Agent-regret seems to give rise to a philosophical puzzle. If we grant that we are not morally responsible for consequences outside our control (the ‘Standard View’), then agent-regret—which involves self-reproach and a desire to make amends for consequences outside one’s control—appears rationally indefensible. But despite its apparent indefensibility, agent-regret still seems like a reasonable response to bad moral luck. I argue here that the puzzle can be resolved if we appreciate the role that agent-regret plays in (...) a larger social practice that helps us deal with bad moral luck. That agent-regret is a component in a social practice limits the questions that we can reasonably ask about it. While we can ask whether an experience of agent-regret is rational given the norms of this practice, we cannot ask the question that motivates the puzzle of agent-regret, viz. whether agent-regret is rationally defensible according to the Standard View. (shrink)

I explore how agent-regret and its object—faultlessly harming someone—can call for various responses. I look at two sorts of responses. Firstly, I explore responses that respect the agent’s role as an agent. This revolves around a feature of “it was just an accident”—a common response to agent-regret—that has largely gone ignored in the literature: that it can downplay one’s role as an agent. I argue that we need to take seriously the fact that those who have caused harms (...) are genuine agents, to ignore this fails to allow these agents to move on. Secondly, following Sussman and MacKenzie, I explore responses that benefit the victim. I argue that we should strive to understand how to configure these responses in a way that does not blame the agent. To do this I look at the role of actions in our self-understanding, as people who have done particular things. I end by briefly considering the ways in which tort law and restorative justice might help us to understand how to appropriately respond to accidentally harming someone. I urge that we need to take this as a starting point to find a better way to respond to the agents of faultless harms. (shrink)

Should we regret the fact that we are often more emotionally resilient in response to the deaths of our loved ones than we might expect -- that the suffering associated with grief often dissipates more quickly and more fully than we anticipate? Dan Moller ("Love and Death") argues that we should, because this resilience epistemically severs us from our loved ones and thereby "deprives us of insight into our own condition." I argue that Moller's conclusion is correct despite resting (...) on a mistaken picture of the nature and significance of grief. Unlike Moller, I contend that grief is a composite emotional process, rather than a single mental state; that grief is a species of emotional attention rather than perception; and that grief is a form of activity directed at placing our relationships with the deceased on new terms. It is precisely because grief has these three features that it facilitates the scrutiny of our practical identities and thus fosters self-knowledge and self-understanding. (shrink)

A philosopher and a lawyer-economist examine the challenges of the last third of life. They write about friendship, sex, retirement communities, inheritance, poverty, and the depiction of aging women in films. These essays, or conversations, will help readers of all ages think about how to age well, or at least thoughtfully, and how to interact with older family members and friends.

Volume 25, Issue 2, February 2025, Page 21-22.

In Aging Thoughtfully, Martha Nussbaum and Saul Levmore tackle a number of issues arising from the experience of aging—a topic in which I should immediately declare a personal interest. That experi...

For healthcare professionals and organizations, there is an emphasis on addressing moral distress and compassion fatigue among clinicians. While addressing these issues is vital, this paper suggests that the philosophical concept of agent-regret is a relevant but overlooked issue in healthcare. To experience agent-regret is to regret your harmful but not wrongful actions. This person’s action results in someone being killed or significantly injured, but it was ethically faultless. Despite being faultless, agent-regret is an emotional response (...) concerning one’s agency in a situation that results in death or significant harm. In healthcare, many clinicians are likely to experience regret for faultless actions that significantly harm or cause the death of a patient. The recognition of agent-regret in healthcare is significant because it differs, conceptually and practically, from moral distress and compassion fatigue. Building on the work of Wojtowicz (Citation2022), we should strive to understand clinicians’ agent-regret by recognizing their agency in the situation, not lessening or removing it. (shrink)

