What persists and what transforms: agent-regret over time : master's thesis in philosophy

Abstract

This thesis focuses on agent-regret, the distinctively first-personal form of regret Bernard Williams describes as directed toward one’s own past actions. Existing discussions have mainly focused on whether agent-regret is reducible to other emotions, and whether it is rational for a blameless agent to feel it. I ask what makes agent-regret persist over time, and through what process it persists. I argue, first, that the constitutive core of agent-regret is agentive relation: a first-personal, inextricable relation of attribution between the agent and their past action. Second, I argue that the persistence of agent-regret should be understood as a transformation of experience. Through conceptual analysis, phenomenological description, and close reading of first-person testimony, the thesis shows that this persistence carries emotional weight, which comes from the tension between agentive relation and narrative self-understanding. Drawing on Ricoeur’s narrative identity framework and Ratcliffe’s account of existential feeling, I argue that this emotional weight can gradually sediment, moving from the felt quality of a foreground episodic emotion into a background sense of distrust in one’s own agency.