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Notes
My description of Stohr’s account omits one concept she spends time developing: moral front regions. Moral front regions are physical-social spaces in which we put forward the fictive self we are aspiring to. I’m including mention of moral front regions for the sake of completeness; I’m relegating that mention to a footnote because the term is not essential for the arguments in this paper and I don’t want to multiply terms unnecessarily.
Please don’t read anything overly significant into the scare quotes. I just need to distinguish between two sets of practices.
While I endorse Mackenzie’s pragmatic, social-practices approach to understanding agent-regret, this may put me adds with some of her more specific claims. Mackenzie suggests that when we feel agent-regret over non-culpable harms, we should acquiesce into the “bad guy” role—Williams’s driver, for example, should offer himself up as a target for the parents’ hate. Mackenzie’s reasoning is that having a concrete target may help the grieving process along. I suppose it might. But it also might not. Hate can corrode moral character; some never quite recover from the corrosion; and the parent who is corroded because he hates someone who doesn’t deserve it is tragic figure. Depending on the details, I worry that playing the bad guy will be less like emotional aid and more like setting a trap for the victims of bad moral luck. Moreover, I worry that offering oneself up as the ‘bad guy’ is in tension with giving the parents reason to see the incident as a non-culpable harm rather than an act of wrongdoing. I may also disagree with Sussman’s more specific claims, but for different reasons. Sussman (802-3) claims that bad luck puts people in a moral state of nature. If the kid in Williams’s example “happened to be carrying a good disintegrator gun, she would be entitled to use it on the truck if this were the only way to save her life,” while the “truck driver [may permissibly] draw his own disintegrator in an effort to preempt her attempts at what he knows to be completely justified self-defense.” For Sussman, practices of making ‘amends’ help us exit this state of nature and reestablish normal moral conditions. Sussman’s view is prima facie plausible in dramatic, high-stakes examples like that of Williams’s driver. But it seems overblown to suggest that we have entered a moral state of nature when we bump folks in a crowded hallway. We do sometimes view the people who bump us with suspicion; but I doubt that we would see ourselves as engaged in a self-interested struggle largely unconstrained by morality. Sussman’s view may lack generality.
Many thanks to the anonymous referee who helped clarify my thinking on this point.
I still think, with Wojtowicz, that Baggio is not culpable for the deficiencies in his penalty kick skills. Admitting that Baggio can get a little better at penalties is not the same thing as admitting that his preparations for the ’94 World Cup were inadequate. The fact that one can get better in the future is not by itself evidence that one’s past preparations were slack. Again, his remarkable conversion rate—paired with the fact that he studied the goalkeeper’s tendencies before the game—is excellent evidence that Baggio spent enough of his limited practice time on penalty kicks.
Of course, opting out of penalties altogether is liable to bring on a different set of regrets—at backing down from a challenge, at missing out on the accolades he would have garnered from converting penalties, and so on. Still, the general point stands: as a motivational strategy, relying too exclusively on regret entails a significant downside. It means doing lots of unpleasant work to avoid the sting of regret and, eventually, getting stung anyhow.
An anonymous referee asked if stoic determination might also be important when there is no recent failure: “Can’t one think ‘I’ve done well this time, I need to do well again, keep it up!’?” I think the answer is ‘Yes’. Stoic determination facilitates practice; it is likely useful whenever practice is needed. But in this essay, I am focusing specifically on responding to failure.
Works Cited
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Mackenzie, Jordan. 2017. Agent-Regret and the Social Practice of Moral Luck. Res Philosophica 94 (1): 95–117.
Murphy, Jeffrie G. 1988. “Forgiveness and Resentment.” In Forgiveness and Mercy, edited by Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, 14-3, Cambridge University Press.
Pettigrove, Glen. 2012. Forgiveness and Love. NY: Oxford University Press.
Stohr, Karen. 2019. Minding the Gap: Moral Ideals and Moral Improvement. NY: Oxford University Press.
Sussman, David. 2018. Is Agent-Regret Rational? Ethics 128: 788–808.
Velleman, David. 2009. “Motivation by Ideal.” Chapter 13 in Self to Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Wojtowicz, Jake. 2019. Agent-Regret and Sporting Glory. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 46 (2): 162–176.
Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to two anonymous referees and, in particular, to Del Ratzsch. Del always insists that he doesn't know all that much about ethics. But after so many rounds of insightful comments on so many different manuscripts, I'm just not sure I believe him anymore. Thanks, Del.
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Maring, L. Beyond Agent-Regret: Another Attitude for Non-Culpable Failure. J Value Inquiry 57, 463–475 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09836-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09836-8