Bernard Williams coined _agent-regret_ with two central examples: the lorry driver who accidentally kills a child, and Agamemnon who must choose between sacrificing his daughter and losing his fleet. Williams uses these two paradigms to support what is termed the _agency principle_ (that we are connected, through our feelings, to even the involuntary aspects of what we do), and the _residue principle_ (that when we must choose between conflicting values or obligations, we can expect some residue of bad feeling even (...) when we make the right choice). In this chapter, it is argued that similar problems plague discussion of both the agency and residue principles, despite their genuine psychological insight. The problems lie with the conception of regret offered and the conclusions drawn about its rationality. It is contended that agent-regret is a chimerical emotion, an amalgam of two fundamentally different sentiments with disparate conditions of rationality: guilt and regret. (shrink)

Andy Egan has recently produced a set of alleged counterexamples to causal decision theory in which agents are forced to decide among causally unratifiable options, thereby making choices they know they will regret. I show that, far from being counterexamples, CDT gets Egan's cases exactly right. Egan thinks otherwise because he has misapplied CDT by requiring agents to make binding choices before they have processed all available information about the causal consequences of their acts. I elucidate CDT in a (...) way that makes it clear where Egan goes wrong, and which explains why his examples pose no threat to the theory. My approach has similarities to a modification of CDT proposed by Frank Arntzenius, but it differs in the significance that it assigns to potential regrets. I maintain, contrary to Arntzenius, that an agent facing Egan's decisions can rationally choose actions that she knows she will later regret. All rationality demands of agents it that they maximize unconditional causal expected utility from an epistemic perspective that accurately reflects all the available evidence about what their acts are likely to cause. This yields correct answers even in outlandish cases in which one is sure to regret whatever one does. (shrink)

Because anticipated and retrospective regret play important roles in practical deliberation and motivation, better understanding them can illuminate the contours of human agency. However, the possibility of self-ignorance and the fact that we change over time can make regret—especially anticipatory regret—not only a poor predictor of where the agent will be in the future but also an unreliable indicator of where the agent stands. Granting these, this paper examines the way in which prospective and, particularly, retrospective (...) class='Hi'>regret can nevertheless yield important insight into the sorts of creatures we are, both generally and individually. The experience of retrospective regret can show a person she values something in a way she did not know or that she is (or was) a different person than she had thought, insights which can factor into forward-looking, or prospective, deliberation. Such instances of revelatory regret reveal something to the agent about herself as agent. I examine two cases of agential self-ignorance. In the first, the experience of regret reveals what the agent values, not only to others but even to the agent himself. In the second, the agent anticipates experiencing regret for an action but does not experience the regret, suggesting that the agent did not value the rejected alternative in the way she thought. Anticipatory regret is forward-looking and can play an important role in practical deliberation. But insofar as anticipatory regret flows from one’s imperfect judgment and prospection about oneself, retrospective regret can be an important corrective in helping the agent understand her own standpoint. (shrink)

An increasing number of research fields must expect that their projects will be classified as susceptible to misuse or otherwise security relevant, even if the reasons or criteria for this classification have not yet been uniformly developed. Research institutions will commonly distribute the obligation to predict and prevent misuse across multiple members and structures including ethics committees. However, cases of misuse occur even in spite of these precautions, raising the question of the type and distribution of responsibility for the resulting (...) harm. This question becomes even more pressing if research ethics committees in their decisions ask researchers to provide a misuse- specific risk assessment or risk mitigation plan and thereby shift back a part of their responsibility on the researchers. While this kind of requirement may be considered as unsatisfactory by researchers, members of research ethics committees or boards and third-party funders, will argue that it fulfils two important functions. On the one hand, it makes use of the best available source for misuse risk-assessment available to most committees; on the other hand, it guarantees that the researchers at least try to take responsibility. If researchers, committee members and others involved discharge their obligation to predict and mitigate misuse risks with due diligence, any backward-looking responsibility they retain is to show agent regret for the results of their work having been misused. (shrink)

