heard hymning God’s immortal glory as curtain falls. Gendler’s claim is that this story – bursting at the seams with the sheerest conceptual impossibilities – provokes little imaginative resistance. (I take it there is a quick little dialogue running in the background here, though we hear only its conclusion. Gendler: ‘You liked it, didn’t you?’ Reader: ‘Yes. Very funny.’ Gendler ‘Then, if you got the joke, you must have been able to imagine what was going on that was funny.’) Gendler’s elaboration of this alleged result is as follows: “the reason the story can do this [fail to provoke imaginative resistance], of course, is that it focuses our attention on certain aspects of the things that it asks us to imagine. When we imagine the things that, on reflection, we realize to be conceptually impossible, we imagine them in ways that disguise their conceptual impossibility … It is as a result of lots of local bits of conceptual coherence that the global incoherence is able to get a foothold. So conceptual impossibility does not preclude imaginability. As long as they are properly disguised, we are able to imagine all sorts of impossible things.” This seems to me perfectly mistaken, as literary phenomenology. “The Tower of Goldbach” is fun to read precisely because the reader keeps, as it were, bouncing off its sheer, unignorable, impregnable impossibilities – imaginative and conceptual – but in a pleasant way. This is how ‘nonsense’ literature always works, after all. This is why we like reading Lewis Carroll. You fling yourself into the text, in the usual way, and are promptly, imaginatively, flung back out. Ha-ha. Repeat procedure. (Why is this fun? I dunno. Little kids like flinging themselves down on the ground. De gustibus non est disputandum. And, as Wittgenstein says, explanations come to an end somewhere. My spade is turned. And, one may add for good measure, then it’s fun to sort of whang the implement against whatever turned it. Makes a satisfying ringing noise. Cf. the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical career and corpus.) Let me prove I am right and Gendler wrong. It is very easy to imagine cases which fit well with what Gendler says is going on in the "Goldbach" case. But, crucially, those cases are quite unlike the "Goldbach" case. So they are actually counter-examples to her claim about the case. Taking these points in order: there are fictional conceptual impossibilities that do slip past, as Gendler suggests, due to a sort of aspectual shell-game. The reader’s imaginative eye fails to track the pea of impossibility. I think the best examples would be things like: descriptions of spaceships moving through hyperspace, extradimensions, wormholes, ideaspace, pick your sf-poison. Such stuff, with rare exceptions, is totally conceptually impossible, but the mind – not so good at fundamental physics – sort of substitutes an exciting image: a silver cigar zipping through a hallucinogenic slurry of color and light and shifting form: hyperspace! It is due to the fact that one is so feeble-mindedly incapable of really understanding what these pseudo-physical claims claim that one can imagine what they claim – wrongly – and not be struck by the wrongness and inadequacy of what one imagines. (One could resolve to imagine a painting of dogs playing poker whenever a spaceship goes faster than the speed of light.) To put it another way, reading a ripping space yarn, in which starships slip in and out of hyperspace, firing impossible weapons at each other, is – qua literary experience – quite like reading a cracking good Patrick O’Brien novel about Napoleonic-era naval battles. In the former case, the frantic officer shrieks, ‘Scanners indicate no-space dimensions seven and nine are undergoing induced tectonic shift. Transdimensional shields are holding! This could be the big one, captain!’ In the latter case, the frantic officer shrieks, ‘Xebec closing larboard and the libeccio’s blowing. Lask the lateen, you loobies! Ah, if only so many of our lascars weren’t laid up in the lazarette, suffering from lues!’ Well, OK, so O’Brien wouldn’t go for so much alliteration. Sue me. But the point is: you don’t understand what is going on, half the time, and that’s actually half the fun. Your imagination sort of wanders around on deck, making an amiable nuisance of itself, ignorantly poking into everything, encountering no serious resistance. As Gendler puts it: local bits of coherence mask the fact that one could not, if asked, give an accurate global account of what happens. And the point is: reading a space-opera, let alone a Patrick O’Brien novel – which isn’t even conceptually impossible, please note - is quite unlike reading a Lewis Carroll nonsense poem, or Gendler’s “Tower of Goldbach”. These are very different species of literary experience and enjoyment. Reading space opera or Patrick O'Brien induces a sort of languid acquiescence to stuff you don't understand. (Yes, I suppose some people actually understand all the Napoleonic naval gazing. Not me. I'm lazy.) You let it all flow past, unquestioningly, plucking a low-hanging, inaccurate image here and there. By contrast, reading Lewis Carroll - or "Goldbach" - is like having someone execute a controlled dribble with your head. Not so constantly impossible that one loses interest. But always going back for more impossibility (impossibility, bit of sense, impossibility, bit of sense, so forth.) But Gendler is providing an account of how we read her story that suggests we read her story the way we read Patrick O’Brien, or some space opera. So Gendler is wrong. Underlining this point by approaching from the opposite direction: we can imagine that a young child – old enough to read but not old enough to really understand why the math is absurd – were to get its