Counterfactuals in Critical Thinking, with Application to Morality

Counterfactuals are conjectures about what would have happened, had an alternative event occurred. "Counterfactual" means contrary to the facts. Counterfactual reasoning involves thoughts on what might have been, what could have happened, had some matter ‒action, outcome, etc.‒ been different in the past. It provides lessons for the future by virtue of contemplating alternatives; it permits thought debugging; it supports a justification why different alternatives would have been worse or not better. Typical expressions are: “If only I were taller...”, “I could have been a winner...”, “I would have passed, were it not for...”, “Even if... the same would follow”. Counterfactual thinking covers everyday experiences, like regret: “If only I had told her I love her!”, “I should have studied harder”; or guilt responsibility, blame, causation: “If only I had said something sooner, then I could have prevented the accident”. The general form is: “If would antecedent, then would consequent”. Are counterfactuals mere fantasies? A waste of time? Not really. They have been well studied in Linguistics, Philosophy, Physics, Ethics, Psychology, Anthropology, and Computation (Collins et al. 2004, Hoerl et al. 2011, Lewis 1973, Pearl 2000, Roese et al. 2009), but not much within Critical Thinking. However, people often think how things that matter to them might have turned out differently (Mandel et al. 2005). Researchers from psychology have asked: Why do people have such a strong tendency to generate counterfactuals? What functions does counterfactual thinking serve? What are the determinants of counterfactual thinking? What are its adaptive and psychological consequences? Human's ability for mental time travel relies on episodic memory. Without it humans would be unable to form a stable concept of self along time, and human cultures would not have been able to evolve. We believe counterfactual thinking is worth more attention as a means to critical thinking. We illustrate this with an original application to morality, a common concern for critical thinking.