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Regret

Regret

PADDY MCQUEEN

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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197651384.001.0001

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Personal and Political Significance of Regret

PART I: THE PHILOSOPHY OF REGRET

1. Making Sense of Regret

Introduction

How to Develop an Account of Regret What Regret Is (and What It Is Not)

The Psychology of Regret Are There “Types” of Regret?

The Rational and Intelligible Limits of Regret

2. On the “Fittingness” of Regret

Introduction

The Moralistic Fallacy

The “Shape” and “Size” of Regret Is It Always Unreasonable to Regret?

3. Reasons, Mistakes, and Justified Decisions

1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.5. 1.6. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5. 3.6. 3.7. 3.8.

Introduction

Practical Identity and Decision-Justification

“Epistemically Available” Reasons

Perspective-Dependent and Perspective-Independent Reas ons

Retrospective Justification

Reasons and Time

Self-Transformations

Akrasia and Regret

4. Regret, Agency, and Responsibility

4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.5. 5.6.

Introduction

Regret and the Scope of Responsibility

Against Williams’s “Agent-Regret”

Description, Intention, and the Framing of Responsibility

Accidents, Apologies, and Interpersonal Relations

5. Regret, Valuing, and Virtue

Introduction

Regret, Attachment, and Affirmation

Assessing Wallace’s Account

Regret and Unrealised Values

Conflicts of Value and Tragic Choices

Coda: Aristotle and Stoicism

PART II: THE POLITICS OF REGRET

6. The Social Structuring of Regret

Introduction

The Cultural Politics of Emotion

The Social Contours of Regret

Pronatalism and Regret

Regretting Motherhood

7. Voluntary Sterilization and Regret

Introduction

Refused Sterilization Requests

Autonomy and Medical Paternalism

Sterilization, Well-Being, and Informed Consent

Permanency, Commitment, and Choice

Credibility, Identity, and Epistemic Injustice

8. Abortion and Regret

6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.5. 7.1. 7.2. 7.3. 7.4. 7.5. 7.6. 8.1. 8.2. 8.3. 8.4. 8.5.

Introduction

The Politicization of Abortion Regret

The Rise to Prominence of Abortion Regret

Ripple Effects

The Normative Force of Abortion Regret

9. Trans Regret

9.1. 9.2. 9.3.

9.4.

Introduction

A Note on Terminology

The Purported “Problem” of Trans Regret Personally Transformative Treatment

Trans Regret and the Authentic Self

10. Living with and without Regret

9.5. 10.

1. 10.

2. 10.

3. 10.

4. 10.

5. 10. 6.

Introduction

Refusing to Regret

The Waxing or Waning of Regret Self-Forgiveness and Regret

Looking to the Future Regulating Regret

Bibliography Index

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Patrick Cockburn for extensive discussions about the main ideas and arguments in this book. He gave up a great deal of his time—far more than could reasonably be expected —to help me to clarify my understanding of regret. Thanks, also, to Chris Cowley for first stoking my interest in this topic. I had many enjoyable and stimulating conversations with him about regret. Without them, this book may never have been written. I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers from Oxford University Press, who provided very helpful feedback. I also want to sing the praises of Lucy Randall, my editor at OUP, who has been unfailingly helpful and supportive.

I have been thinking and writing about regret for nigh on ten years now. This book draws from the following articles that I have published during this time: ‘Authenticity, Intersubjectivity and the Ethics of Changing Sex’, JournalofGenderStudies25, no. 5 (2016): 557–70; ‘Feminist and Trans Perspectives on Identity and the UK Gender Recognition Act’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 18, no. 3 (2016): 671–87; ‘When Should We Regret?’, InternationalJournalofPhilosophicalStudies25, no. 4 (2017): 608–23; ‘The Role of Regret in Medical Decision-Making’, EthicalTheory and Moral Practice 20, no. 5 (2017): 1051–65; ‘A Defence of Voluntary Sterilisation’, Res Publica 26, no. 2 (2020): 237–55. I am very grateful to the respective publishers for their permission to reprint and rework parts of these works.

Introduction

The Personal and Political Significance of Re gret

Towards the end of the film Casablanca, Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart) is trying urgently to convince Isla Lund (played by Ingrid Bergman) to board a plane with her husband, Victor Laszlo, that will enable her to escape Vichy-controlled Casablanca. This will part Rick and Isla for good, despite their professed love for each other, as Rick will remain behind. Uttering the following, memorable lines, he tells her: ‘If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him [Victor], you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life’. This is a hugely momentous decision, which will significantly affect the rest of their lives. Therefore, it is noteworthy that Rick invokes regretin order to persuade her to leave Casablanca and, thus, him.

