Agent-Regret and Regret Consequentialism
place. That is, it does not ‘fit’ in relation to a box of crayons. Philosophers mainly
focus on when emotions are fitting because it gets to the essential nature of the
emotion in question. The question I will seek to answer is: When is agent-regret
fitting?
What Grounds Agent-Regret: Two Rival Views
Agent-regret is commonly understood to be related to mistakes in action. But what
do we mean by “ mistake? ” There are two possibilities:
Deliberation sense of mistake : S’s mistake consists in deliberating badly
given the information S had — and should have had (i.e., if S was epistemically
responsible) — at the time.
Outcome sense of mistake : S’s mistake consists in S’s decision leading to
a bad outcome.
Which sense of ‘mistake’ is most essential for agent - regret? In “Regret, Agency,
and Error ,” Daniel Jacobson defends the deliberation sense of mistake. Examining
Bernard Williams’s famous lorry driver case, where a truck driver blamelessly
runs over a child, Jacobson writes,
The blameless driver can think “How much better if I had done otherwise”
without imagining that he is at fault, but the spectator cannot think this —
supposing that she could not have averted the accident. But if the driver
simply feels regret or guilt (or most likely both), then his sentiment is
irrational: in fact he made no mistake and did nothing wrong. 5
Jacobson uses the word “ mistake ” to mean what I have called deliberative
mistake. Jacobson claims that since the driver made no deliberative mistake, it
would be “ irrational ”— unfitting — for him to feel regret. This is because, for
Jacobson, regret functions to motivate a kind of learning from our mistakes. 6 By
5 D’Arms and Jacobson, 114 6 D’Arms and Jacobson, 117.
Volume VI (2023)
40
Made with FlippingBook Annual report maker