Undoing one’s past

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.