82

Without ignoring the part played by immediate emotions and rational reflection, it is appropriate to rehabilitate the place of the moral imagination, particularly in health ethics. For example, the poetic work of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard illustrates and defends the place of the imagination of the subject embodied in the world in the formation of a moral view of the good. More broadly, the imagination is called upon in approaches to the ethics of care that emphasize the experience of empathy, which allows one to act “as if” one were the other, the recourse to the story of the patient’s experience in order to restore the meaning of their illness, and the recourse to a morality of consequences that obliges one to anticipate the future.