hands on “The Tower of Goldbach” and not really get it. For, after all, the child would encounter no imaginative resistance. Men did something. God stopped them. Men did something to get back on His good side. Complications. Some guy helps it all work out OK. The story would seem rather dull – not much action - unless read, as we adults read it, with a sharp, unignorable sense of its total conceptual impossibility. If you aren’t throwing yourself at the story and being bounced off at regular intervals, you aren’t getting it. Which is to say: sheer conceptual impossibility (as opposed to the disguisable variety), generating total imaginative resistance, is the primary engine of our enjoyment of “The Tower of Goldbach”. But Gendler talks as though our enjoyment of the story proved the absence of imaginative resistance. Totally upside down, near as I can figure. Conclusion: liking a story very much should not be taken as indicating lack of imaginative resistance to the story. Next point: disliking a story very much should not be taken as indicating imaginative resistance to the story. I may have already proved this point, to the reader's satisfaction, with the simple example given above: boredom. Certainly it is not likely that all varieties of literary dissatisfaction are species of the genus, imaginative resistance. But let us expand this modest point, with reference to the following rather notorious Saki story. Which I found available on the web (cut and paste, cut and paste): Hermann The Irascible The Story of the Great Weep It was in the second decade of the Twentieth Century, after the Great Plague had devastated England, that Hermann the Irascible, nicknamed also the Wise, sat on the British throne. The Mortal Sickness had swept away the entire Royal Family, unto the third and fourth generations, and thus it came to pass that Hermann the Fourteenth of Saxe-Drachsen-Wachtelstein, who had stood thirtieth in the order of succession, found himself one day ruler of the British dominions within and beyond the seas. He was one of the unexpected things that happen in politics, and he happened with great thoroughness. In many ways he was the most progressive monarch who had sat on an important throne; before people knew where they were, they were somewhere else. Even his Ministers, progressive though they were by tradition, found it difficult to keep pace with his legislative suggestions. "As a matter of fact," admitted the Prime Minister, "we are hampered by these votes-for-women creatures; they disturb our meetings throughout the country, and they try to turn Downing Street into a sort of political picnic-ground." "They must be dealt with" said Hermann. "Dealt with," said the Prime Minister; "exactly, just so; but how?" "I will draft you a Bill," said the King, sitting down at his type-writing machine, "enacting that women shall vote at all future elections. Shall vote, you observe; or, to put it plainer, must. Voting will remain optional, as before, for male electors; but every woman between the ages of twenty-one and seventy will be obliged to vote, not only at elections for Parliament, county councils, district boards, parish-councils, and municipalities, but for coroners, school inspectors, churchwardens, curators of museums, sanitary authorities, police-court interpreters, swimming-bath instructors, contractors, choir-masters, market superintendents, art-school teachers, cathedral vergers, and other local functionaries whose names I will add as they occur to me. All these offices will become elective, and failure to vote at any election falling within her area of residence will involve the female elector in a penalty of 10 pounds. Absence, unsupported by an adequate medical certificate, will not be accepted as an excuse. Pass this Bill through the two Houses of Parliament and bring it to me for signature the day after tomorrow." From the very outset the Compulsory Female Franchise produced little or no elation even in circles which had been loudest in demanding the vote. The bulk of the women of the country had been indifferent or hostile to the franchise agitation, and the most fanatical Suffragettes began to wonder what they had found so attractive in the prospect of putting ballot-papers into a box. In the country districts the task of carrying out the provisions of the new Act was irksome enough; in the towns and cities it became an incubus. There seemed no end to the elections. Laundresses and seamstresses had to hurry away from their work to vote, often for a candidate whose name they hadn't heard before, and whom they selected at haphazard; female clerks and waitresses got up extra early to get their voting done before starting off to their places of business. Society women found their arrangements impeded and upset by the continual necessity for attending the polling stations, and week-end parties and summer holidays became gradually a masculine luxury. As for Cairo and the Riviera, they were possible only for genuine invalids or people of enormous wealth, for the accumulation of 10 pound fines during a prolonged absence was a contingency that even ordinarily wealthy folk could hardly afford to risk. It was not wonderful that the female disfranchisement agitation became a formidable movement. The No-Votes-for-Women League numbered its feminine adherents by the million; its colours, citron and old Dutch-madder, were flaunted everywhere, and its battle hymn, "We Don't Want to Vote," became a popular refrain. As the Government showed no signs of being impressed by peaceful persuasion, more violent methods came into vogue. Meetings were disturbed, Ministers were mobbed, policemen were bitten, and ordinary prison fare rejected, and on the eve of the anniversary of Trafalgar women bound themselves in tiers up the entire length