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Why You'll Regret Not Reading This Paper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2019

Mark Schroeder
Mark Schroeder*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In this paper, I explore the role for anticipated regret in major life decision-making, focusing on how it is employed by realistic decision-makers in a variety of realistic cases. I argue that the most obvious answers to how regret might matter in decision do not make these cases intelligible, but that we can make them intelligible through consideration of the significance of narrative in our own self-understanding.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 85: Passions and the Emotions , July 2019 , pp. 135 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2019 

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References

1 This reasoning combines the idea that rational regret should match rational retrospective ‘ought’ judgments with a Reflection-like principle for ‘ought’ judgments.  The principle of reflection is due to van Fraassen, Bas, ‘Belief and the Will’, Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984), 235–256CrossRefGoogle Scholar.  For a particularly illuminating discussion of the principle and its limitations, see Weisberg, Jonathan, ‘Conditionalization, Reflection, and Self-Knowledge’, Philosophical Studies 135 (2007), 179–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Regan, Donald, Utilitarianism and Cooperation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Ross, Compare Jacob and Schroeder, Mark, ‘Belief, Credence, and Pragmatic Encroachment’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2014), 259–288CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for discussion of this feature of Regan's case, following Kolodny, Niko and MacFarlane, John, ‘Ifs and Oughts’, The Journal of Philosophy 107 (2010), 115–143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.  See also Schroeder, Mark, ‘Getting Perspective on Objective Reasons’, Ethics 128 (2018), 289–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a strengthening of Kolodny and MacFarlane's argument.

4 Loomes, Graham and Sugden, Robert, ‘Regret Theory: An Alternative Theory of Rational Choice Under Uncertainty,’ Economic Journal 92 (1982), 805–824CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bell, David, ‘Regret in Decision Making Under Uncertainty’, Operations Research 30 (1982), 961–981CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fishburn, Peter, The Foundations of Expected Utility (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Kahneman, Daniel and Tversky, Amos, ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,’ Econometrica 47 (1979), 263–292CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 As calculated by Givewell.org's 2018 cost-effectiveness analysis, available at Givewell.org.

8 Velleman, David, Practical Reflection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

9 Velleman, David, Self to Self: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Brison, Susan, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

11 Korsgaard, Christine, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Lindemann, Hilde, Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.  Lindemann, following Schechtman, Marya, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar and others, connects narrative to our sense of our selves in a sense of ‘personal identities’ that is, like Velleman's claims, much stronger than I need here, though I am much more sympathetic to it.

13 Lindemann, Hilde, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001)Google Scholar offers a particularly helpful account of the features essential to narratives in the sense that I intend.

14 See Lindemann, Damages Identities, pp for the significance of this important contrast between narratives and what she calls chronicles, which are all-inclusive.

15 Velleman, Compare David, ‘Persons in Prospect III: Love and Non-Existence’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (2008), 266–288CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Harman, Elizabeth, ‘“I'll be Glad I did it” Reasoning and the Significance of Future Desires’, Philosophical Perspectives 23 (2009), 177–199CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Special thanks to audiences at the Royal Institute of Philosophy and Dartmouth University, and particularly to conversations with Steve Bero, Susan Brison, Ruth Chang, and Marya Schechtman.