This book provides a study of regret (metameleia) in the moral psychology of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. It was important for all these philosophers to insist that regret is a characteristic of neither fully virtuous nor wholly irredeemable characters. Rather, they took regret to be something that affects people who retrospectively feel pain at realising an earlier mistaken action. Regret sets out in full the accounts of the nature of this emotion found in the works (...) of these philosophers, viewing them in the context of their respective accounts of virtuous and non-virtuous agents, ethical progress, the role of knowledge in producing good actions, and compares it with modern philosophical notions of 'agent regret'. (shrink)

When sporting agents fail through wrongful or faulty behaviour, they should feel guilty; when they fail because of a deficiency in their abilities, they should feel shame. But sometimes we fail without being deficient and without being at fault. I illustrate this with two examples of players, Moacir Barbosa and Roberto Baggio, who failed in World Cup finals and cost their teams the greatest prize in sport. Although both players failed, I suggest that neither was at fault and neither was (...) deficient. I argue that we can fail through no fault of our own because our abilities are always fallible. This fallibility means that to succeed – to achieve sporting glory – we must run the risk of failure. The appropriate emotion to feel over such failures is agent-regret. Sporting agents and observers should not take up what I call the ‘critical position’: the idea that someone who fails must be deficient or must have been at fault. This allows for a softer, but also more accurate, attitude towards our own failures and the failures of others. I end by suggesting that the fallibility of our abilities is made clear through playing or watching sport, and this can illuminate life more broadly. (shrink)

Are there wrongs for which states cannot apologise? In this chapter, I argue that the answer is 'Yes'. I begin with the simple observation that reasoning as a state official requires a conception of what officials do, and so a conception of what is - and is not - properly undertaken on behalf of the state. To act as an official, then, requires a theory of what happens in a well functioning state: it requires a 'normative theory of the state. (...) What officials believe to be necessary for a state to be a good example of its kind will affect what they recognise as outside the bounds of what a state official ought to do. This limit on what can be recognised as something prior officials ought not to have done is illustrated by Canada's official apology for imposing residential schools on indigenous peoples. Canada's official apology left out a crucial feature of the schools policy in part because of the influence of integrationist theories of the state. An integrationist view of good statehood has limited officials' ability to see the project of restructuring indigenous communities and inculcating attachment to an overarching identity as a wrong in itself, and distorted officials' diagnosis of what went wrong in previous policy. One effect has been to allow contemporary officials to offer a sincere and comprehensive apology for past officials' human rights violations in indigenous communities while themselves pursuing policies in these communities that violate human rights. The lesson of the Canadian apology is that how state officials theorise the state can undermine their capacity to recognise human rights violations for what they are and distort their judgements of what must be done in remedy. (shrink)

I argue that the phenomenon underlying Bernard Williams’ (1976) “agent-regret” is considerably broader than appreciated by Williams and others. Agent-regret— an anguished response that agents have for harms they have caused, even if faultlessly— I maintain, is a species of a more general response to harms that need not be one’s fault, but which nonetheless impact one’s practical identity in a special way. This broader genus includes as a species what I call “relation-regret”, a pained response to (...) harm caused by a person to whom one is intimately related, as a co-member of a group partly constitutive of one’s practical identity (e.g. one’s family). After providing an account of the moral psychology of relation-regret, I attend to its normative significance, proposing in particular that acceptance of relation-regret provides us with reasons for accepting a novel form of moral luck, namely associative luck: the luck of being vulnerable to responsibility-responses in virtue of one’s attachments to others, despite one’s personal faultlessness. (shrink)

