Undoing one’s past

Eduardo Vicentini De Medeiros

doi:10.4013/fsu.2018.191.11

Abstract

In contemporary research on memory, the idea of mental time travel (MTT) has been connected, at the functional level, with planning and imagining what might occur in one’s future. Episodic memory impacts on our capacity to move imaginatively towards possible scenarios ahead. Consequently, Gerrans and Kennett (2010, 2016) urge us to agree that MTT is essential to moral agency. In this paper, we suggest that if we conceive the specific varieties of MTT as something more than remembering one’s past and imagining one’s future, then the capacity of undoing one’s past both by episodic counterfactual thinking and the emotion of regret must be considered essential to moral agency on equal terms. Keywords: moral agency, Mental Time Travel, episodic counterfactual thinking, regret.

Highlights

In “Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency” Philip Ger ans and Jeanette Kennett endorse the crucial role that imagination and memory play for capa le moral agents. They op ose the soca led “neurosentimentalism”, namely, a kind of metaethical sentimentalism built upon empirical evidence, availa le in studies with neurological patients impaired by significant damages to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, patients who are compromised both at the level of the tacit affective processes and of moral agency
As most of you surely know, in the footsteps of the groun breaking results by Antonio Damasio and Antoine Bechara, there is a lot of discussion, both in neurosciences and moral psychology, on the cor ect interpretation of the experimental data exploring the capacities for moral judging and decision-making in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) patients
For our cur ent goals, it would be less demanding to discuss the big picture of the theoretical dispute against neurosentimentalism than to point out the pro lematic dissociation between moral agency and moral judgement in the neurosentimentalistic camp, a dissociation su ge ed by the idea that it is only possi le to make moral judgements either by the ap lication of a rule or by automatica ly responding to tacit affective processes, without the need, in both cases, to menta ly project ourselves into fitting future scenarios

Summary

Introduction

In “Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency” Philip Ger ans and Jeanette Kennett endorse the crucial role that imagination and memory play for capa le moral agents. With the hypothesis in plain view, we can move on to introduce the leading motivation behind it: Mental time travel (MTT) is essential to moral agency because episodic memory and imagination are tools to conceive ourselves as tempora ly extended entities.

Results

Conclusion