Published Paper Details:

Scientific imagination is often celebrated as the source of innovation, shaping hypotheses, directing experimentation, and enabling breakthroughs that transform human life. However, this paper argues that imagination is also a profoundly ethical force and must be examined as such. Scientific aspirations do not merely predict the future--they actively participate in creating it, generating new powers with potentially far-reaching and irreversible consequences. Because aspirations reflect particular values, interests, and visions of progress, they can perpetuate social inequalities and ecological harm if left unexamined. Drawing from virtue ethics, anticipatory governance, and theories of epistemic justice, this article contends that responsibility must arise at the very moment scientific futures are imagined, not only after technologies are developed or harms emerge. It advances a framework that links imagination, anticipation, and responsibility, and argues for institutional practices--such as ethical foresight, democratized agenda-setting, and education for responsible ambition--that cultivate moral imagination within scientific cultures. Ultimately, the paper calls for a shift in ethical inquiry from the question of whether research methods are permissible to whether the envisioned futures are just, inclusive, and worthy of pursuit. Ethical science must ensure that the worlds it imagines and builds contribute to collective flourishing.