Abstract
Bernard Williams (1981) briefly discusses agent regret in his broader account of moral luck. The present paper first outlines one way to develop Williams’s notion with reference to the unintended harm; it then suggests that agent regret can be counteracted by externalizing the action that caused unintended harm, in Harry Frankfurt’s (1988a, b) sense of externalization; and then the present paper argues that apology is a mechanism by which a person can externalize an offending action/effect—in that way counteracting agent regret (and possibly, though this is a further empirical point not defended here, mitigating the psychological effects). This function for apology—self-repair—is different from others described in the literature, which address the role of apology in repairing relationships. The present paper describes a nonfictional example, that of a veteran of the U.S. war in Iraq who contacts a family gravely injured by him and his combat unit; the veteran is motivated to contact the family to apologize. The example serves as a prototypical case of agent regret. The example is taken from a recent literature on the clinical psychology of (what that literature calls) self-inflicted “moral injury”; categorizing this example of moral injury as agent regret also helps broaden our understanding of moral injury as a philosophical category and as a psychological phenomenon.
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Notes
Frankfurt 2008 makes this latter point. A complete account of agent regret would require connecting these two points, showing that the philosophical account of the grounds for agent regret explains the particular kind of psychological distress and the particular emotions experienced—though drawing out such a connection is far outside the scope of the present paper.
The account of agent regret outlined in the main text is broadly compatible with Tannenbaum (2007). Tannenbaum proposes three conditions for acting successfully, and failing with respect to one of those conditions is grounds for agent regret. The first condition is that an action “must result from a decision that is based on one’s ends, as well as sub-ends rationally entailed by those ends,” the second is that “the action must realize those ends, as well as the associated sub-ends” (45). In Williams’s example, the truck driver’s action fails with respect to the second condition (the end of acting to protect human life) and, with Tannenbaum, the driver’s failing to realize this end is grounds for agent regret. Further, for Tannenbaum, the end at stake in Williams’s example “reflects his [the driver’s] moral values,” and the driver’s action is therefore morally inadequate as a result (45, see also 55). My own account makes this same point using different terminology: where Tannenbaum describes agent regret in terms of failing with respect to the agent’s ends, my account refers to actions or outcomes that conflict with the agent’s normative frameworks.
But there are also points of difference. In particular, Tannenbaum’s third condition for acting successfully (and so avoiding agent regret) is that “one must have the correct ends” (45). This condition suggests that behavior is evaluated against an objective—“correct”— (perhaps moral) standard; but my account, in contrast, allows that different individuals could associate themselves with—and evaluate their actions against—different normative frameworks apart from an external standard of correctness. Also, though Tannenbaum allows that not all forms of agent regret are moral, meaning that agent regret can be associated with non-moral ends, she distinguishes agent regret from guilt and regret on the basis of the negative moral evaluations involved—so she may have difficulty fully accommodating non-moral ends.
Moreover, the two accounts come apart in some cases. Consider a triage nurse who choses to help two accident victims (the two with the best chance of surviving) and allows a third to die—because there wasn’t time to save all three. This outcome (allowing the third victim to die) is the result of a decision on the part of the nurse and it realizes that nurse’s ends (saving as many as possible); moreover, the nurse can justify that outcome. So, for Tannenbaum, there would be no grounds for agent regret. Or, consider a different version of Williams’s original example: say the truck driver swerved to avoid a mother pushing her three kids in a stroller (the mother crossed the street without looking, distracted by her cell phone) and, trying to avoid the mother and her children, the driver chose to crash into a parked car. And, say the driver lives on that street and knows that the parked car is one of his neighbor’s cherished possessions, a gift from that neighbor’s father, etc., and still the driver chose to crash into the car to avoid hitting the pedestrians. The damage to the car is the achievement of the truck driver’s correctly chosen end (“correctly chosen” because the driver avoids hitting pedestrians)—so, again, for Tannenbaum the driver couldn’t experience agent regret. But, my intuition is that both the nurse and the truck driver would very likely experience agent regret, tied directly to their respective roles in causing unwanted harm—and these cases expose a problem for Tannenbaum’s account.
