Fantastical Ethics in Romantic Situations

Abstract

In recent years, we have seen an abundance of published philosophical work concerning the topic of imagination. Yet, there still seems to be one subset of imagination that has not been widely researched, which is fantasy. My analysis of fantasy concerns its relationship with ethics. I mainly consider whether we can expand the boundaries of applied ethical principles by considering whether fantasies can be evaluated as morally right or wrong. When we discuss the topics of imagination and fantasy philosophically, it’s not easy to see how such mental phenomena could have an ethical component to them. More specifically, I want to propose an account of fantastical ethics for situations where fantasies seem to occur most often, which is within romantic situations. I argue that for a fantasy regarding romantic situations to be unethical, the fantasist has to be imagining the fantasizee in such a way that the fantasizee would not approve of themselves being imagined as, and/or they do not obtain the fantasizee’s consent to fantasize about them in such a way.