Chapter 4: Hypothetical Situations
A. Fiction in Ethics
Hypothetical Situations
Typically, when we ask about right and wrong, it focuses around a story — true or imaginary — and asking, “Would it be right (or wrong) to do X?”
Chapter 2 contains a story about an airplane that crash lands in the middle of a desert near a house, owned by a person who imports a great deal of water, which is needed to keep our accident victims alive. It also tells the story of a hiker stranded in a snowstorm who comes across a cabin - occupied or unoccupied.
Also in Chapter 2, I had a story about a mad scientist giving people a choice between falsely believing that their child is well, and falsely believing that their child is being tortured. However, this was not meant to elicit a moral response, but to collect data that is at odds with the proposition that everybody is selfish (unless we invent a whole new definition of the word ‘selfish’).
Chapter 3 discusses stories about people with dreadfully painful diseases and compares them to people tortured in an inquisition into confessing their transgressions against God.
This is not just me doing this. There is a set of objections against act-utilitarian theories of ethics that tell similar stories. One objection asks us to, “Imagine a case in which a doctor has five patients, each of which will die unless they get an organ replacement in the near future. A healthy patient steps into the doctor’s office who has the five healthy organs the doctor needs. However, the doctor would have to kill this healthy visitor to harvest his organs. Still, he would be saving five lives, and only taking one life. Five lives are better than one life. Should he not harvest the organs?”
The whole situation is fiction, but these stories help us to understand the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil.
In fact, most of our moral choices take place in hypothetical worlds of the imagination. A person thinks about finding a wallet with $1,000 inside and asks himself, “What would I do if this ever happened?” Or he thinks about a situation in which his boss asks him to sign a document making claims he knows to be false. In neither case is the person thinking about something that has actually happened. These are both hypothetical situations. Yet, in spite of this, it is possible to draw a conclusion about what a person should or should not do.
There is a great deal of room for the examination of hypothetical situation in ethics.
B. Morality in Fiction
We can see good and bad in many works of fiction. It is typically very easy to identify the hero as well as the villain, and to determine when injustices are being done.
Plato’s writings consisted largely of dialogues that never actually took place — they were fiction. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN proved to be an extremely influential work on the ethics of slavery, even though it tells the story of a slave family. Science fiction, from the works of HG Wells to Aldus Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD, to the original Star Trek series, used fiction to address moral issues.
That is one of the things I started to do when I returned to college. I started to look at different situations and asking myself, “What do these situations tell us about right and wrong?”
II. Games
Shortly after I started college the first time (before my suspension) I was sitting in a classmate’s dorm room listening to this strange chatter between two others that I just could not understand.
One of them spoke about loading up some mules and going up to this abandoned castle, about a battle that took place on the other side of the entrance involving swords and magic spells and strange beasts, about wounds suffered and lives nearly lost, and a great time had by all. The most startling thing about this was that he described these events as if they had actually happened. “We walked through the gate. We were attacked. I drew my sword.”
I had to ask what they were talking about, and they answered by describing a game where players use dice to determine the attributes of a character — attributes such as strength, wisdom, and dexterity. The character had a certain amount of gold, which was to be used to purchase starting equipment such as weapons, armor, and tools such as rope, spikes, and torches.
Then this character would meet up with other characters run by other players and go out into a dungeon, where they would hunt out the villainous occupants and walk away with gold, magic items, and stories to tell of heroic deeds and great escapes.
All of this was done in conversation, with no real limit to the types of things the player’s character can do, no board, and no fixed rules. Anything one can imagine could happen within the context of the game.
They described to me the world of Dungeons and Dragons®, and I could not wait to step into it.
One of the things that I liked most about the game, even from the start, is that it was fully cooperative. All other games that I knew of had members sitting on opposite sides, competing against each other. The games ended with a victory for some players and a loss for the others.
I hated these types of games, because somebody would have to walk away beaten. If I lost at such a game, I disliked the way it felt to lose. If I was winning, I felt bad for the other person, who was probably feeling the same way I felt when I lost. Typically, I hated making the other person feel bad more than I liked winning, so I was reluctant to win.
In this game, everybody worked together. No opponent would feel bad regardless of what I may do to win, because the opponent was just a figment of imagination. Everybody who was real was a part of the cooperative adventure.
