Moral regret and moral feeling(s)

Abstract

ABSTRACT In cases of apparent moral dilemmas, the feeling of regret reminds us that there were competing, morally significant options. Because Kant denies the existence of genuine conflicts of obligation [1996c. “The Metaphysics of Morals (1797).” In Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor, 353–604. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511813306.013, 6:224], he cannot explain the propriety and phenomenology of regret, or so it is traditionally argued [Williams, Bernard. 1965. “Symposium: Ethical Consistency.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 39: 103–138]. I argue that regret can be modelled as a painful and in-part retrospective version of what Kant calls ‘moral feeling’. Different moral feelings arise in different contexts of moral thought and represent our duties in ways that reflect our normative situations. Regret represents the relation between a past action and a general duty that we imagined fulfilling in a certain way but did not. For beings like us, moral feeling is a subjective condition on our being put under obligation at all. Absence of regret therefore suggests that an agent may no longer be, or perhaps never was, sincerely moved by the moral law.