Rick’s use of regret may seem perfectly understandable. We want to avoid regretting our choices and often spend a great deal of time deliberating in order to ensure that we do not regret them. The experience of regret is a painful one and seems to indicate that we made a poor decision, which can serve as a further source of frustration. We often beat ourselves up about the mistakes that we make, sometimes dwelling on them and, in extreme cases, becoming obsessed with them. Thus, warning someone that they will regret their decision can be a powerful way of influencing them. It alerts them to the fact that they are making a terrible mistake (or so it seems to us). If we can avoid making a decision that we will regret later, then, surely, we should do so. We expect Isla to be persuaded by Rick’s warning of regret. At the very least, we are not surprised if she is. However, why is this the case? Why should we care that we might regret something? Is the possibility of regret a strong reason

to avoid a course of action? More generally, why do we regret many of our choices and is such regret intelligible or appropriate? What does this reveal about how we understand ourselves and the world? Ultimately, how should we determine what regret is and the place that it ought to have in our lives? My aim in this book is to offer some plausible answers to these questions.

To begin, it is worth noting how prevalent regret is. Many people’s lives—I suspect most people’s lives—are littered with regrets, both minor and more major. The experimental data certainly suggest this. In a 1984 study, Susan Shimanoff monitored people’s everyday conversations to see which emotions were mentioned in them.1 Regret was the second most frequently mentioned emotion, after love, and thus the most frequently mentioned negative emotion. More recently, Saffrey et al. reported that of nine negative emotions, participants said that regret was the one they experienced most frequently.2 A lot of regrets are low-key and relatively trivial, such as when one misses the bus to work because one overslept, gets a small fine for forgetting to return a library book on time, or makes a stupid remark at a social event. However, some regrets—indeed, quite a few of them—can be substantial, such as regretting whom one married, the career one did or did not pursue, or one’s failure to reconcile with someone before she died.3 Deep regrets can become all-consuming, defining in large part how we make sense of our lives. Think, for example, of the character Terry Malloy in the film On theWaterfront.4 Malloy was a talented young boxer, who deliberately lost a fight so that his brother could win a lucrative bet. Many years later, after his boxing career has fizzled out and he is working as a bodyguard, he declares, ‘I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been someone. Instead of a bum, which is what I am’. Thus, not only can our regrets be felt intensely, but they can also be brooded over, providing a fresh pang of pain each time we focus on them. In extreme cases, our entire life can be seen as a failure, as a huge mistake, and hence as one big regret.

In addition to its impact on our emotional lives and decisionmaking, regret is also important for reflecting on our beliefs about

personal identity. For example, if I regret something that I did ten years ago, then I must think that “me” now and “me” back then are, in some significant sense, the same person: I regret what I did. It may well be correct to think this, but it indicates that our experiences of regret are underpinned by beliefs about personal identity. If someone denies that they are quantitatively the same person as the one who committed the regrettable act, then they may refuse to regret it. They may say, “Idid not make that decision. Therefore, why should I regret it?”. One may think that this is a flawed attitude to adopt towards the past and personal identity, but it does not seem to be utterly incoherent or impossible, especially if a large amount of time separates the two selves. At a minimum, the temporal distance between a past and present self might diminish the intensity of the regret I feel about something my past self did. More understandably, someone may refuse to regret what they did because of a substantial qualitative change in who they are. For example, someone may have done something very stupid when they were a teenager, which caused them significant regret. Now, forty years later, they feel little or no regret about it, because they are such a different person. Conversely, someone may have done something that they did not regret at the time, but which now causes them great regret. Analysing the connection between regret, changes in our self over time, and identification with past selves is a major focus of this book.

Making sense of regret also involves engaging with debates about time, reasons, and truth. If I regret ending a relationship with someone when I was younger, then it is likely that I think that things would have been better if we had stayed together. However, does this counterfactual statement need to be true in order for my regret to be coherent? If so, then can it be true? Perhaps I should think that things would have been disastrous if we had stayed together, and thus feel great relief instead of regret. What would make one judgement more justified than the other? Similarly, if I regret not spending more time practicing the piano, then I must think either that I had a reason to practice the piano in the past or that I have a reason now to have practiced the piano in the past. Either way, we

need to assess whether and, if so, how, reasons can “transmit” their force across time and, more generally, what it means to say that one “has” a reason to do something or, crucially, to have done something in the past.

Furthermore, if the experience of regret involves thinking along the lines of “how much better if things had been otherwise”, then the experience of regret could be conditioned upon a view about the nature of freedom and determinism. If one believes wholeheartedly in a fully deterministic universe, then it makes little or no sense to think “if only I had acted differently”, because it is impossible that one did so. Thus, perhaps the intelligibility of regret is reliant on the belief in human free will; in the belief that it is genuinely metaphysically possible for us to choose one way or another when deliberating about what to do.5 Nietzsche noted this with regard to remorse, a close cousin of regret: ‘Thus, because he thinks he is free (but not because he is free), man feels remorse and the pangs of conscience’.6 This implies that one feels emotions like remorse and regret because one thinks one is free. If one did not think this, then one would not experience these emotions. Along similar lines, Henry Sidgwick writes that ‘a man will not feel remorsefor his actions, if he regards them as necessary results of causes anterior to his personal existence. I admit that so far as the sentiment of remorse implies self-blame irremovably fixed on the self blamed, it must tend to vanish from the mind of a convinced Determinist’.7 Of course, Nietzsche advocated strong causal determinism and thus rejected the idea of free will.8 He therefore asserted that it is “unjust” to judge ourselves, e.g., to criticise or to blame ourselves for what we have done or who we are is, because we are not responsible for these things.9 Assuming, as I shall argue, that regret is a form of self-judgement—specifically, a form of self-recrimination—then Nietzsche’s view seems to suggest that we ought not to regret the things we do, or, at least, that it is “unjust” if we do so.