Helmreich’s account is an alternative to two common-sense, intuitive explanations about how apologies function. First, Searle (1979) argues that apologies are expressions of regret, guilt, or remorse. Apologies so-conceived are a form of emotional sharing. But apologies can be effective even when the offender does not feel the emotion, the emotion doesn’t have to be present (the emotion isn’t necessary), and an apology therefore must be more than and/or different from the expression of an emotion. Second, on some views apologies are an expression of moral regret, a psychological state constituted by a negative attitude about an action because it was wrong. Apologies on this sort of view communicate a fact or express an attitude (the offender believes that what he or she did was wrong), but it is not clear how this could remedy or counteract the wrongs. Also, Helmreich’s conception of apology is fundamentally remedial; his account is not concerned with the problem of reconciling the parties for future action, which is another dimension of moral repair distinct from righting wrongs (for an account of the latter see Adrienne Martin 2010).
Helmreich (2012) argues that blameless harms requires apology along these exact lines (in the context of legal requirements). Note, also, my characterization of agent regret in terms of the kind of impact the agent wants to have on the world was derived from Frankfurt’s work, discussed above, but Helmreich (2012) uses the same language to explain the self-critical stance on the part of someone who has caused unintended harm.
This line of thought is close in spirit to Meir Dan-Cohen’s (2009) work on moral repair. For Dan-Cohen, “revisionary practices”—his general term for repentance, forgiveness, and pardon, including apology, though he doesn’t use that term—have the effect of redrawing the boundary of the self so that the wrong action is outside of that boundary. Dan-Cohen describes this process of shifting boundaries by analogy: there is a source of pollution inside the border of a fictional state Arcadia, it causes damage to a neighboring state, but if the border is redrawn so that the polluting facility is outside of the border, then Arcadia would no longer bear responsibility. The account developed in the present paper explains how one “revisionary practice” on the part of the wrongdoer, an apology, can re-draw the boundary of the self. In particular, apologies externalize an action as inconsistent with the person’s moral frameworks; in this way the wrongdoer distances him- or her-self from, or disowns, the harmful effect; this is how the wrongdoer shifts the “boundary” by counteracting the harm, not by (merely) declaring it to be outside.
Filkins (2012) refers to Jonathan Shay’s (1995) work with Vietnam veterans, which first introduced the concept of moral injury. According to Shay, moral injury is caused by “(1) a betrayal of what’s right, (2) by someone who holds legitimate authority (in the military—a leader), (3) in a high stakes situation,” (2012: 59). Moral injury “deteriorates [the subordinates’] character; their ideals, ambitions, and attachments begin to change” (2012: 59). For Shay, the violator—the cause of the moral injury—is someone who holds legitimate authority, a commanding officer in the military, and the soldier is the victim. Litz et al. (2009, 2012)—discussed immediately below in the main text—offer an alternative conceptualization of what causes moral injury, according to which the moral injury is self-inflicted. Litz et al.’s account is now more widely discussed in the literature and more widely applied in therapeutic contexts (the patient population might explain the different causal accounts, in that Shay is writing about the experience of Vietnam veterans who felt betrayed by their superiors, where Litz et al. are working with veterans who had different experience in Iraq and Afghanistan). But Shay is clear: moral injury can be caused in both ways and—what matters most to Shay—the resulting disorder must be recognized as distinct from PTSD and treated appropriately. In the example in the main text, Lobello’s moral injury is self-inflicted, so Shay’s conception of the cause of moral injury—where the soldier in question is betrayed by a superior officer—doesn’t apply. Moreover, in Lobello’s case the action is not wrongful, so it doesn’t exactly fit Litz et al.’s account (which concerns the effects of wrong action). If, with Filkins, we take Lobello’s case to be one of moral injury, then there are three potential causes—Shay’s (caused by betrayal by others), Litz et al.’s (caused by wrongful action on the agent’s part), and my own (caused by harming but not wrongful action on the agent’s part); that is why this example can broaden our understanding of moral injury as a philosophical category and a psychological phenomenon. At the same time, the present paper understands the psychological harm involved in a way closer to Shay’s account, though consistent with Litz et al., taking Shay’s reference to character as a reference to identity in Charles Taylor’s sense—even if we might expect some variation in effect as a result of the different causal paths, though that is a question for another context.
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Cohen, M.A. Apology as Self-Repair. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 585–598 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9906-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9906-6