of the Nelson column so that its customary floral decoration had to be abandoned. Still the Government obstinately adhered to its conviction that women ought to have the vote. Then, as a last resort, some woman wit hit upon an expedient which it was strange that no one had thought of before. The Great Weep was organized. Relays of women, ten thousand at a time, wept continuously in the public places of the Metropolis. They wept in railway stations, in tubes and omnibuses, in the National Gallery, at the Army and Navy Stores, in St. James's Park, at ballad concerts, at Prince's and in the Burlington Arcade. The hitherto unbroken success of the brilliant farcical comedy "Henry's Rabbit" was imperilled by the presence of drearily weeping women in stalls and circle and gallery, and one of the brightest divorce cases that had been tried for many years was robbed of much of its sparkle by the lachrymose behaviour of a section of the audience. "What are we to do?" asked the Prime Minister, whose cook had wept into all the breakfast dishes and whose nursemaid had gone out, crying quietly and miserably, to take the children for a walk in the Park. "There is a time for everything," said the King; "there is a time to yield. Pass a measure through the two Houses depriving women of the right to vote, and bring it to me for the Royal assent the day after tomorrow." As the Minister withdrew, Hermann the Irascible, who was also nicknamed the Wise, gave a profound chuckle. "There are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it with cream," he quoted, "but I'm not sure," he added "that it's not the best way." There.Told you it was short. (Pretty much it’s best feature, I should say.) Now we can all probably agree about this much. The story means to be clever, a cunning little reductio ad absurdum; it means to lead the naïve suffragette down the primrose path to an appreciation of the essential shallowness of her outlook. It means to open our eyes to the subtle wisdom of conservative intransigence on the issue of women voting. Ergo, the story only works, i.e. is funny, if you think (or are potentially willing to think) the following is a moral truth: letting women vote would be socially pernicious, or at least deeply pointless and counter-productive and silly. If you don’t think that, and are not prepared to think it any time soon, the story will inevitably seem not just a moral but a literary flop (even given its modest aspirations.) If it were longer, you would have thrown it against the wall before finishing. (Cf. Saki’s novel, When William Came, and the small smudge mark on my wall.) Actually, it seems to me the story has other curious features worth jotting down. (There will be a point to this.) The ‘argument’ against women’s suffrage the story implicitly constructs is patently fallacious. (No one would seek to ‘prove’ male suffrage was bad by imagining a situation in which all male voters were mandatorily dunked in acid before ballotting, ergo voting is bad for your skin.) Saki surely appreciates the fallacy of his position, yet he tells the story anyway. Why? Well, in part I think it pleases him on some level to insult the opposition by not deigning to offer good arguments. There is a sort of mysogynist pleasure in maintaining that a high-handed satiric spanking is what suffragettes need and deserve, not the dignity of open, rational debate on the merits between presumptive equals. On another level, however, I am sure Saki genuinely feels the argument sort of works. That is, it is ineffably and unarguably true (for him) that the proper place for women is in the (ideally) placid sphere of the home and hearth. Elections and voting are unfeminine hubbub and rough, public clamor. By forcing the women in his story to vote constantly, he is teaching them a valuable, (by his lights) valid lesson. It is not in women’s nature to thrive in such an environment. He is rubbing their noses in the nature of this thing they think they want but which (Saki knows better) they really don’t. Of course, men would find mandatory voting just as onerous as Saki’s women do, so the argument is not an iota improved by reading it this way; but I think this gets at the ‘felt’ moral potency of his fable, for Saki. (Think about this classic technique for discouraging youthful smoking: make junior smoke an entire pack, or a toxic cigar, until he gets sick and learns his lesson. It is a strictly invalid ‘proof’ that smoking is bad, but – since we disapprove of kids smoking – it doesn’t feel like such a bad argument as it really is. It ‘gets at’ a deep truth about smoking: namely, don’t.) So when women splutter that the story’s implied argument is illogical (waggling J. S. Mill angrily under the author's nose), the author shakes his head derisively and knowingly. The poor dears are grasping at logical straws and missing the deeper, ineffable moral rightness of the story’s moral. Now, getting back to Gendler, I think she would take our strongly unappreciative response to Saki’s story to be a classic case of ‘imaginative resistance’ to a morally deviant world. We decline the invitation to enter the fictional world of Hermann the Irrascible (thank you very much); in which Hermann is genuinely wise; in which women genuinely are better off for being deprived of the right to vote. But does what Gendler says fit the case? I think not. And I quote: My hypothesis is that cases that evoke genuine imaginative resistance will be cases where the reader feels that she is being asked to export a way of looking at the actual world which she does not wish to add to her conceptual repertoire. The problem with this, it seems to me, is that the problem we have with Saki is really quite simple. We disagree with him. If this is all Gendler means, she could just say so. If this is