As we shall see, a Stoic attitude toward regret may also reject its coherence because of Stoicism’s understanding of human freedom and the nature of the universe. One reason for this is that, like

Nietzsche, Stoics endorse strong causal determinism, which rules out the idea that one could have acted otherwise. A second reason is that it is part of the Stoic view that the world exhibits a fundamentally rational order—or, put differently, is ordered according to a fundamentally rational principle or divine will—and this, also, would seem to rule out the coherence of regret. This is because regret implies that things would have been better if one had acted otherwise or if events had transpired differently. However, if this is the “best of all possible worlds” (regardless of whether “best possible” is all that good), then it makes no sense to assert that things could have been better and hence it makes no sense to regret. Consequently, to think about regret is to think about, among other things, the nature of human agency, identity, time, reasons, and even the physical universe itself.

Given all of this, it is somewhat peculiar that there has been relatively little discussion of regret in the philosophical literature.10 I suspect that many readers will be familiar with Bernard Williams’s remarks on regret, especially in his paper ‘Moral Luck’,11 and there is a reasonable number of philosophy articles that discuss his view and regret more generally. However, to the best of my knowledge, there are only three philosophical monographs on regret James Warren’s Regret:AStudyinAncientMoralPsychology,12 R. J. Wallace’s TheVi ewfromHere:OnAffirmation, AttachmentandtheLimitsofRegret,1 3 and Brian Price’s A Theory of Regret14—along with Anna Gotlib’s edited book, The MoralPsychology of Regret.15 The fact that these texts were all published within the last ten years, coupled with the recency of many of the philosophy articles on regret, suggests that there is growing philosophical interest in the topic.16 Nevertheless, given the relative paucity of philosophical analyses of regret, there is little agreement about how best to understand it and the role that it should play in our lives. As Carolyn Price states, ‘Fundamental questions about its fittingness conditions and functions have yet to be settled’.17

Importantly, my exploration of regret includes an examination of how our experiences of regret are shaped by the social world(s) that

we inhabit. For example, are some people more prone to regret things than other people are and, if so, why? How do social discourses and people’s identities affect their experiences of regret? Potentially more troublingly, in what ways is regret used to regulate people’s choices and to sustain social practices and policies? To give one of the main examples that I discuss in the book, the concept of “abortion regret” has become a central part of the anti-abortion/prolife movement. Campaigners offer the supposed fact that many women regret their abortions as a compelling reason for governments to ban abortion and for women to choose to avoid it. I look at how beliefs about women’s natural and spiritual identity as mothers—the tendency to equate women with motherhood— generate the assumption that women will inevitably regret having an abortion and the assertion that it is right that they do so. I also document how, especially in the United States, but also elsewhere, these beliefs became politicised in the battle to overturn the legal right to abortion. Furthermore, I consider how these beliefs render it very difficult, and highly stigmatizing, to express regret about having had children. Thus, alongside a philosophical examination of the nature and normativity of regret, I also develop a cultural politics of regret.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the philosophy of regret. This comprises an analysis of existing accounts of regret within the philosophical literature and an account of how I think we should understand regret. In developing this account, I explore our reasons for regret and how these reasons connect with beliefs about practical agency, personal identity, value, time, and causality. Throughout this part, I consider a range of regrets, from the relatively mundane (e.g., staying up too late at night) to the existentially significant/life-defining (e.g., wasting one’s life in pursuit of a career that one now considers to be of little value or meaning). The second part looks at regret within specific practical contexts, especially medical decision-making and choosing to have, or not to have, children. Here I am interested in two issues. The first is whether regret should play any role within these domains. For example, can a doctor be justified in denying a woman’s request for

sterilization because she might regret it? The second is how the role of regret in these contexts is shaped by social discourses and identities, with a strong focus on gender. Along with the issue of abortion regret outlined above, I also offer in-depth analyses of post-sterilization regret and regret following gender confirmation treatment.

A few final notes on the following. The two parts can be read relatively independently of each other. Whilst the main arguments that I make about the politics of regret in the second part of the book are underpinned by the theoretical account of regret I set out in the first part, it is not necessary to have read the first part in order to make sense of what I say in the second part (and vice versa). If you are purely interested in either the philosophy or the politics of regret, then you could forgo my discussion of the other. However, the claims I make in the second part will make more sense, and hopefully seem more justified, if one has read the first part, and you will get a richer, fuller appreciation of regret if you read both parts sequentially.

In addition, as will be clear from this introduction, the book considers a wide range of topics and theories. Amongst other things, I cover discussions of practical reasons, the persistence of the self, Stoicism, pronatalism, abortion politics, agency, responsibility, frames of description, gender confirmation treatment, detransitioning, paternalism, and the gendered dimension of autonomy. This breadth is, I hope, interesting in itself, as it weaves together a plethora of different ideas and arguments. It also shows the complex nature of regret and the numerous philosophical and political issues that are relevant to making sense of it. However, breadth requires the occasional sacrifice of depth and, at times, you might think that an important debate or theory is not covered as thoroughly as it could or should be, that relevant parts of it are omitted, and/or that a position I endorse is not justified sufficiently. That is unavoidable for a book of this size, but I hope that you will agree that the benefits of bringing together all of these important ideas and arguments outweigh these costs.

