The Importance of the Tangible World - by Debbie Jensen

I do not think it is possible to give moral blame or praise based on situations that could have existed in other possible worlds. I was always taught that we cannot live second-guessing our actions because we will only regret those actions that we have actually taken. If this is how we live our lives then how can our morality be judged by what may have been? We make hundreds of decisions each day which may or may not be morally important. The amount of potential situations which could arise from these decisions is innumerable. It is preposterous to think that a large part of our morality may be judged based upon a decision such as whether we decided to tell a lie to our parents in fifth grade about what you were doing after school.

Imagine a situation in which you have four morally important decisions to make in a single day. At choice one, you can either do it or not do it, and the same goes for each subsequent choice. If you make a diagram of this, it looks similar to a family tree with only two strong branches. Since you are making four decisions and each has two options, that makes 15 possible situations on either major branch (after the first decision the two branches make a V). It ends up that only 1/30 of your potential situations are the actual one which exists in this physical world. This type of judging based upon all weighing all potential situations does not take into account our character, or our recognition of poor morally important decisions. There have been times in my life that I have lied and felt so guilty about it that I have resolved myself to not ever do it again in such a situation. A system of judging morality that does not take into account one's character is also not satisfactory. Many of the potential situations only have one answer because never in that particular agent's life would he do what one of the potential situations asks of him. A moral system which assigns blame and praise cannot take into account possible worlds which may have existed had the agent been in another time period or made different decisions which could have changed the course of his life indefinitely.