People selectively enforce their moral principles, excusing wrongdoing when it suits them. We identify an underappreciated source of this moral inconsistency: the ability to imagine counterfactuals, or alternatives to reality. Counterfactual thinking offers three sources of flexibility that people exploit to justify preferred moral conclusions: People can (a) generate counterfactuals with different content (e.g., consider how things could have been better or worse), (b) think about this content using different comparison processes (i.e., focus on how it is similar to or different than reality), and (c) give the result of these processes different weights (i.e., allow counterfactuals more or less influence on moral judgments). These sources of flexibility help people license unethical behavior and can fuel political conflict. Motivated reasoning may be less constrained by facts than previously assumed; people’s capacity to condemn and condone whom they wish may be limited only by their imaginations.

中文翻译：

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动机反事实思维和道德不一致：我们如何利用我们的想象力选择性地谴责和纵容

人们有选择地执行他们的道德原则，在适合他们的时候原谅不法行为。我们发现了这种道德不一致的一个未被充分认识的根源：想象反事实或现实替代方案的能力。反事实思维提供了三种灵活性来源，人们可以利用它们来证明首选道德结论的合理性：人们可以（a）产生具有不同内容的反事实（例如，考虑事情如何变得更好或更糟），（b）使用不同的比较来思考该内容(即，关注它与现实的相似或不同之处)，(c) 赋予这些过程的结果不同的权重（即，允许反事实或多或少地影响道德判断）。这些灵活性来源帮助人们许可不道德行为，并可能加剧政治冲突。动机推理可能比之前假设的更少受到事实的限制；人们谴责和宽恕他们所希望的人的能力可能只受到他们的想象力的限制。