1 Susan B. Shimanoff, ‘Commonly Named Emotions in Everyday Conversations’, PerceptualandMotor Skills 58, no. 2 (1984): 514.

2 Colleen Saffrey, Amy Summerville, and Neal J. Roese, ‘Praise for Regret: People Value Regret above Other Negative Emotions’, Motivation and Emotion 32, no. 1 (March 2008): 46–54. Happily, participants reported experiencing positive emotions, such as love, pride, and joy, more frequently than negative emotions.

3 A review of existing studies on the most prevalent types of regret concluded that they are, in descending order of frequency, regrets about education, career, romance, parenting, the self, and leisure. Neal J. Roese and Amy Summerville, ‘What We Regret Most . . . and Why’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31, no. 9 (1 September 2005): 1273–85. For a useful analysis of this, see Daniel H. Pink, The Power ofRegret (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2022).

4 Credit goes to Chris Cowley for using this as an example of life-defining regret (Christopher Cowley, ‘Long-Term Regret, Perspective, and Fate’, in The Moral Psychology of Regret, ed. Anna Gotlib [London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019], 240–58).

5 Some people, especially compatibilists, will reject this as an accurate depiction of what the belief in free will involves, but I hope that it will suffice for the point being made.

6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 174.

7 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981), 71.

8 ‘When we see a waterfall, we think we see freedom of will and choice in the innumerable turnings, windings, breakings of the waves; but everything is necessary; each movement can be calculated mathematically. Thus it is with human actions; if one were omniscient, one would be able to calculate each individual action in advance, each step in the progress of knowledge, each error, each act of malice’. Nietzsche, The Nietzsche Reader, 177.

9 Nietzsche, The Nietzsche Reader, 174.

10 There is a large body of literature on regret in psychology, economics, and decision theory, which I draw on where relevant. However, whilst this is useful for a descriptive understanding of regret, it says very little about the normativity of regret. In other words, it tells us much about the regrets people have, but next to nothing about whether and when we ought to regret the things that we do. Furthermore, the types of regret analysed tend to be very specific and rather contrived. For example, a study might examine people’s regrets about purchasing a product that they then discover could have been bought cheaper elsewhere (“buyer’s regret” is a common topic of study in behavioural economics). The more interesting and meaningful regrets, such as relationship or career regrets, are

rarely engaged with, perhaps because they do not lend themselves to controlled, replicable experiments.

11 Bernard A. O. Williams, ‘Moral Luck’, in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973–1980(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 20–39.

12 James Warren, Regret: A Study in Ancient Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). As the title suggests, Warren’s book is largely confined to examining the concept of regret (metameleia) in Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism, although he does connect this with contemporary discussions of regret, especially the views of Williams and Wallace.

13 R. Jay Wallace, The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits ofRegret (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). As will become clear in Chapter 5, where I discuss Wallace’s book in detail, he is focused on exploring how our attachments place limits on what we can regret, rather than providing an extensive analysis of the concept of regret itself.

14 Brian Price, A Theory of Regret (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). Despite the title, Price’s book says rather little about the nature of regret and next to nothing about whether our regrets are warranted. Indeed, he argues that regret is ‘of no real import for reason’ (5). Contrary to this claim, I and pretty much everyone else who writes about it think that regret is of the utmost import for reason. Thus, our books have very different focuses and very different ways of examining regret.

15 Anna Gotlib, ed., The Moral Psychology of Regret (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

16 There is also an interest amongst the general public in the topic, with books such as Bonnie Ware’s The Top Five Regrets of the Dying and Daniel Pink’s The Po wer of Regret being very successful. Ware’s book sold over a million copies and has been translated into thirty-two languages. There is also a plethora of self-help books that promise to free you from regret and to teach you how to live without regrets.

17 Carolyn Price, ‘The Many Flavours of Regret’, The Monist 103 (2020): 147.

PART I

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REGRET

I have two main aims in this part of the book. The first is to pin down what regret is. My view, to put it nounally, is that regret is the painful feeling of self-chastisement (i.e., self-reproach, self-rebuke, self-recrimination, etc.) resulting from doing something that one thinks is a mistake. To put it verbally, to regret is to reproach oneself for acting poorly (more specifically, to reproach oneself for making a decision that is not justified by one’s practical identity). This means that there are two components of regret. First, to regret is to experience the sting of self-reproach, which constitutes its phenomenological core. Second, regret concerns the things that we do, that is, our actions. More specifically, I claim that regret concerns our mistakes. This means that I treat regret as a distinct emotion, which differs from other, related emotions, such as guilt, remorse, and disappointment. It also means that I reject many existing philosophical discussions of regret, especially Bernard Williams’s account of agent-regret, according to which we can and, more importantly, ought to regret things that we do entirely unintentionally/involuntarily.