Even the Dungeon Master, the player who created the adventure for those who ran characters, was not a true opponent who could lose in any meaningful sense of the term. The DM was a god who could smite a player’s character with a word with no chance for protest or appeal to the rules. However, his job was not to use his ultimate power to defeat the players, but to use his ultimate power to make the game interesting and exciting for everybody else. The DM was successful when, in his god-like role, he created a session in which everybody had as much fun as possible.
So, here was a game with complete, guiltless fun, where worrying about how the other players felt and making sure they were enjoying themselves contributed to the quality of the session. It was just what I wanted.
III. The Ethics of Fiction
Okay, what does any of this have to do with ethics?
For the most part, I had never read fantasy stories before I entered college. I could find nothing in that genre that showed an interest in examining serious social issues like that found in science fiction. Fantasy authors tended to draw simplistic, sharp distinctions between what they called good and evil, placing each character deep in one extreme or the other, allowing only the slightest hints of gray to blur the line between them. Fantasy was for escaping reality, escaping a life in which people had to confront serious moral questions and actually worry about whether an action was good or evil.
Yet, in their quest to simplify right and wrong, fantasy writers often offered, and its readers eagerly accepted, an unquestioned simplicity that on its own was morally questionable.
For example, most fantasy presumes a glaring form of racism. In a fantasy novel, a person could be adequately described either by a wordy account of his character and personality revealed through past deeds and present actions, or in a single word — the creature’s race. A dwarf was a hard working humorless individual, an elf was an artistic free spirit, and an orc was a nasty bloodthirsty killing machine. Indeed, in fantasy, a racial name was little more than an abbreviation for a moral description.
One element of these stories that I found particularly problematic held that if one was an orc, then one was fit only to be killed. No questions needed to be asked. No evidence needed to be presented in a court of law. Nothing needed to be known about a person but his race, and once the race was known the individual could be judged guilty and the execution carried out immediately afterward.
The fantasy games I played swallowed this racism pill whole. One could scarcely find a page that did not tie moral character to race. Indeed, every racial description contained an entry in the table for moral alignment. Certain character classes within the game, identified as necessarily good, were nonetheless allowed to identify a particular race as one which they were particularly adept at killing. It was a character class that a neo-NAZI or KKK member could take to with gusto, and the game called it good.
However, one of the great virtues of the game is that players could change the rules at will. Because it was a cooperative game, there was no need for the rules litigation that one finds in competitive games. Dungeon masters are invited to cheat, to alter dice roles and make off-the-cuff decisions based on nothing but their own sentiment, all aiming at the goal to make the game experience more enjoyable for all.
I simply made the decision to create a world in which moral questions, such as the issue of racism, were addressed in the game. I would not only introduce orcs that were good, I would introduce racist organizations like a fantasy version of the KKK who held that the only good orc was a dead orc. I would introduce more liberal members of society who condemned this way of thinking as morally bankrupt, and create a conflict between them.
In short, I took the habits and unquestioned ethical assumptions of my players, both within the context of the game and outside of it, and used them to create situations where the assumptions could not remain unquestioned.
In doing this, I found another excellent tool for evaluating what “better” was and how it could be found.
IV: Greater Earth
I named the world that I created for my campaign “Greater Earth”. I like to think that I came up with this name, not because I was an unimaginative sot who could invent nothing better than a variant of “Middle Earth”, but because the name had the best fit.
To explore the moral issues I wanted to explore, I set my world 50,000 years in our future. The world was built by our descendents, who used our own home world as a model, but made their new Earth much bigger, and much more exotic, than this planet..
Before creating Greater Earth, I created a builder, Michael Jacobson, and gave him a motive for building the planet. I postulated that our descendents will use genetic engineering and computer technology to enhance and improve themselves far beyond our primitive state. They will link their brains directly to computers, giving themselves virtually infinite memory and computational power. They will use their science to enhance their physical bodies to give themselves incredible strength and dexterity.
They will discover that, with all of these improvements, life could get pretty boring. Even chess would be a dull game, as mathematical models run on computer programs instantly selected the best move and fed it into the player’s mind.
In order for any game to be interesting, it had to be so big and so complex that even the computers of the day could not handle it, giving the players a sense of risk, and a sense of adventure.