This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of the relationship between regret and episodic memory, the temporal structure of ‘regretful memory’, the affective and evaluative dimension of regretful memory and the counterfactual dimension of regretful memory. Based on Husserl’s phenomenology, I offer an analysis of regret’s complex structures of intentionality and time-consciousness. Husserl held that episodic memory requires two temporal orientations on one’s own experience: the past now that one relives and the present now in which one does the (...) reliving. If memory generally entails two temporal perspectives, regretful memory brings in a third point of temporal reference: that now that could have been. Drawing on Hoerl and McCormack, I give an account of regret as a mnemic and counterfactual form of intentional consciousness that confronts an alternative past and attempts to negotiate between two essential yet conflicting features of its actual past: its contingency and its irreversibility. On this basis, I then draw on Bagnoli to offer a phenomenological theory of regretful memory as an emotional mode of valuing possibilities that belong to the past. (shrink)

Women face extraordinary difficulty in seeking sterilization as physicians routinely deny them the procedure. Physicians defend such denials by citing the possibility of future regret, a well‐studied phenomenon in women’s sterilization literature. Regret is, however, a problematic emotion upon which to deny reproductive freedom as regret is neither satisfactorily defined and measured, nor is it centered in analogous cases regarding men’s decision to undergo sterilization or the decision of women to undergo fertility treatment. Why then is (...) class='Hi'>regret such a concern in the voluntary sterilization of women? I argue that regret is centered in women’s voluntary sterilization due to pronatalism or expectations that womanhood means motherhood. Women seeking voluntary sterilization are regarded as a deviant identity that rejects what is taken to be their essential role of motherhood and they are thus seen as vulnerable to regret. (shrink)

Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights to opinion leaders based on their past predictive performance to (...) determine the level of their inclusion in recommendations for voters. The weighting minimizes the difference between the performance of meta-induction and the best opinion leader in hindsight. The difference represents the regret of meta-induction whose minimization ensures that the recommendations are optimal in supporting voters’ competence. Meta-induction has optimal truth-tracking properties that support voters’ competence even if it is targeted by mis/disinformation and should be considered a tool for supporting democracy in hyper-plurality. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the object of agent-regret is the self. Therefore, to regret is to feel pained by the fact that we were moved by reasons to act that do not move us anymore. In the literature, the object of regret has been identified otherwise, for instance as mistakes or as unchosen valuable paths of actions. However, these views are inadequate in addressing certain cases of regret that appear nevertheless paradigmatical, such as cases (...) of conflicting values, cases of recurrent patterns of regret and cases of aesthetic regret. One implication of defining the object of regret as the self is that it is virtually unavoidable. I also address three potential objections to my account of regret and demonstrate how they can be overcome. (shrink)

People compare actual decision outcomes with what might, could, or should have been, and they experience negative emotions when the foregone outcomes are better. We hypothesised that the normativity of a decision, whether it is norm-compliant or norm-deviant, also shapes emotional experiences to the outcomes. We expected that norm-deviant decisions would result in more regret than disappointment, because there would be more blame associated with norm-deviant decisions. We expected that norm-compliant decisions would result in more disappointment than regret, (...) because norm-compliant decisions would be associated with higher expectancies. In five pre-registered experiments (N1 = 332, N2 = 334, N3 = 338, N4 = 1284, N5 = 347), participants read about norm-compliant or norm-deviant investment decisions, and were asked to rate how much regret and disappointment the person in the vignette (or they themselves in Experiment 5) would feel. Consistent with the hypotheses, norm compliance was associated with more disappointment than regret and norm deviance was associated with more regret than disappointment, though the effect sizes were small (Mr = 0.14). We also found evidence for that norm-deviant failures in general engender more negative emotional reactions than their norm-compliant counterparts. (shrink)