The focus on mistakes is central to the second aim, which is to identify when we should regret the things that we have done. This involves distinguishing different senses of “should”, which, in turn, requires identifying the different reasons we can have for regret. As I explain, what is of fundamental importance is whether our regret is “fitting”, that is, whether the features of the situation we are in “warrant” regret. The challenge is then to ascertain what features of a situation render regret a fitting response to it. I argue that it is when we make mistakes, and only when we make mistakes, that the situation warrants regret.1 Of course, this involves explaining what

constitutes a “mistake”. I argue for an evidence-relative perspectivist account of “mistake”. In short, to make a mistake is to fail to act on good practical reasons that were epistemically available to you at the time you made your decision. As we shall see, this differs from the views of some influential philosophers. For example, I reject the claim that it is rational to regret a decision you believe to have been the best you could have made, even if that decision has very unwanted, negative consequences. In contrast, the likes of Bernard Williams and Michael Stocker think that regret about such “tragic dilemmas” is both rational and praiseworthy. Thus, I endeavour to show why my account is preferable.

1 In so doing, I suggest that many philosophical discussions of regret are guilty of committing what D’Arms and Jacobson call the “moralistic fallacy”. Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, ‘The Moralistic Fallacy: On the “Appropriateness” of Emotions’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61, no. 1 (2000): 65–90. These accounts offer reasons for regret that do not pertain to its “fittingness” and are thus irrelevant to whether regret is a warranted response to a situation itself.

1 Making Sense of Regret

1.1. Introduction

Given our everyday familiarity with regret, it might seem that providing a clear, succinct description of it would be a fairly simple task. As I show in this chapter, that is far from the case. Despite the ease and frequency with which we think and talk about it, regret is surprisingly hard to pin down. Once placed under the philosophical microscope, regret becomes a rather elusive, ‘slippery’ concept.1 Perhaps this is why philosophers have said quite different things about what regret is and the sorts of things that we can and should regret. I am puzzled by many of these views, which seem to be at odds with the sorts of regrets that people have and what the typical experience of regret is like. They also fail to meet what I consider to be some important conditions for what an acceptable account of regret should be like. In arguing this, I present how I think we should understand regret. This will set things up for the following chapters, in which I analyse when, if ever, regret is justified.

1.2. How to Develop an Account of Regret

Regret is an emotion. This much, I hope, is uncontroversial. What is a matter of much debate is how we should understand the nature of emotions. Cognitivist accounts assert that emotions can be defined or are constituted by a particular thought or set of thoughts. For example, to be afraid is to think (or believe or judge) that something is fearful; to be envious is to think (or believe or judge) that

someone has something that you want. In contrast, “feeling” accounts of emotion assert that emotions are bodily feelings, which are differentiated by their experiential quality (what they feel like). Thus, to be afraid is to be consciously aware of feeling fear; to be angry is to be consciously aware of feeling anger. Each of these broad theories has different versions, which are much more complex than the very brief summary given here, and these are by no means exhaustive of how emotions are understood. Thus, outlining which account of emotion seems to be most plausible would be a booklength task in itself. Rather than do this, I focus on how we should understand the nature of regret, regardless of how this fits within a particular theory of emotion.2 Thus, the way that I define the nature and normativity of regret need not apply to other emotions. I think that there are several features of regret that a plausible account of it needs to accommodate. First, regret is about something; it is “object-directed” or “intentional”. We do not have a general mood of “regretfulness”, in which we feel regret without being able to say what it is that we regret / what the cause of our regret is. Rather, we regret specific things, such as staying up too late or being unfaithful to our partner.3 This contrasts with occasions in which we feel a general sense of, say, depression or happiness, even though we cannot say what it is that we are depressed or happy about. Second, regret involves both cognitive and affective states (or, less technically, thoughts and feelings). To experience regret, one must believe something to be the case and one must have a certain sort of feeling. It is not sufficient to think, “I ought not to have done that”, one must also feel pained by what one did. Third, regret can be recalcitrant. That is, regret can be relatively immune to our judgement about its appropriateness. For example, I may regret the impulsive purchase I made, despite telling myself that it does not matter or that it will prove to be a worthwhile purchase in the future.4 Fourth, regret is motivating. Specifically, it motivates us to improve our decision-making in the future. We can also call this regret’s “action-tendency”. I think that this also constitutes the function of regret, or, at least, its primary function.

Note that this need not be successful. For example, despite resolving to avoid impulsive purchases in the future, I may be unable to resist the shiny new gadget I see when I am next shopping. Nevertheless, regret provides a pressure towards acting differently (i.e., less regrettably) in the future.