Michael Jacobson had decided to build such a game. He started with a planet, making it several times the size of Earth by making it hollow. His construction crew mulched planets by the gigatonne to create the material for his construction. They poured molten rock to make mountains, bulldozed and landscaped the valleys, and dumped water onto the planet until continents took shape. When they finished, Jacobson had a planet that looked just like Earth, but bigger. After years of toil, he looked down on what he had created and said that it was good.
I built Greater Earth as a Creationist’s dream, as a constructed planet, Michael Jacobson created a world with a year that lasted an even 1,000 days, accurate down to the microsecond. It’s moon, which looked exactly like Earth’s moon, circled the planet in exactly 100 days. The Gods themselves inspired the cultures that worshipped them to divide these months into 10 weeks, each week being 10 days long. This precision was meant to make it clear to the people who he would have occupy the planet that they did not live on an accident of nature, but on something created by the Gods.
If anybody on the planet ever came to doubt that divine forces had created their world, the priests only needed to point at the calendar and say, “Look, if this planet had come from the random forces of nature, the odds that its year would be exactly 1,000 days would be infinitesimal. The odds of a moon circling every 100 days would be just as small. This planet has the precision that could only have come from a designer.” And they would have been right.
Next, using genetic engineering, Jacobson’s crew filled the planet with all of the creatures of history and legend. Where a creature could not live because of the limitations of biology, Jacobson’s scientists built technological implants that give these creatures life.
Then he added people. These were primitive people, so insignificant and irrational (from the point of view of Michael Jacobson and others in his society) that they were to Michael Jacobson and his kind as the animals of Earth are to us. He engineered elves and dwarves, orcs and trolls, giants, pixies, and, of course, humans. He made the latter the dominant species on his planet.
Then, when he was done, he held an auction. Anybody with enough money could win a seat at the gaming table. Each player took the name of a deity from ancient mythology; Sif, Apollo, Xochopilli, Loki, Jahovah, and the like. The objective of the game was to become the only deity worshipped by any being on the planet. The entire population of the planet had to worship that deity and no other. When the game ended, Jacobson promised to wipe the game board clean, add a new set of playing pieces, and start a new game.
To make the game interesting, each player faced limits in what they could do. None could visit the planet in person; they could speak only to the priests who prayed to them and through which they could work miracles. Jacobson had installed technology onto the planet that would make these miracles possible. Yet, he also kept the list of possible miracles was kept limited; the game would not be interesting if it were too easy.
The purpose of these campaign elements was to illustrate the idea that the existence of a creator does not imply that we have an obligation to obey him. The creator need not be good, and that whether the creator is good or bad depends on how he measures up to an external standard, not his own dictates. Michael Jacobson, of course, did not use his own dirt. However, it is difficult to see how this detail would change the results. We can imagine Michael Jacobson creating his own dirt out of nothing, without the slightest change in his personality or moral character.
V: Culture: The Sifians of Gat
Once I had worked out the story for the creation of Greater Earth, and built my maps of Malikii Province, I began populating the province and creating the dominant cultures in the region where the players would adventure.
I created a land with two great ethical systems in conflict. Malikii Province itself was a stranded frontier province of the Gatian Empire. The Empire worshipped a goddess named Sif. The player who took the name Sif (actually a team of players) took the name from ancient Egyptian mythology. However, they had no interest in remaining true to the Sif of legend. They sought to win the game, and they sought to give Sif an identity that would make it easier for them to do so.
They packaged Sif the way a marketing company would package a product. They needed to create a product (a deity) that the people would buy.
Over 80 percent of the planet’s population of intelligent beings was human. Therefore, in order get a jump start in the power struggle, the Sifian team decided to create a god that appealed to humans. To do this, they designed a religion that said that humans were God’s chosen people. To any degree that any other race deviated from what is standard or normal for humans, to that degree those races were called defective or deformed.
For example, the Sifian religion called dwarfism a physical deformity, an illness to be treated and, if possible, cured. Elves, they said, suffered a set of physical and mental defects that left them in a perpetual child-like state. They never grew up, and the wiser and more mature humans needed to watch over them as if they were children. Elven demands for independence and respect were seen as just another manifestation of their immaturity, like the tantrums of a teenager bucking under the parent’s wise and paternalistic rules.
The Sifian religion categoried creatures like orcs, goblins, and trolls as the “blood races.” These races were too far corrupted by a lust for violence to be helped. They deserved nothing less than extinction. The only good orc was a dead orc.