not what she means, she is barking up the wrong tree. Expanding slightly: we find the author himself – whose smirk we can feel burning into is - disagreeable company while he tells us condescending parables. (He is thoroughly pleasant on other occasions, I must say.) But we understand him perfectly well. He is no sort of mystery to us. Our conceptual repertoire is chock full of Saki-related material, accumulated readily as a result of our reading of this little literary item. A simple argument: if we were really concerned to keep bad stuff out of our ‘conceptual repertoire’, I take it my interpretation of Saki’s outlook – outlined above – would be more likely to spur resistance than Saki’s story itself. Because, after all, in the story the basic moral premises are kept somewhat out of view. But surely my interpretation does not provoke imaginative resistance. Only the story (at least possibly) does that. So this whole 'conceptual repertoire' notion isn't helping. My point, then, is this. To me it seems quite misleading to say we are ‘imaginatively resistant’ to Saki. It makes no more sense to say this than to say we are ‘imaginatively resistant’ to any view we disagree with, or anyone we find disagreeable company. (I do not think it would be helpful to say, for example, that I am ‘imaginatively resistant’ to the appeal of Bush’s tax cut, much less that I have imposed high cognitive tariffs against the importation of its virtues into my ‘conceptual repertoire’. I do not think that if I find myself stuck next to a morally obnoxious person at a dinner party, it makes much sense to say I am ‘imaginatively resistant’ to my neighbor. He annoys me, that's what.) So an important sub-conclusion can now be stated: taking these two stories - Gendler's own "Goldbach" fable, and Saki's "Hermann the Irrascible" - I am quite sure Gendler would say with confidence that we are imaginatively unresistant to the former, highly resistant to the latter. I have just made out the case that the opposite is the case. I think the problem is terminology, mostly. 'Imaginative resistance' is threatening to turn into a portmanteau, with different drawers stuffed with quite distinct conceptual puzzles and literary reactions and so forth. (And, of course, confusing terminology leads to confusion. The thing to do is start with a list of all the things that might get labeled 'imaginative resistance'.) Post-Script: Some Stray Thoughts I'm Trying To Herd. Proceed At Own Risk. Now it might seem, despite what was just said, that Gendler could argue there is a hard kernel of imaginative resistance at the core of our response to Saki. We understand what he is asking us to imagine. But, then again, we don’t. There’s an incoherence here that’s just as hard to wrap your mind around as 7 + 5 does not equal 12; somehow, metaphysically, it’s just better for women not to do something that it doesn’t seem to us better for women not to do: namely, vote. Well, this is a big can of worms. Can a Kantian really understand a utilitarian, i.e. imagine what it would be for utilitariainism to be true? Kant says the only thing we can conceive of being good in itself is a good will. This should make Mr. Bentham’s writings perfectly opaque to him; argle bargle up and down. Yet I think a Kantian who is not in some way cognitively infirm can ‘imagine’ utilitarianism. He just won’t agree that it is true. I think the same goes with Saki. I can perfectly well imagine what it is to believe what he believes. Thomas Nagel writes somewhere that he can’t muster up much enthusiasm for moral skepticism, because, although he's one of the few, the proud who confesses he can conceive that he is a brain in a vat, deceived by mad scientists, he cannot conceive of holding fundamentally different moral views than he does. Which is, in a way, maybe right; but, in a way, definitely wrong. Obviously Nagel can imagine that, at a young age, he was taken by Nazis and raised to be a Hitler Youth. Nagel is not so anthropologically naïve, I trust, as to suppose he would have somehow mysteriously resisted the predictable results of such an operation. So, obviously Nagel can imagine holding moral views very different than he does. This is important, it seems to me,because it exposes a first person/third person assymetry between our beliefs about things like ‘7 + 5 = 12’ and our beliefs about ‘cruelty is wrong’. We really can’t wrap our heads around the sincere denial of either, but we can perfectly well imagine other people denying the second, whereas we cannot imagine anyone denying the first. If we find people who tell us cruelty is good, we will take them to be bad. If our translator tells us we’ve found people who think 7 + 5 does not equal 12, we will take our translator to be bad. It takes a bit of work to tie this point back to the point about Saki. But basically I think it goes like this. We can readily imagine moral views quite different than our own - Saki is a minor example of the genre - without having any inclination to consider them as even possibly true. (I take this to be a descriptive truth about us, whatever one makes of its causes or consequences or goodness or badness.) I guess I don’t think it is natural to call our unshakable disbelief of these positions ‘imaginative resistance’, because – well, we can imagine people holding the views in question. Whatever it is keeping us from holding these views ourselves is not our infirm or refusenik imaginations. One final point, although I’ve already rattled on far too long. Most of us are moral pluralists of some stripe or other. I think one reason we have trouble conceiving of moralities that are possibly true in some alternate universe, but not in our own, is that we feel that any possibly true morality is actually true in our world. (Think about it.)