This dissertation is a defence of agent-regret and an exploration of its role in our lives. I argue that agent-regret shows that an agent takes seriously her status as an agent who impacts the world, but who only has fallible control over it. To accept responsibility for any outcomes, she must accept responsibility for unintended outcomes, too: agent-regret is part of being a human agent. In doing this, I try to defend and develop Williams’s own conception of (...) agent-regret. -/- In the first part, I explore the nature of agent-regret. Agent-regret is distinct from guilt because we can feel agent-regret without being at fault. I argue that several challenges that seek to reduce agent-regret to a form of guilt fail. I further argue that agent-regret takes as its object not only something one has done, but the fact that one did it; I discuss this in terms of what Bernard Williams called taking an “external” view on one’s own action. -/- I suggest that we can best understand the object of agent-regret as one’s responsibility for an outcome. I argue that this form of “responsibility” is conceptually separate from liability or answerability; it concerns whether the outcome can be ascribed to an agent. This is a restricted form of causal responsibility but retains its agential character. I suggest that we can be responsible for outcomes even when we did not intend to bring them about. -/- In the second part, I vindicate the propriety of agent-regret against the ideas that we are not responsible for unintended outcomes or that such responsibility is not important. I set out several challenges to this effect. I argue that we are responsible for unintended outcomes because in order to be responsible as agents at all, we must use fallible abilities. When we exercise these abilities but fail, we are responsible as agents for those unintended outcomes that arise. I then consider the importance of being responsible for particular unintended outcomes and analyse the idea that this affects our identities. I argue that responsibility for an outcome affects a form of identity, but that it does not involve essential features of a person. Instead, our responsibility for outcomes is a contingent feature that nonetheless plays an important role in our interpersonal interactions and self-conceptions. I argue that these reactions are appropriate, because our responsibility for particular outcomes is independently significant—but these reactions also lend this responsibility added significance as part of inescapable human practices. -/- Thus our responsibility for outcomes is important. Its importance means that it can serve as an appropriate object of agent-regret that vindicates the propriety of agent-regret. I end by considering several interesting features of agent-regret, including its expression and “pure” cases, which are cases where an agent feels agent-regret despite not regretting the result of her action. (shrink)

We very much welcome Enck and Condley’s (2025) introduction of agent-regret and their plea for the existential and moral importance of this concept as a distinct phenomenon from moral distress or c...

Over time, research programs focusing on the processes that underlie dissonance and regret diverged to the point that the present literature only occasionally draws explicit connections between regret and consistency seeking processes. One of our aims in this chapter is to reestablish the connection between regret and consistency within the context of a theory that examines two independent factors that critically interact to enhance or diminish regret. The first of these is opportunity, which includes both perceptions (...) of past opportunities to make alternative choices and future opportunities to take corrective actions, and the second is mitigation, which is the ability to justify one's actions or otherwise engage regulatory processes that allow for the diminishment of regret. We examine both opportunity and mitigation separately before describing how the two may interact to elicit differential experiences of regret. (shrink)

Regret compounds the pain of mistakes by making us ruminate on the past. Is there any value in this compounded suffering? An intuitive and widely endorsed view, the learning view, states that regret has value because it helps us learn from our mistakes. This paper challenges the learning view. I show that we often learn from our mistakes without regret, through a process I call “belief‐driven learning.” The challenge is to explain what value regret adds to (...) our lives, over and above belief‐driven learning. To meet the challenge, I develop the idea that regret helps us overcome temptation. I show that belief‐driven learning falters for mistakes made due to temptation because the source of error is not epistemic, but motivational. I argue that the ruminative processes involved in regret can help us learn in the face of temptation by reshaping our motivational tendencies, bringing them into better alignment with the values we endorse. (shrink)

In his classic essay, "The Dilemma of Determinism", William James argues that the truth of determinism would make regret irrational. Given the central role of regret in our moral lives, James concludes that determinism is false. In this paper I explore the attitude of regret and show that James's argument is mistaken. Not only can we rationally regret events that were determined to occur, but we can also rationally regret events that had to occur.

1. Kantian moral theories have been criticized for their inability to make sense of the phenomenology and propriety of regret in the face of difficult moral choices. As Bernard Williams puts it, re...