Putting these requirements together, an account of regret needs to state what it is that we regret, what regret feels like, what thought(s) regret involves, how regret relates to rational judgement and belief, and how regret improves our behaviour/decisions. In addition, I think that an account of regret should enable us to distinguish it from other, similar emotions, such as guilt, remorse, and shame. These, I contend, are distinct emotions that have, inter alia, different objects, action-tendencies, and valences (i.e., affective qualities: they feel different). This is a controversial claim. A lot of theorists treat regret as a broad, umbrella-like emotion that encompasses a range of other emotions, such as guilt, remorse, and disappointment. For example, Wallace writes about “generic regret”, which ‘is typically understood to involve an affect of pain or distress about a past event that is judged to be in some way unfortunate or lamentable’,5 and which contains various “subclasses”, such as remorse, sorrow, sadness, guilt, resentment, and indignation.6 Similarly, Landman states that ‘regret is a superordinate concept that subsumes certain defining features of disappointment, sadness, remorse, and guilt’.7 Contrary to such views, I argue that regret is a specific emotion that has a different phenomenological and cognitive structure to emotions such as guilt and remorse. In other words, regret feels different to other emotions and involves different thoughts or judgements.8

I call the requirement that an account of regret captures its distinctness, and thus enables us to distinguish it from other emotions, the “specificity condition”. Support for the specificity condition comes from work by Roseman et al., who showed that emotions can be differentiated in terms of distinctive feelings, thoughts, action-tendencies, actions, and what they call “emotivations” or “emotional motives”.9 Whereas actions are specific

behavioural responses, emotivations are general goals or motives. For example, an emotivation of fear is wanting to avoid danger and an emotivation of anger is wanting to break something (respective actions for fear and anger could be running away and slamming a door). Roseman et al. found that for ten selected emotions—fear, sadness, distress, frustration, disgust, dislike, anger, regret, guilt, and shame—each had different characteristic feelings, thoughts, action-tendencies, actions, and emotivations, based on how participants in their study described their experiences of these emotions. For regret, these were “feeling a sinking feeling”, “think of what a mistake you made”, “think about a lost opportunity”, “feel like kicking yourself”, “feel like correcting your mistake”, “do something differently”, “want to improve your performance”, and “want to get a second chance”.10 Indeed, there is a general consensus in the psychological literature that regret constitutes a discrete emotion, which can be differentiated from other emotions along multiple dimensions (see Section 2.3).

The specificity condition requires that we define regret in a way that distinguishes it from other emotions; a definition of regret that could also apply to guilt or remorse means that one cannot say that regret is distinct from them. Somewhat oddly, Landman—who treats regret as a “superordinate concept”—also asserts that regret can be distinguished from disappointment, guilt, remorse, etc. Thus, she seems to think that feelings such as guilt are a form of regret and yet she also wants to treat them as separate emotions. I do not think that she can have it both ways. If regret incorporates other emotions, then it is not really an emotion but, rather, a way of referring to a set of emotions (a sort of meta-emotion). Indeed, her definition of regret seems to be exactly that:

Regret is a more or less painful cognitive and emotional state of feeling sorry for misfortunes, limitations, losses, transgressions, shortcomings or mistakes . . . the regretted matters may be sins of commission as well as sins of omissions; they may range from the voluntary to the uncontrollable and accidental; they may be actually executed deeds or entirely mentals ones committed by oneself or by another person or group; they may be moral or legal transgressions or morally and legally neutral.11

Regret is defined so broadly that it ceases to have anything unique to it that marks it off as “regret”. This means that if you have reason to feel remorseful or guilty or disappointed about something, then, on Landman’s definition, you also have reason to feel regretful. At least, you cannot say, “But regret does not apply here”, for, definitionally, it does. In other words, if this is what regret is, then we have no way of separating it, conceptually and in practice (i.e., in our experiences) from other emotions. The problem is that we can and do distinguish it. We say things like, “I feel disappointed about what happened, but I do not regret it”. We can even feel guilty about something we did, without feeling regret. Therefore, we need to be able to give an account that allows us to distinguish it from other emotions. Part of what may cause confusion, I think, is that we can experience several emotions at once and this is often the case when we experience regret. Imagine that you steal some money from a friend in order to place a bet on a horse race, which you lose. You are likely to feel—and likely would be justified in feeling—guilt, disappointment, and regret, all at once. Nevertheless, these are distinct emotions with distinct intentional objects. In this scenario, you feel guilty about wronging your friend, disappointed that the horse lost the race, and regretful at making a mistake (or two mistakes: you ought not to have stolen the money and you bet on the wrong horse). Because of this co-occurrence, it is tempting to treat them as interchangeable or to see one as subsuming the others. However, this temptation ought to be avoided. Regret is a unique emotion and an account of it should reflect this.

Furthermore, to what extent should an account of regret accommodate or be influenced by its linguistic use? If a sentence of the form “I regret X” is linguistically intelligible, does that mean that we can or do regret X and that an account of regret must be able to incorporate regret about X? I am sceptical that we should be guided by language too much in this regard. For example, it is conventional to use “regret” as a social nicety when delivering bad news, e.g., “We regret to inform you that . . . ” , but the person who uses the word in this way is not thereby expressing the emotional state of regret. This point is important: we can use the word “regret” in a

sentence without declaring that we are experiencingregret and thus without expressing a genuine instance of regret (just as we can say “sorry”, in a meaningful way, without feeling sorry or trying to communicate that we are feeling sorry). Indeed, it seems that we can say that we regret something without it being either possible or rational to feel regret about it. For example, according to David Sussman we can regret things ‘that we know to be metaphysically or even logically necessary . . . I might regret the fact that the circle cannot be squared or that my students cannot all be above the class average’.12 Similarly, Parfit states, ‘When they learnt that the square root of two was not a rational number, the Pythagoreans regretted it. We can regret truths even when it is logically impossible that these truths be false’.13

