Relation-Regret and Associative Luck

Abstract

AbstractIn 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.