Moral Impossibility: Ethical, Political, and Psychological Approaches

In every choice, action, and act of the imagination, what is possible for us is variously determined and delimited not only by physical and logical limits, but also by moral ones. These limits constitute the domain of ‘moral impossibility’. Moral impossibilities limit what we conceive of, what we consider practically, and what we are capable of doing. They manifest in what is not-thought, what is unthinkable, and what is undoable. They have individual and collective roots, change over time, and have significant consequences for the framing of problems, for the scope of deliberation, and for individual and social worldviews – as well as the conflicts that arise between them. This phenomenon is ubiquitous, yet scarcely discussed. The volume aims to open up and unify a field of inquiry by collecting original contributions that explore both conceptual and applied questions through the moral psychology, meta-ethics, and politics of moral impossibility.