Although a sentence such as “I regret the fact that the circle cannot be squared” is perfectly correct linguistically—compared with, say, “I remorse the fact that the circle cannot be squared”—I am doubtful that someone could feelregret about this fact. Has anyone, ever, genuinely regretted this fact? Could a human be painedat the thought that the circle just will not be squared? Perhaps someone, somewhere, really could regret this. I am not sure whether this could be settled one way or another (there is the possibility, no matter how slim, that tomorrow one meets such a person). Thus, I will not say definitively that one cannotregret logical impossibilities, at least in the sense of it being impossibleto do so. What I will insist on is that it is always irrationalto do so and that it is at the very limit of the possibilities of human psychology. I also insist that when people do express “regret” about things such as the fact that spring is over or that all fun must come to an end, they are not feeling regret in the standard way that is felt (i.e., a somewhat painful wish that one had acted otherwise). In short, they are not expressing the emotionof regret. Instead, they are sador disappointedthat spring has ended or that fun must come to an end, which is then labelled as regret. Consequently, I agree with Daniel Jacobson’s view that ‘ordinary language is especially misleading with respect to emotion

terms’.14 We should not be guided too much by how we can use the word “regret” when deciding how to understand it best.

As Jacobsen explains, “regret” can be used to express either an evaluative judgement or an emotion.15 It is deployed as an evaluative judgement when we articulate the wish that things were otherwise, even if, in some cases, they cannot be: “I regret to inform you that your application has been unsuccessful”; “I regret that Putin invaded Ukraine”; “I regret that Frank Ramsey died so young”. However, these evaluative judgements are not in themselves a feeling of regret and thus they do not express an affective state (and, hence, an emotion) that we should call “regret”. They are, instead, either dispassionate assessments of events in the world or else expressions of feelings that are characterised more accurately as, say, anger or sadness (“I am angry that Putin invaded Ukraine”; “I am sad that Frank Ramsey died so young”). Thus, we can say that we “regret” something, and this is linguistically intelligible, without actually regretting it, in the sense of being in the affect-laden emotional state of regret. This is because, in order to experience regret-the-emotion, we must feel the pain of self-reproach and be subject to some of its standard action-tendencies (wanting to undo what we did; resolving to avoid making the same mistake again).

Appreciating that the idea of regret can be used to express an evaluative judgement is, I think, how to make sense of Sussman’s “regret” that the circle cannot be squared. One may judge that it would be better, in some sense (although I struggle to see what sense), that the circle cannot be squared, but I think that experiencing the emotion of regret about this fact is simply not possible. If it is possible, then it is deeply mistaken. After all, it would be highly unusual to resolve to act differently or to beat oneself up about a metaphysical impossibility, but these are core features of regret. This distinction enables us to explain how we can use the word “regret” in meaningful English sentences without thereby referring to an emotion. This, in turn, means that we can argue for the narrow, specific nature of regret—the pain of selfreproach about one’s mistakes—whilst acknowledging the linguistic

coherence of “regretting”, say, the world’s failure to tackle global warming. What we should not do is assume that such “regretting” is an expression of the emotion of regret and, therefore, that an account of regret as an emotion should accommodate this type of regret.

A further reason to avoid being guided too much about how we can use the word “regret” when defining it is because its usage has changed over time. The word emerged in the Middle Ages, when it meant both to look back with distress or sorrowful longing, and to grieve for something. Thus, I could regret someone or something that I have lost, in the sense of missing or mourning them/it. It seems to be connected to the Old English grætan (to weep) and/or Old Norse grata (to weep; to groan). The modern version of the word has largely dropped this more sorrowful element. It would sound strained to the modern ear, if someone said that they were “weeping with regret”. It has also shifted to the things that we do, rather than the things that happen in the world, at least in terms of the typical regrets that people have. Consequently, common usage seems more aligned with bitterness, annoyance, or even anger, given the common element of self-reproach in our regrets (“D’oh!”; “How could I have been so stupid?!”). Given its shifting meaning, asserting that the way we currently use the term is how we should use it, is to assume what needs to be proven.

This point may be seen to conflict with my argument for the specificity condition. If the meaning of regret changes over time, why think that it picks out a distinct emotion? The issue of how we should understand / identify / carve up the range of human emotions is a large and complex one. I am not even sure that it has a clear or complete solution. To state my view very briefly, I understand the range of emotions we experience to be a complex product of physiology, psychology, and culture. Our bodies are able to generate a dizzying array of different, momentary psychophysiological states through the release of neurochemicals. Our “feelings” are clearly connected to this: tweak the neurochemical balance and one will feel differently. However, equally clearly, how we talk about emotions shapes how we feel; it may even shape what

we can feel. To learn about emotional terms like “smug” and “disgruntled” is to expand the descriptive range through which we make sense of and communicate how we feel.

