Anticipatory Moral Imagination in Corona Times: A Study Based on Drawings 

In the wake of the Corona crisis, each of us was confronted to new personal or collective moral dilemmas to which we had not yet been confronted: Should you attend a funeral? Would you recommend the adoption of a policy restricting access to stores or public transportation to people with a vaccine electronic passport?

In this study Anneke Sools (Psychology), Yashar Saghai (Philosophy) and Sophie Rodriguez (research assistant) from the University of Twente collaborated with visual artist Judith Schepers to create drawings depicting potential dilemmas, from familiar to futuristic, to stimulate imagination regarding moral issues situated in the future and creative ways to deal with those issues. Drawings are rich and ambiguous to enable participants to come up with their own story of what is at stake in each situation and imagine how they would address it.

To investigate these issues, the researchers asked participants from Ecuador, Finland, Greece and the Netherlands four to five questions about each set of moral dilemmas, every three weeks between September and December 2020.

How would you respond? What do you see happening in the drawings? Which dilemmas do you spot and what do they mean in your life?