The moral imagination requires a capacity for feeling the experience of the other, so as to have a concrete foundation to map a rational understanding over. Otherwise the rational mapping can only continue to extend from one's own self and its provincial feeling.
The failure of this capacity in the moral reasoning of various members of high civilization, which results in the inability to imagine oneself as a living being within a society that is external to and separate from one's own society, can only be construed as a form of savagery, as it results in all sorts of actual cruelty.
