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I know that just because some action or state of affairs is morally right, that does not mean it will actually happen. So, does that mean morality is counterfactual in nature? Or am I misunderstanding something?

user107952
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    You're certainly missing something, first you assumed "some action or state of affairs is morally right" so your question is framed under moral *realism*. At least per the famous Leibniz theodicy and his pre-established harmony doctrine this world is *really* and neccesarily the best world according to (God's) morality, not counterfactual at all... – Double Knot Aug 23 '23 at 23:31
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    You also know that just because it may not actually happen does not mean that it cannot happen or did not happen, right? So, why *must* it be counterfactual, i.e. contrary to fact? Counterfactuals can be used in moral reasoning, but hypotheticals are more common, there is even a [YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy4I_ywrkLY) on the difference. – Conifold Aug 23 '23 at 23:41
  • @Conifold The [SEP article](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/#CounPhil) says, "This entry will use counterfactual conditional and subjunctive conditional interchangeably, hoping to now have dispelled the suggestion that all counterfactuals, in that sense, have contrary-to-fact antecedents." This is also the way Judea Pearl uses the term. Counterfactual antecedents are not necessarily false; what distinguishes them is that the truth of the counterfactual depends on the application of some (good) model to determine the consequent, instead of consulting reality. – causative Aug 24 '23 at 00:14
  • @causative As SEP admits, their terminology is confusing, and it is not followed in ethics. "Counterfactual" without stipulations will be interpreted as contrary to fact. – Conifold Aug 24 '23 at 00:34
  • @Conifold Where does SEP say their terminology is not followed in ethics? SEP says that requiring counterfactuals to have false antecedents "does not match the use of counterfactuals in the sprawling philosophical and interdisciplinary literature surveyed here." In other words, they're saying that their definition of counterfactuals to allow either true or false antecedents *does* match the literature they surveyed. – causative Aug 24 '23 at 00:41
  • @Conifold Besides, it's just more convenient not to have to check whether the antecedent happened to be true every time. It allows counterfactuals to just be "what you get when you propagate the change through your structural equation model (or similar type of model)." – causative Aug 24 '23 at 01:07
  • @causative My SEP clause attaches to the first part of the sentence only, with "and" as a separator. The reference list in this article does not include anything on ethics, so they could not have commented on that, I did on my own behalf in the second part. Also, it is unclear to me what "counterfactual" would mean as applied to something other than conditionals on your reading, especially the "nature of morality". It is a good question to the OP what exactly they meant by the word (maybe it should apply to "moral reasoning" instead), but I suspect that for moral realists the answer is no. – Conifold Aug 24 '23 at 12:18
  • Let us [continue this discussion in chat](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/148062/discussion-between-causative-and-conifold). – causative Aug 24 '23 at 14:23

2 Answers2

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Studies of morality often consider counterfactual scenarios. But so do studies of physics, or engineering, or politics, or scheduling meetings, or painting, etc. What if these two particles collided at this energy? What if we built the bridge in this shape? What if we passed X law? What if we met at 3:30 on Wednesday? What if we did this painting in blue? When you want to understand some part of the world, there are few tools better than considering what might have been or what might be if things were different.

So unless you want to label basically all practical fields of study "counterfactual," then there's no need to label morality "counterfactual" either; it is counterfactual to the same extent and in the same way as those other studies.

causative
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  • "Nature" is a counterfactual domain because we assume the absence of moral agents. But as moral agents we are aware of the counterfactual(s). – SystemTheory Aug 24 '23 at 15:59
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The term "counterfactual" is usually used to refer to discussions of things in the past. If X happened, and you then want to talk about what would or should have been done if X had not happened, that's a counterfactual.

But discussions of morality are generally about what people should do. While we may use past events as examples of morality or immorality, when we consider morality in the abstract we're usually talking about the future. Since the future isn't known, it makes little sense to use the term "counterfactual" to refer to it. An exception might be if the situation is impossible, but in that case a moral discussion is moot (e.g. "Would it be OK for people with wings to fly without a pilot's license?").

