When Should we Regret?

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I develop and defend the ‘Justified Decision Perspective’ (JDP) in answer to the question of when we should regret the things we have done. I claim that one should not regret a past decision one has made so long as it was justified in relation to the kind of person one was at the time of acting. On this time-indexing account, judging a decision to be justified – at least for the purposes of assessing one’s regrets – is a matter of identifying the practical reasons that were epistemically available to the agent when she was deliberating about what to do. Accordingly, when responding to her regrets, an agent should not invoke (a) reasons that existed but were epistemically unavailable to her when she was deliberating; or (b) reasons that only came into existence after she acted. The JDP has important implications for prospective regret. In particular, it implies we should worry less about experiencing regret in the future than many of us do. Thus, my overall aim is to show that we often have reason to reject our regrets, which means that regret should play a less prominent and painful role in our lives than it does currently.

Keywords:

• Identity over time
• justified decisions
• personal Identity
• practical reasons
• regret

Notes

1. As Hampshire (1959, 241) writes, the question ‘“do you regret that decision?” is a question that requires me to think and to think practically about the decision, and not merely to inspect my feelings’.

2. Although see Jacobson 2013 and Wallace 2013, 33–45 for a critique of the agent/impersonal regret distinction.

3. I do not assume or imply that we will necessarily be successful in adopting these second-order attitudes. Deciding that one has good reason to reject one’s regret does not mean that the regret will automatically dissipate or even diminish. Our emotions can be recalcitrant and relatively cognitively impenetrable. For example, feelings of guilt can persist even when one believes that one is not responsible for what occurred. Nevertheless, it is still important to reject one’s guilt, if it is inappropriate. This can help to alleviate it, just as rejecting one’s regret can contribute to its diminishment.

4. A cautionary note: in speaking of ‘accepting’ one’s regrets, or other emotional states, I do not mean that one should indulge or become obsessed with them. There is a fine but important line between acknowledging that one should feel guilty or regretful, and becoming consumed such feelings. As Rorty (1980, 501) warns, regret

can become a self-indulgent attitude … A person can savor regret, even wallow in it, dramatizing its occasions … Confessions of regret can be disarming, even addictive … Eliciting sympathy can come to be the whole point of regret.

5. This, I think, is why a common response to a person expressing regret about something they did is to tell them, ‘but it doesn’t matter’ – we want the person to see that they should not care about what they did and hence that they should not regret their actions.

6. There is, of course, a large, complex debate about justification for one’s beliefs and actions. Roughly, externalists hold that something is justified is there exists a reason for it, regardless of the agent’s epistemic relation to that reason. Conversely, internalists hold that justification is tied to what the agent actually knows or believes. I am assuming that internalism is the right way to think about justification, at least in relation to regret. I cannot offer an in-depth defence of internalism here, but I do offer some reasons in support of it in the next section.