This book attempts to understand regret, an emotion that bridges the actual and the possible, the past and present. Through a wealth of sources (including psychology, economics, philosophy, anthropology, and literature) it takes up questions of the meaning of regret and how it differs from similar experiences such as remorse and guilt; what sorts of things people most often regret; and the roots of regret in circumstances and in who we are. It takes issue with the (...) view common both in this culture and in leading theories of decision that regret is irrational and dysfunctional - specifying the surprising benefits of regret, its great and good sense. (shrink)

In this study, we investigated whether differences in the experience of regret may be a potential explanation for damaging behaviours associated with psychopathy and criminal offending. Participants were incarcerated offenders (n = 60) and non-incarcerated controls (n = 20). Psychopathic traits were characterised with the Psychopathic Checklist: Screening Version. Regret was assessed by responses to outcomes on a simulated gambling task. Incarcerated offenders experienced a reduced sense of regret as compared to non-incarcerated controls. We obtained some evidence (...) that specific psychopathic factors and facets could differentially relate to the experience and use of emotions. Our data provide initial evidence of important associations between negative emotions and decision behaviour in the context of criminal offending. (shrink)

Consider a teenage girl who is contemplating motherhood. Prior to her becoming pregnant, it seems that she might truly judge that it would be a bad thing on balance to have a child at this stage in her life. After giving birth as a teenager, however, she might also truly judge that it is not a bad thing on balance that her child exists. These attitudes have commonly been thought to be in tension with each other. This chapter argues, however, (...) that when correctly interpreted in deliberative terms, as judgments about the agent's reasons, the apparent conflict disappears. Giving birth changes the girl's situation, in ways that give rise to corresponding changes in her reasons for action and for various emotional responses. A consequence of this analysis, however, is that there may be mistakes or errors in deliberation that the agent is unable to regret having made. The teenage mother ought not to having conceived and given birth to a child at that stage in her life; and yet, as a mother, she can hardly regret having made the wrong decision in this particular matter. This raises large questions about the relation between justification and regret. Williams argues in ‘Moral Luck’ that our decisions can be justified or ‘unjustified’ retroactively through intervening circumstances that make regret either impossible or unavoidable. The chapter challenges Williams' assumption that justification and regret are necessarily connected in this way, and shows that the things that drive a wedge between justification and regret need not have anything to do with epistemic luck. (shrink)

I examine the ‘momentous’ choices that one makes early in life – about career or spouse, for example – and I ask what it means to regret such choices at the end of one’s life. I argue that such regrets are almost meaningless because of the difficulty of imaginatively accessing a much earlier self. I then contrast long-term regret to remorse, and argue that the two are qualitatively different experiences because remorse involves another person as victim.

It is often suggested that when opinions differ among individuals in a group, the opinions should be aggregated to form a compromise. This paper compares two approaches to aggregating opinions, linear pooling and what I call opinion agglomeration. In evaluating both strategies, I propose a pragmatic criterion, No Regrets, entailing that an aggregation strategy should prevent groups from buying and selling bets on events at prices regretted by their members. I show that only opinion agglomeration is able to satisfy the (...) demand. I then proceed to give normative and empirical arguments in support of the pragmatic criterion for opinion aggregation, and that ultimately favor opinion agglomeration. (shrink)

This chapter considers whether it could be wrong to have a disabled rather than a non-disabled child. There is often thought to be some substantial objection to doing so even when the would-be parents know that they will not regret such a decision. This chapter examines whether the prospective and retrospective attitudes that parents take on such a decision must be consistent with one another, or whether they can come apart in contexts like Parfit’s “non-identity problem.” The chapter argues (...) we can morally condemn such a decision that we know we will affirm in retrospect because affirmation is not an evaluation of the decision (let alone of the life of the child). Instead, affirmation is best understood as the parent’s extension to the child of the sort of pre-reflective acceptance of oneself that is part of normal self-love. (shrink)

