Relation-Regret and Associative Luck

Abstract

In this chapter, the author argues that the phenomenon underlying Bernard Williams’s “agent-regret” is considerably broader than appreciated by Williams and others. Agent-regret—an anguished response that agents have for harms they have caused, even if faultlessly—the author argues, is a species of a more general response to harms that need not be one’s fault but which nonetheless impact one’s practical identity. This broader genus includes as a species what the author calls “relation-regret,” a pained response to harms caused by persons to whom one is intimately related, as co-members of groups partly constitutive of one’s practical identity (e.g., one’s family). After providing an account of the moral psychology of relation-regret, the author attends to its normative significance, proposing that acceptance of relation-regret provides us with reasons for accepting a novel form of moral luck—associative luck—the luck of being vulnerable to responsibility-responses in virtue of attachments one has to other persons.

Feeling Responsible: On Regret for Others’ Harms

“… 8 Daniel Telech has recently argued that ‘if agent-regret is fitting, when it is, owing in part to causal agency being an expression of one's practical identity, then we might expect different kinds of “faultless blows” to our practical identities to render fitting responses structurally similar to agent-regret’ (2022, p. 236). Building from Williams’ theory of practical identity, Telech proposes ‘relation-regret’ as an ‘anguished response to harm caused by a person to whom one is intimately related as a co-member of a group partly constitutive of one's practical identity’ (2022, p. 249). I understand social-regret to name a very similar, if not the same, phenomenon, and I take my arguments in favour of a regret-based account in Section 4 to support Telech's account.…”

“…In other words, my view is that one is susceptible to social-regret on account of vectors that play outsized roles in the relational constitution of one's practical identity. See also Telech's view that practical identity is constituted by both ‘(a) subsumption under and (b) self-application of normatively significant (for the self in question) categories’ (2022, p. 249).…”