It seems like you may be confusing counterfactual with conditional. When talking about the past, saying "If X had happened, a moral person should have done Y" is a counterfactual. But when talking about the future, "If X happens, a moral person should do Y" is a conditional.

To be sure, there's a relationship, if you assume morality is eternal, since what you should do in the future is the same as what you should have done in the past in similar circumstances. But in many cases we use hypothetical situations in discussions of morality, so we don't have past cases to refer to. AFAIK, no one has ever actually been put in the situation of solving the trolley problem (although it may be viewed as an archetype of moral problems that are often encountered by doctors, soldiers, law enforcement, and politicians).

Barmar
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    "Counterfactual" does not mean "contrary to fact"; we have a word for that already, the word "false." In philosophy, counterfactual means that an implication A->B is not to be evaluated based on the truth values of A or B, but rather by *setting up* A within some model, and determining whether or not B can be derived from it within the model. This method cares not whether A is past, present, future, or unspecified. – causative Aug 24 '23 at 16:08
  • @causative Interesting, because that's the exact definition at merriam-webster.com. – Barmar Aug 24 '23 at 17:26
  • IANAP, but in my experience "counterfactual" has always been used in the way I described, when talking about what would or should have happened if some past event had been different. – Barmar Aug 24 '23 at 17:28
  • merriam-webster is not authoritative for a term in philosophy. You would get completely the wrong idea if you thought "counterfactual" literally meant "contrary to fact"; you'd imagine it to be a synonym for "false," which it is not. SEP is the better source. – causative Aug 24 '23 at 17:29
  • And my use is consistent with SEP. The first example it gives is in the form "If X hadn't happened, Y would be true." – Barmar Aug 24 '23 at 17:31
  • SEP explicitly states they are allowing true antecedents, and they also give examples of counterfactuals that refer to present or future events. "If Janis Joplin were alive today, she would metabolize food." "A glass is fragile if and only if it would break if it were struck in the right way." Also in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/conditionals.html "Bob died yesterday. If he had died tomorrow instead, he would have been 98 years old." – causative Aug 24 '23 at 17:49
  • Those are just different wordings. "If he had died tomorrow" is almost equivalent to "If he hadn't died yesterday" (although it's true that the latter wording also technically includes dying even longer ago). But SEP also points out that context matters, and they suggest other terms like "subjunctive conditionals" that are more precise. – Barmar Aug 24 '23 at 17:55
  • Look, we need a single word for "in the imaginary situation where X is the case, Y would follow." Counterfactual is that word. It's just ungainly to split it up into different cases with different words based on when X or Y happened or whether X or Y were or will be the case in this universe. Such nitpicking is about English grammar, not any fundamental philosophical idea. This is the conclusion reached by philosophers such as Lewis and Pearl, as well as the convention used by the SEP article. – causative Aug 24 '23 at 18:07
  • As I understand it, counterfactual is used for that imaginary world when it's distinguished from the real world (where X is not the case). But when talking about something unknown in the future, there's no real world to distinguish yet, everything is imaginary. – Barmar Aug 24 '23 at 19:24
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    I use Pearl's framework of causal inference with data. You can infer future differences between the predicted actual and the predicted counterfactual, but you need a model. I'm skipping the details here about statistical forecasting but that is a non-trivial aspect. You can also compare two counterfactuals rather than comparing an actual to a counterfactual, which is what I personally call a *hypothetical causal inference* which doesn't have much practical purpose in my discipline. ( @causative tagging you just to notify that the convo continued) – Galen Aug 24 '23 at 21:20
  • @Galen Is forecasting relevant to questions of morality? As I said, I'm not a philosopher, so much of this is going over my head. – Barmar Aug 24 '23 at 21:30
  • For purely theoretical or hypothetical questions of morality I'm not sure. Might need to ask a philosopher. But forecasting definitely has some bearing on applied questions. How many beds should we supply at a hospital by 2025? How much carbon emissions should we reduce by 2030? These sorts of questions suppose underlying moral assumptions, but the underlying moral assumptions are not sufficient to answer them either. Forecasting helps with filling in some of the details for some kinds of questions that require information about the (probable) future. – Galen Aug 24 '23 at 22:36