{"title":"Feeling Responsible: On Regret for Others’ Harms","authors":"Magnus Ferguson","doi":"10.1017/s0031819124000020","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the moral emotion of being socially, but non-agentially connected to a harm. I propose understanding the emotion of an affiliated onlooker as a species of regret called ‘social-regret’. Breaking from existing guilt- and shame-based accounts, I argue that social-regret can be a fitting, expressive, and revelatory reactive attitude that opens the way for deliberation over accountability for others’ harms. When we feel social-regret, our attention is directed towards the moral salience of our social relations and the expectations that undergird them, as well as possibilities for ameliorative action. I consider several existing accounts of affiliated onlookers’ emotions (including embarrassment, guilt, and shame), and I highlight the advantages of supplementing these with a regret-based account. Social-regret provides a novel way to understand negative, self-directed emotions in response to others’ harms as rational, expressive, and potentially reason-giving experiences.","PeriodicalId":54197,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"PHILOSOPHY","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0031819124000020","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"PHILOSOPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper investigates the moral emotion of being socially, but non-agentially connected to a harm. I propose understanding the emotion of an affiliated onlooker as a species of regret called ‘social-regret’. Breaking from existing guilt- and shame-based accounts, I argue that social-regret can be a fitting, expressive, and revelatory reactive attitude that opens the way for deliberation over accountability for others’ harms. When we feel social-regret, our attention is directed towards the moral salience of our social relations and the expectations that undergird them, as well as possibilities for ameliorative action. I consider several existing accounts of affiliated onlookers’ emotions (including embarrassment, guilt, and shame), and I highlight the advantages of supplementing these with a regret-based account. Social-regret provides a novel way to understand negative, self-directed emotions in response to others’ harms as rational, expressive, and potentially reason-giving experiences.
期刊介绍:
Philosophy is the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, which was founded in 1925 to build bridges between specialist philosophers and a wider educated public. The journal continues to fulfil a dual role: it is one of the leading academic journals of philosophy, but it also serves the philosophical interests of specialists in other fields (law, language, literature and the arts, medicine, politics, religion, science, education, psychology, history) and those of the informed general reader. Contributors are required to avoid needless technicality of language and presentation. The institutional subscription includes two supplements.