As I mentioned above, I had moral objections to the racist assumptions built into the game, but I felt the best way to expose those objections was to put them right out in the open where players could see them.
The Sifian team also noticed that the majority of the other players were aiming their religions at men, so the Sifians decided to market their deity to women. They created a religious doctrine that said that women where the better gender. Men were little more than beasts of burden capable of speech. Men clearly had no capacity to control their primitive animals lusts, which explained their disposition toward violence and aggression. Such creatures were clearly unfit to rule a civilized nation. As one of the most popular clichés of the land put it, “A man’s place is in the field.”
It was intentionally designed to show how easy it would be to justify prejudice and bigotry against people who are not accustomed to being the victim of the way the bigot’s mind works.
VI: Culture: The Meelarians of Laurella
Against the Sifians stood the Laurellans and the goddess Meelar.
Michael Jacobson allowed the highest bidders to pick the name of their deity first. By the time Susan Altman was allowed to pick, all of the good mythical names had been selected. She picked the name Meelar out of her own imagination. It sounded nice.
She liked elves, so she wanted to play a goddess that liked elves. She thought they were cute, and established a stronghold of worshippers in an isolated mountain region that its occupants called Laurella. The community was far from any other player, so it grew in peace for several hundred years. Eventually, Susan grew bored and paid her worshippers less and less attention. She did not notice the changes taking place.
A philosopher born in Laurella, Anthers, began to talk about an ethical system that was not based on any religious foundation. According to Anthers, all creatures, regardless of how powerful they were, had the same moral worth. The elf, being more powerful than the pixie, did not thereby gain a right to rule over the pixie, and the pixie had no obligation to obey the elf.
Anthers claimed that the same relationship held between Meelar and the elves. Meelar’s greater power gave her no moral right to command the elves, and the elves’ lesser power gave them no duty to obey Meelar. In the realm of morality, all creatures are equal regardless of their power. This principle applied to gods as well as mortals.
As a result of Anthers’ writing, these rebels proclaimed that, even though the gods clearly existed, none of them were to be worshipped. These Antherians announced that they would be willing to negotiate with the gods in the sense of, “If you do this for me, then I will do that for you.”
However, there would be no worship.
The Antherians went so far as to say that any god or goddess that demanded worship could be counted evil on that grounds alone. Morality demanded that others be treated as moral equals. Where this requirement was violated, that is where evil could be found. They would oppose any god that demanded worship, as they would oppose any devil or demon.
Susan Altman did not really start paying attention to her nation of elves until she noticed that the Sifians had expanded into the nearby Malikii Valley. These humans worshipped Sif, and Sif was clearly one of the larger and more powerful players in the game. When Susan looked at her own small and neglected band of Meelar followers, she saw the situation as hopeless. Sif could easily overrun the nation.
Faced with these challenges, Susan Altman put her seat at the table up for auction. Because of her weak position, there were not many bidders. This made it a perfect opportunity for a group who thought that Jacobson’s game was, itself, evil. These players felt that Jacobson had no right to create beings just for the purpose of setting them against each other in religious wars for sport.
The game was popular, and the players pretending to be gods had no interest in listening to arguments that their was something wrong — morally wrong — with their game. The group that purchased Susan Altman’s seat in the game had no power to put an end to the game, but they were free to work within the rules of the game, try to help Jacobson’s victims on the planet as much as they could. When the Meelar seat came up for auction, they snatched it up.
Immediately after this team took over the Meelar deity, the nation of Laurella experienced an event that shook society to the core. Known as Meelar’s Conversion, the deity they had been worshipping for centuries visited her priests and said that the Anthers was right.
The new Meelar said that no person had a duty to worship any deity, and that no deity had the right to demand to be worshipped. Even if a deity created an individual, that individual’s gratitude can never extend so far as to have a duty to be a slave to their creator.
Meelar told her priests that she would no longer demand worship, but would trade with her priests as moral equals. She will offer powers in exchange for service, and that the only service she could legitimately ask for would itself have to be good. If the service she sought to buy was for the elves to conquer and enslave others, than that would be just as wrong as if she was seeking to enslave the elves.seeking to enslave the elves t, and the people were to reject such trade.