I argue that in certain circumstances where individuals are harmed or wrongful omissions occur, and those harms or wrongs could have been avoided by collective action, it can be appropriate for individuals who were in a position to contribute to avoiding those wrongs to feel a kind of collective regret. This can be true even in situations where there was no agent, individual or collective who was in a position to prevent the harm or wrong, provided that a suitable (...) collective agent could have been formed. I also argue the existence and appropriateness of this form of collective moral regret suggests that collective obligations can fall on groups which do not constitute collective agents. This conclusion runs counter to an assumption which plays a fundamental role in much existing work on collective obligation: namely that only agents can be obligation bearers. (shrink)

This paper concerns regret, where regretting is to be understood, roughly, as mourning the loss of a forgone good. My ultimate aim is to add a new dimension to existing debate concerning the internal logic of regret by revealing the significance of certain sorts of cases—including, most interestingly, certain down-to-earth cases involving vague goals—in relation to the possibility of regret in continued endorsement cases. Intuitively, it might seem like, in continued endorsement cases, an agent’s regret must (...) be tied to the idea that the forgone good is no better than the achieved good but is also not fully made up for by the achieved good because the goods are different in kind. But this view is controversial. After describing a challenge to the view, as well as the main features of the debate regarding regret in which it figures, I appeal first to a fanciful case involving a set of ever-better options, and then to a more down-to-earth case involving a vague goal, to develop a defense of the opposing view that, even in continued endorsement cases, mourning the loss of a forgone good need not be tied to the idea that the loss of the good is not fully made up for by the gain of a preferred or incomparable good of a different kind. (shrink)

We are all familiar with regret. And on the face of it, there doesn't seem to be anything puzzling about it, the way there is about (among other things) self‐deception and survivor guilt. So what philosophical significance does it have?

In this paper, I argue an authoritative directive can be defeated (i.e., outweighed) by a reason it defeats (i.e., excludes), where it is rational to feel regret for failing to act as the directive demands. This is the case as, first, it is rational to feel regret when one fails to act on a binding reason, and a defeated reason is still binding unless its triggering conditions have been removed; second, an authoritative directive can be defeated by a (...) more weighty reason it excludes if the latter is still binding; and third, there is no general rule preventing a more weighty excluded reason from defeating a directive. (shrink)

“Agent Regret in Healthcare” is a valuable contribution to the field of bioethics, and an insightful application of the concept of agent regret. In this response, I will argue that the authors’ wor...

This essay elaborates on my essay, “Confucius’ Complaints and the Analects’ Account of the Good Life,” responding to issues and criticisms raised by Michael Ing and Manyul Im. Ing’s and Im’s critiques most invite reflection on regret, both as it might situate in Confucius’ own life and as it could feature more broadly in developed moral maturity. I consider two modes of regret: regret concerning compromises of conscience and end-of-life regret. The latter can naturally include elements (...) of the former, but may nonetheless have special features not exhausted by it. I argue that the model of Confucius is consistent with versions of both of these forms of regret while also acknowledging that where the Analects is concerned, much of what we might say about regret will inevitably be somewhat speculative. The essay thus dwells in some of the ambiguities suggested by the Analects. (shrink)

The menu-dependent nature of regret-minimization creates subtleties when it is applied to dynamic decision problems. It is not clear whether forgone opportunities should be included in the menu. We explain commonly observed behavioral patterns as minimizing regret when forgone opportunities are present. If forgone opportunities are included, we can characterize when a form of dynamic consistency is guaranteed.

I argue for a novel understanding of the nature of agent-regret. On the standard picture, agent-regret involves regretting the result of one’s action and thus regretting one’s action. I argue that the standard picture is a flawed analysis of agent-regret. I offer several cases of agent-regret where the agent feels agent-regret but does not regret the result itself. I appeal to other cases where an agent’s attitude towards something depends upon whether or not they (...) are involved in that thing. I argue that the same applies to actions: sometimes an agent’s attitude towards a result differs from their attitude to their involvement in bringing about that result. Agent-regret is regret about my own action, but it need not involve regret about something in the world. I end by considering how this picture of agent-regret allows us to respond to a particular criticism of agent-regret. (shrink)