Abstract
In ‘Moral Luck,’ Bernard Williams famously argued that “there is a particularly important species of regret, which I shall call ‘agent-regret,’ which a person can feel only towards his past actions.” Much subsequent commentary has focused on Williams’s claim that agent-regret is not necessarily restricted to voluntary actions, and questioned whether such an attitude could be rationally justified. This focus, however, obscures a more fundamental set of questions raised by Williams’s discussion: what is the role in our moral psychology of evaluative attitudes that relate essentially to past exercises of our agency—occurrences which, by their very nature, cannot be repeated? On a standard conception, regret is directed principally towards actions that resulted from suboptimal deliberation. On this view, the main point of regret is to guide us away from similar poor decisions in the future. But Williams’s key insight in ‘Moral Luck,’ I argue, is that there is a mode of evaluation of one’s past actions and decisions that does not track considerations one could and should have been responsive to at the time, and is for this reason essentially retrospective. From this perspective, the full significance of regret cannot be captured in terms of a disposition to deliberate better in the future. Rather, the particular kind of painful of consciousness of the past embodied in regret amounts to a reflective, and essentially backward-looking, insight into the contingency and finitude of our own agency—that I am a particular person leading a particular life, and that the possibility of leading a different life is now gone forever. I end by making some speculative comments about the intractable question whether it is ultimately good or desirable to be disposed to regret one’s past mistakes.
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Notes
For Williams’s scepticism about the latter of these, see (Williams 1995c).
See for example (Williams 1995e), where he discusses Nietzsche’s critique of the distortions inherent in a psychology of the will shaped by the demands of Christian morality.
See, for example, the final pages of (Williams 1985). Something these pages bring out is that Williams’s critique is directed not only at the morality system considered as a philosophical theory of the moral emotions and of moral value, but rather as a set of concepts and values that are endemic to post-Enlightenment Western culture. Accordingly, the demand for a realistic moral psychology is not just a demand for moral philosophers to do better in their theorising, but is also a call for a better set of culturally shared hermeneutic resources for understanding human life and its difficulties. For an illuminating recent discussion of Williams’s critique of the morality system, see (Queloz 2022).
For related discussion, see Williams’s remarks on the connection between blame and retrospective advice in (Williams 1995b).
This is, for instance, the line taken by R. Jay Wallace in The View from Here (Wallace 2013).
In a later postscript, Williams identifies these as separate concerns (Williams 1995d).
As a reviewer pointed out, there are of course important difference between Nolan’s situation and Gaugin’s, in addition to the fact that Nolan does not face any specifically moral complaint parallel to Gaugin’s. In particular, there is no suggestion on Nolan’s part that her project of moving to New York would be undermined if her creative career floundered; rather, it seems to be something rather harder to define, along the lines that she will never really belong in New York or gain a deep sense of fulfilment from her career as a writer.
This connection is a theme in the work of Michael Bratman; e.g. (Bratman 2014).
See, for example, Williams’s remarks on the ‘featureless self’ at (Williams 1992, 158–60).
This point is subject to a further distinction Williams draws between the ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ failure of a project, the former being attributable entirely to some external misfortune; and the latter being in some way attributable to the agent, and involving the sense that the project itself was somehow ill-conceived or chimerical. See n. 19 below.
For criticism of the coherence of this idea, see (Bacharach 2021).
Of course this point requires qualification: the elderly and terminally ill may well regard their lives as for all intents and purposes over and done with. But then again, they may not. The distinctive modes of autobiographical thinking associated with the end of life is of course a rich topic in itself, which I do not want to get into here.
This point is to some extent parallel the idea that self-attributions of belief are ‘transparent’ to the world our beliefs are about: one settles the question “do I believe p,” canonically, by settling the question “is p the case?” (Moran 2001; Boyle 2019). Transparency imposes certain constraints upon self-knowledge, the most stark of which is the incoherence (though not inconsistency) of the Moore-paradoxical conjunction, “I believe p yet p is false.” More generally, the idea of transparency introduces a contrast between knowing one’s beliefs through the activity of reasoning and making up one’s mind about extra-mental matters of fact, and the activity of reflecting on how one’s beliefs fit into the causal unity of one’s psychological life, hanging together with such things as possible non-rational motivations for belief, general character dispositions, social identities, and so on. These activities in some sense tend to oppose one another or cancel one another out, so that one cannot coherently adopt the same stance at the same time with respect to the same specific belief. I am suggesting something like the same contrast obtains between practical deliberation and autobiographical reflection.
The difference between case in which one finds a project to be empty or unappealing, and the case where it simply fails due to unforeseen contingencies, is related to Williams’s distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic failure, mentioned in n. 14 above.
This discussion has been focused on individually made decisions and later evaluations; but this of course abstracts away from the respects in which our freedom to shape our lives is exercised together, in dialogue with one another; and the role of other-directed moral emotions, such as blame, in articulating that freedom. For this aspect of Williams’s conception of freedom, see (Fricker 2022).
Compare T. Nagel’s puzzlement at the question: “What kind of fact is it—if it is a fact—that I am Thomas Nagel? How can I be a particular person?” (Nagel 1986, 54).
This is of course a theme in Williams’s earlier work on the self, e.g. (Williams 1973).
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Funding
ERC Consolidator Grant 726251 for project, “Seeing Things You Don’t See: Unifying the Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience of Multimodal Mental Imagery”. PI: Prof. Bence Nanay.
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Bacharach, J. Agent-Regret, Finitude, and the Irrevocability of the Past. Topoi 43, 447–458 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09986-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09986-3