Meelarian priests who rejected these new rules wanted to continue to live under the original system where a despotic deity commanded worship and power-hungry priests served as intermediaries between a submissive population and a domineering deity. However, Meelar refused to grant powers to such priests. Many left, to find other Gods who were more demanding. Most, however, stayed with Meelar, and promoted this new way of thinking about the relationships between gods and mortals.
VII: Ethical Sidetracks
Through the campaigns that I ran, I continued to add elements that explored a number of ethical issues. I took popular opinion, both within and outside the game, and tried to create a situation that called those assumptions into question. Wherever I heard players argue about things like how a certain type of character should be played, I introduced factions into the game world who disputed the same issues.
A. Treatment of the Dead
For example, there was a widely shared assumption among players that necromancy (the art of dealing with the dead) was innately evil. Therefore, I introduced a faction into the game that lived according to the following standard:
Assume that you are in a combat with your best friend, and you are killed. However, your spirit can still watch the battle. Your friend has a chance to survive the fight if he takes your sword and uses it. You would want him to take it. If, instead, your flesh magically turns to dust upon your death and your friend can save himself by grabbing your leg bone and using it as a club, you would consider him a fool not to do so. It makes no sense to argue that if he could make use of your entire skeleton, by animating it and turning it against his enemies, that this somehow crosses some sort of moral boundary. Using a friend’s skeleton is no worse than using his leg bone.
Necromancy became an actual political faction. More importantly, it was not a faction of evil that also happened to seek the pain and misery of others. Many of this faction truly sought to help others. They simply believed that animating the dead was a useful way of helping others without hurting anybody who was
B. Family Values
In an area with more real-world relevance, I created a civilization of intelligent lions, and built their culture according to what I knew about lion behavior at the time. Lion families did not have the traditional human makeup of one father, one mother, and children. They consisted of two males, usually brothers; and a group of females, all closely related. Lion females within a family were typically closely related — sisters, mothers/daughters, cousins, and other close relatives. They were not, however, closely related to the males. I then introduced the occasional leonid who did not share these dispositions. These leonid preferred an alternative lifestyle where the males pairbonded with a single female, who would then raise their children without belonging to a pride.
The elders within the pride rejected these deviants, arguing that a pair-bonded family was prone to risks and dangers that prides did not face. They argued that an injury or death to either parent would be catastrophic to a two-lion pride, and how a larger pride provided a more stable and secure home for young cubs against such tragedies. They called pair-bonding unnatural, and insisted that any lion acting on a preference for such an arrangement was a sinner in the eyes of their God and should be condemned. They certainly had no interest in promoting these pair-bonded relationships and resisted all efforts to make pairbonding legal.
C. Deception: The Art of Lying
I created factions that argued that illusion was the art of lying, and that spell castors that specialized in illusion deserved the same contempt as con artists, hustlers, and sophists, all of whom used the art of deception to their own advantage. These were people who specialized in getting people to agree to things that were not true, much like marketing and public relations organizations today specialize in creating illusions about political candidates and public policy that are similarly untrue.
D. Enchantment and Charm
Another aspect of the game that I looked at with a new critical eye dealt with charms and enchantments. There were whole realms of magic within the game that dealt with love potions, beguilement, and other methods to twist the will of the victim so that he acted in a way that suited the spell caster.
Within the game, I created a faction that argued that enchantments and charms fit into the moral category of moral rape. According to this faction, the spell caster took her victim’s will to use for her own purposes the same way that the rapist takes his victim’s body to use for his own purposes.
VIII: Get Real
These games not only gave me a new way of looking at certain ethical problems, but they also gave me some answers, or at least some insight, that I would apply later.
A. The Golden Rule
For example, there is the moral maxim, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Though Christians often claim that this is a unique and special principle of their religion, it is difficult to find any moral system that does not specify it somewhere.
However, what happens if we apply this maxim in a world that includes a lot of different types of creatures — elves, dwarves, dragons, sprites, orcs, pegasi, and the like. In this environment, we have a question. Should a human treat an elf as he (the human) would want the elf to treat him? Or should he treat the elf as he would want the elf to treat him if he were an elf?
If we pick the former, we end up with some peculiar results. Why should the human treat the elf as if the elf were a human when, in fact, the elf is not a human? If we shift the difference a little more, we can start to see the problem a little more clearly. Why should a human treat a pegasus as if the pegasus was a human when, in fact, a pegasus is a horse. Should it not be the case that pegasus are treated as pegasus and not as humans?