I do not know whether one should say that each unique emotional term picks out an ontologically unique state of feeling (or, one might say, a particular complex of neurochemicals), but they do allow us to offer more fine-grained descriptions of our emotional states. Thus, we can distinguish between feeling giddy and gleeful; frustrated and impatient; fearful and trepidatious. This is useful, both for understanding precisely how we feel—and, thus, how we are—and for informing other people about this (which, in turn, helps them to understand us and to know how to respond/interact with us). It is a reasonable question to ask someone, including oneself, which of these paired terms they are feeling (and, of course, the answer could be “both”). Perhaps the colour palette is a useful analogy here. We can almost endlessly subdivide colours or we can use very broad terms. We can say “blue” or “sapphire, azure, cobalt, navy, turquoise, aquamarine, etc.”. To see sapphire is to see something subtly different to cobalt, just as, I argue, to feel remorse is to feel something subtly different to regret. In terms of the changing meaning of regret, I think that it is likely that its usage in the Middle Ages picked out one specific feeling / emotional experience and that its current usage picks out another. Thus, the change in its use is a change in the specific emotional state that it correlates with. I admit that this is rather speculative, but I think that it is at least plausible.

Even if one denies that emotional terms are picking out ontologically unique emotional states (in the way that shades of colour pick out physically distinct colours, grounded in wavelengths), I still think that it is better to distinguish between subtly different emotions. Think of rain: we can carve up rain into ever more distinct formations (drizzle; mizzle; squall, shower; downpour), or we can just say “rain”, without assuming that forms of rain are natural kinds. Distinguishing types of rain provides a richness to our experience and our capacity to describe the world that simply having the generic word “rain” does not. Regarding our emotions, the wider our

emotional language—the more fine-grained our emotional terms— the better able we are to describe and to shape the deep, complex emotional texture of our lives (regardless of whether they correctly correlate with ontologically unique emotional states). In this regard, Tiffany Watt Smith’s TheBookofHuman Emotionsdescribes around 150 different emotions, including gems such as “umpty”—‘a feeling of everything being “too-much” and all in the wrong way’16—and malu—used by the people of Dusun Baguk in Indonesia to describe ‘the sudden experience of feeling constricted, inferior and awkward around people of higher status than us’.17 If we can formulate unique, discrete emotions, then I think that we should, as this enhances our ability to make sense of and to communicate how we are feeling. It helps us to paint a richer, more detailed landscape of our emotional lives. This is one reason why I endorse the specificity condition and apply it to my analysis of regret.

Finally, it is clear that the experience of regret is not a pleasant one. It is very hard to imagine someone wanting to regret something or enjoying their regrets, although I suppose one might in the same way that a masochist enjoys pain. Thus, I think it is reasonable to assume that our lives are better if they contain fewer regrets. This is both because of the negative experiential quality of regret (it hurts) and because regret is often about our mistakes— things we wish that we had not done—and so fewer regrets suggests we have made fewer mistakes, and fewer mistakes suggests that we have made better decisions and thus crafted happier or more satisfying lives. Given this, it would be useful if an account of regret was able to show that some, perhaps many, of our regrets were unwarranted and that we should reject them. In other words, it would be nice if there was a therapeutic value to how we understand regret.

I say “nice”, as I do not think that this should figure in how we do define regret and determine when we ought to regret. Rather, it would be a welcome benefit of an account of regret if it had a kind of therapeutic value. At a minimum, perhaps it could function as a “tie-breaker”, if we could not decide between different accounts of

regret. Conversely, it may be a mark against an account of regret if it justifies our having a great deal of regrets. As it happens, I think that my account of regret does have this therapeutic value, whereas several competing accounts seem to give us reason to regret a great deal of things, or, at least, they provide no reason not to regret them. Based on my understanding of regret, I argue that we ought not to regret a lot of the things that we do regret and that we often ought not to worry about whether we will regret what we are doing.18 Thus, reading this book does not promise you a life free from regret, but it will, I hope, help you to understand and analyse your regrets, to work out when you should accept your regrets and when you should reject them. It may even prevent fewer regrets from arising in the first place and reduce any worry or anxiety you might experience about coming to regret the things you do.

1.3. What Regret Is (and What It Is Not)

As I hope to have made clear, regret, as an emotion, is more than just a judgement about the state of the world. It is also affective: it has a particular feel to it. However, both elements—thought and feeling—are integral components of regret. As Landman observes, ‘regret is conceptually, logically, and experientially a matter of thought and feeling as interdependent and co-constitutive’.19 Similarly, Gilovich and Medvec conclude that ‘there is general consensus that regret is an unusually cognitively-laden or cognitively-determined emotion’.20 The feeling of regret is a negative one; it is, Scarre notes, ‘essentially painful ’ . 21 More specifically, I consider the phenomenological core of regret to be “kicking oneself” or “beating oneself up” for a mistake that one made. We can thus call the constitutive feeling of regret “self-reproach” or “selfrecrimination”. As for the thoughts, I do not think there is a single constitutive thought of regret. Rather, as we have seen, regret can be characterised by thoughts such as “I have made a mistake”, “I wish I had not done that”, “I should have acted differently”, or “What an idiot I am!”. There are almost endless variations of these

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