Agent-Regret and Regret Consequentialism
Introduction
W
hat is regret, and why should we care about it? Generally speaking,
regret is a negative emotion we feel when something bad has
happened or when we make bad decisions. Regret is important
because it influences how we act and think about our lives. When considering what
to do, we do not want to act in such a way we will later regret. Sometimes, the
stakes can be so high that we will regret a choice for the rest of our lives. In these
situations, regret can become a defining feature of our life story. So, what exactly
does regret consist of? I propose the following account of what I will call ‘general
regret .’ It has three key features:
1. Feeling a sense of sorrow or loss at what might have been and/or judging
that some decision or event is bad in some respect
2. Wishing that you had not made a certain decision, or that a certain event
had not happened
3. Caring in some sense about the decision that you made or the event that
happened
This is a commonsense conception of regret. (1) reflects our intuitions that regret
involves a negative happening. (1) also acknowledges that regret can have both
cognitive (e.g., judging an event as bad) and non-cognitive (e.g., feeling sorrow)
elements. (2) accounts for a distinction philosophers make between two types of
regret: agent-regret and event-regret. 1 Typically, we regret choices we have made,
known as agent-regret. Sometimes, we can regret events that are unrelated to our
agency, like regretting that a close friend got rejected from law school or regretting
that your favorite football team lost the Super Bowl. This is an event-regret. For
present purposes, what is most important is that, for agent-regret, you must wish,
in some sense, that you had not made the decision. Lastly, (3) accounts for the fact
1 Amelie Rorty, “Agent Regret,” in Explaining Emotions, Edited by Amelie Rorty, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 489-91.
Volume VI (2023)
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