In other words, the point above suggests that we should not do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Rather, we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us if we were them. Or, we should do unto others as they would have us do unto them.
B. Animal Rights
The game provided a wide range of creatures, from giants and titans, to pixies and sprites, to dragons and basilisks, from humans to trolls, and from deities to demons. Each race was assigned a value for its median intelligence. The average Human was smarter than the average Orc.
In contemporary society, we are morally prohibited from suggesting that one race or gender tends to be smarter than another. Any who dares make such a suggestion is instantly condemned, typically losing his livelihood. However a fantasy world allows us to investigate this question without the emotion that we have in this society. What implications can be drawn if we actually had a society with different races, each with different levels of intelligence?
On a related issue, these fantasy worlds had no clear and sharp distinction between an intelligent race (humans) and a less intelligent race (antelope). So, where, in the range of possibilities between human and antelope, does one lose the moral worth of being human? How do you justify this?
Then, we ask questions that go in the other direction. There were also superhuman entities. In the context of the game, many species of dragon were smarter than humans. If our superiority over animals made it legitimate for us to treat them as mere property, then does this not imply that dragons (who are clearly stronger and portrayed in the game as also having superhuman intelligence) have a right to treat humans as mere property? If not, then from where do we get the right to treat animals as property?
If any should think that I am arguing for a strict moral equality between humans and animals, yielding such absurd conclusions as owning a pet is slavery or that we face some sort of moral dilemma when confronted with a choice between saving a puppy and saving a boy, then they are jumping to conclusions. Here, I am raising questions. I am not yet offering any answers. I will return to this question again in a future chapter.
C. Human Nature
I have known a lot of people who have tried to tie ethics in with human nature. However, the fantasy worlds I created showed a significant problem with this view. What happens if you have a society that is obviously made up of a large number of different types of creatures with a large number of different natures?
In a world made up of humans, elves, halflings, orcs, ogres, and goblins, it is nothing short of arrogance to hold that morality should be fixated solely on human nature. Instead, morality should look for some sort of peaceful compromise between a lot of different creatures each having distinct natures.
When we look at humans, we see a society filled with creatures that do not have the magnitude of differences that we would find in a fantasy world. However, the nature of that difference remains the same. Ultimately, there is no truth to be found in the claim that humans have a common nature. Nor is there any justification for holding that only our common characteristics are to be considered, and differences among humans are to be ignored.
The idea of deriving ethics from a common “human nature” has some very difficult questions to answer.
IX: Universalization
If morality truly is universal, then it should be applicable to a wide variety of situations, real and imagined. Most of our moral life consists in making moral choices in imaginary situations. “What should I do if...?” is a very common and very useful question to be asking. “What should I do if I discover that my child has been using drugs?” “What should I do if my boss asks me to lie?”, “What should I do if I come across a wallet filled with cash?” Asking and answering these types of questions helps to prepare us to do what we ought when that situation actually pops up. We have already figured out what the answer is.
Our human imagination gives us a great deal of opportunity to ask and answer questions of the type, “What should I do if. . .?”, and allows us to apply these questions to a wide variety of situations. It gives us a useful tool for looking at a number of issues and arriving at conclusions that may surprise us.
Does it really matter, morally, whether we were created by a being that had a particular purpose in mind in creating us? What if that being, like Michael Jacobson, did not have noble motives in doing so — but only wanted to entertain himself watching gladiatorial combat on a world-wide arena?
What moral conclusions would we draw in a society made up of a range of different types of creatures with different natures — creatures like intelligent lions or insects — and what does that tell us about how we should treat other humans whose natures might also differ from our own?
Should we truly be doing unto others as we would have them do unto us? Or should we instead be doing unto them as we would have them do unto us if we were them?
If moral worth depends on levels of intelligence, what would we say if a race of beings far more intelligent than us decided to treat us as we treat animals? What would we say of a race of beings half way between humans and animals — if, for example, the Neanderthal would not have gone extinct?
A moral theory cannot be limited to just evaluating the present. It has to be able to evaluate possible futures. Those possible futures are products of the imagination. A theory that cannot handle these types of cases shows a serious weakness compared to those that can.
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