On the propagation of human actions through time and space
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Actions exist that are amplified as time goes on and their consequences spread through space. Example: Anything that shuffles up male gametes before conception such as bumping into a person while on public transportation. Such actions have consequences that are highly sensitive to initial states and produce relevant effects relatively quickly. Another example might be the election of officials, two people falling in love, meeting people and forming friendships, finding a PhD advisor, etc.
Such actions, although start from one individual they propagate, initially, to more individuals in similar states. By induction they may propagate for ever in relevant ways. We may imagine what would have happened had one of Hitler's ancestors from 1500 years ago died in battle before having children. Hitler may have even been a woman, history would have been completely altered as Hitler was not the only descendant of that person, The Holocaust may never have happened, or something worse may have, etc.
We can model a universe in which such actions take place by a directed acyclic graph. The graph is grouped into layers, similar to a neural network, except that each node is connected to a finite number of child states and a child state has a finite number of ancestors. The bottom layers represent the initial states, the top layers represent the final states, each node is either white or black. A node, except the initial ones, have their color determined as the XOR of all its ancestors. To model what effect such an action has on the universe, flip the color of just one initial node. We can concretely map such a model to reality by assuming that the graph is a genealogy and the colors represent the sex of the person.
Furthermore we can imagine human decision as a progressive subset selection. For example person 0 chooses the first element of a binary sequence as 1, person two chooses 1, 2 0, etc. In this example, although person 0 does not choose the final, nor the greatest number of bits in the sequence he selects half of the possible sequences at that time, the same for person 1, 2, etc. In reality we would expect that the universes we select are different to us in relevant ways, instead of a ones(|a - b|), such as (Bill: politician, John: farmer, Ellis: nurse, etc.) vs (Joe: cleric, John: deceased, Jane: sailor, etc).
Thus our actions as minor as they may be can have significant results especially as they get further away from us in time and space. From an ethical perspective it is unlikely that after a given distance we would have any preference towards a given universe we produced versus an alternative one. Therefore they are for the most part ethically irrelevant after a given time and space.
In the scenario where the consequences of our actions are left in the tides of fate, good need not follow good, evil may only be apparent. As we would mindlessly change the world around us, we may only take credit for what is within the reach of our prediction and control. Two issues arise here. The first, would we be comfortable in these boundaries? A mother wishes the best for her child as long as he lives, but one day she sends him shopping and a car hits him. The second, should we place more importance on what we can successfully accomplish? I might have saved Rome for the time being, but weakened it to the barbarians through civil war. Every good and evil would only be an illusion given by our ignorance of the world.
Let us consider another scenario, good follows good eventually, evil is only temporary. As in Immanuel Kant's argument from morality we propose a world in which time and space are shepherded by God himself. Nothing grand would come out of our good will, such as empires lasting until the end of the world, neither saving countries from ignorance and deceit as enlightenment attempted. However our intuition would be much more comfortable as we need not concern ourselves that our works be in vain, humble as they may be.
As a final remark, assuming that the world is beyond our control and prediction and it is still very good, without us even concerning ourselves for it nor being able to do so, we may consider the first scenario falsified in the favor of the later.
Robert Browning
Pippa’s Song
The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side ’s dew-pearl'd;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!