THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF AGENT-REGRET

The paper aims at defending agent-regret as a morally significant emotion. To this end, it reconstructs the debate about agent-regret in the context of the problem of moral luck, focusing on the solution put forward by R. Jay Wallace in his 2013 book The View From Here. A critique is proposed of Wallace's account of the rationality of agent-regret as grounded in the objective value of what the agent lost. The paper argues that it should instead be explained in terms of the transformation of the agent and of the relationship of the agent to her own life and identity. Finally, some thoughts are offered on the ways in which agent-regret, thus construed, matters for morality.