About Moral Imaginations

What is Moral Imagination?

Moral Imagination our capacity to imagine for the well-being of the whole. It allows us to imagine beyond how things could be, to how things should be, and to look through the eyes of others and stretch the circle of moral concern.

The moral imagination as a concept has been alive since the time of Plato, Virgil and Dante. Over time, it has been periodically re-expressed, for example by Edmund Burke in 1790, and then others in more recent years.

Who is Moral Imaginations?

Moral Imaginations is a research and practice centre dedicated to building the moral imagination. Our work brings moral imagination alive beyond a concept and as a practice to tackle 21st century challenges. We believe that the moral imagination is a muscle that can be exercised, grown and strengthened, and we have developed a curriculum and practice that builds the capacity of moral imagination in leaders, communities and organisations.

We believe that the vast majority of our challenges are not resource problems, but imagination problems, and we train people as Imagination Activists, a new kind of activist powered by imagination to create new possibilities and new forms of action.

How do we work?

Moral Imaginations works with the public, private and community sector to work at the deeper level of the climate crisis, and help shift mindsets, values and worldviews for systemic change. We support society to reimagine its systems with a new vision of ethics, ontology, cosmology and epistemology that places nature and all of life at the core. We create pathways, strategies and interventions that place life back at the centre of the economy, politics and systems of governance, and help catalyse futures that are rooted in values, an expanded sense of connection to nature, future generations and the past, and a connection to a moral sense of what is important.

We work with an imagination curriculum to catalyse the following mindset shifts and embed them into organisational design and governance: short term to long term, human-centric to nature-as-stakeholder, current-day to ancestors and future generations, hierarchical to horizontal, shareholders to shared ownership, extraction to regeneration, taking to giving, linear to holistic, rational to more-than-rational, financial to other forms of value, budget-first to budget-second, ‘we can’t’ to ‘how can we not’, risk modelling to radical ambition.

Our major project in the London Borough of Camden trained 32 council officers to become ‘ambassadors of imagination and spread Imagination Activism across the organisation and Borough, from the 30 to the 3000. You can read our 2023 report on this here. Since then we have worked with local councils, organisations and companies around the world, such as training IKEA’s top leaders in Moral Imagination to partnering with the London Marathon to create an immersive moral imagination lab for their partners and stakeholders.

Below you can find resources, podcasts and interviews to find out more.

These three videos will give you an overview of our imagination-based approach to systems change.

We work across practice and policy to effect change across the whole system.