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Regret
Regret
A Study in Ancient Moral Psychology
JAMES WARREN
1
3
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For Alison
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction: Why Regret? 1
1. Virtue, Metameleia, Regret, and Remorse 12
2. Plato on Regret, Akrasia, and the Tyrannical Soul 35
3. Aristotle on Regret and Counter-Voluntary Actions 84
4. Aristotle on Regret and Akrasia 98
5. Metameleia and Ignorance 117
6. Stoic Regret 127
7. Gellius and Gallus on the Limits of Regret 156
8. Epilogue 179
References 183
Index Locorum 189
Subject Index 193
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of parts of this work were presented to audiences at the

Institute of Classical Studies, at the 2018 meeting of the Northern
Association for Ancient Philosophy, and as the 2019 Collis Lecture at
Transylvania University, Kentucky. I would like to thank in particular
George Boys-Stones, Jenny Bryan, Matthew Duncombe, Emily Fletcher,
Simon Gathercole, David Kaufman, Anthony Price, Katharine O’Reilly, John
Svarlien, Shaul Tor, and Raphael Woolf for their comments, assistance, and
suggestions. I have also benefited greatly from discussions of this material with
Frisbee Sheffield and Gábor Betegh. The Cambridge B Caucus remains a
source of inspiration and encouragement and a reminder of what fun it can
be to think about ancient philosophical texts with friends. Two readers for the
Press spotted some errors for me to correct and made helpful suggestions for
improving the final version. I also owe thanks to Peter Momtchiloff at the
Press and to Monica Matthews for her careful copy-editing.
The major part of the research for this work was completed while I was on
sabbatical leave for the 2017–18 academic year. I would like to thank my
colleagues in the Faculty of Classics and at Corpus Christi College who took
over my duties for that time.
I dedicate this book to my sister, with love and thanks.
List of Abbreviations
EE Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics

DK H. Diels and W. Kranz, 1952, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (6th edition),
Berlin
EK L. Edelstein and I. Kidd, 1989, Posidonius, Volume I: The Fragments
(2nd edition), Cambridge
Nauck² A. Nauck, 1892, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (2nd edition), Leipzig
NE Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
PHP Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis (On the Opinions of Hippocrates
and Plato)
SVF H. von Arnim, 1903–5, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta 4 volumes, Leipzig
For references to ancient authors and works, please consult the Index locorum.
Introduction
Why Regret?
Regret is a complex emotion. The form of regret I am most interested in

throughout this study is what the ancient Greek philosophical texts tend to
label metameleia (μεταμέλεια). Metameleia is most like what in modern discus-
sions is variously called ‘agent’ or ‘autobiographical’ regret; it is an attitude an
agent takes towards something they have chosen or done. There are various
qualifications that I will need to make at various points in what follows because
‘agent regret’ as it is currently used in the philosophical literature and metame-
leia as it appears in the ancient texts cannot be straightforwardly identified but,
for now, this rough equivalence is the most useful starting point. The necessary
qualifications will be better understood as we work through the ancient discus-
sions in more detail.
There are many reasons why philosophers might be interested in this kind
of regret and also why they should be interested in ancient Greek and Roman
philosophical discussions of it. This form of regret is a specific kind of the
more general attitude of preferring that things had been otherwise, which is
perhaps the broadest available notion of regret. In a case of metameleia, the
things the regretful person prefers to have been otherwise are things they have
themselves chosen or done. Regret therefore involves some kind of evaluative
stance on the part of the subject concerned towards their own past actions. But
it also has an affective aspect since it is usually a painful attitude. Regret is
therefore an interesting kind of self-reflexive emotion which carries both
a cognitive and evaluative component and also has an affective—usually
negative—aspect. Although there are ways in which we might come to see
regret as sometimes having positive consequences—for example, we might
encourage children to come to regret things they have done as a way of
encouraging them not to repeat that kind of behaviour—those positive con-
sequences are also connected with the simple fact that regret is something we
prefer not to feel. It is a sign that we have gone wrong somehow as well as a
sign that we have come to recognize that error. To put the matter in the most
general terms, the form of regret I am interested in here occurs when someone
Regret: A Study in Ancient Moral Psychology. James Warren, Oxford University Press. © James Warren 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198840268.003.0001
2 :      
forms a painful negative evaluation of something that they themselves did or

chose. Regret is therefore an interesting attitude for anyone considering
questions of moral development; that aspect of the philosophy of regret
plays a significant role in Greek and Roman moral psychology and deserves
more attention in modern accounts. Of course, the simple fact that the person
in question did previously perform or choose the very thing that they now
regret goes to show that something has changed between the occasion of the
action and the adoption of the retrospective negative evaluation. After all, if
the person concerned had felt at the time of the action what they now feel
about that same action then it is hard to see how they would have acted as they
did unless they were doing so under some kind of coercion. So regret in this
form is interesting not only because it is an example of a self-directed negative
evaluation accompanied by a painful affective state but also because one of the
conditions necessary for regret to come about is that the person in question
has changed their preference or evaluation over time. We are susceptible to
regret not only because we are capable of critical self-evaluation and of looking
back at our past actions but also because we are capable of changing our
assessment of ourselves and our actions over time.
I hope that these brief remarks already go some way to show why regret
might be a phenomenon worthy of philosophical interest. But in case further
justification is needed, let me outline some more reasons why it deserves our
attention and why, in particular, it is worthwhile considering regret specifically
by thinking carefully about its role in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.
So here are two sets of reasons why it is interesting to think about ancient
Greek and Roman philosophical accounts of metameleia both for our under-
standing of ancient moral psychology and also as an interesting source of
comparison and contrast with more recent accounts of regret.
First, thinking about regret offers us a way to think about ancient philo-
sophical accounts of moral psychology more generally. As we shall see, for the
most part it is a commonplace in these philosophical accounts that regret is
not to be associated with the very best human characters. Certainly, it is
commonly claimed that wise and virtuous people will be free from regret.
And in some cases, as in Aristotle for example, it is also thought that regret is
not associated with the very worst human characters. It follows, in that case,
that regret is an attitude that belongs to those people—presumably, most of
us—who are somewhere between these two extremes, neither wise and perfect
nor completely dissolute. That fact alone, I think, makes it an interesting
phenomenon for us to consider. Furthermore, for those philosophers whose
picture of human psychology includes reference to multiple possible sources of
:   ? 3
motivation, regret is instead to be associated with those people whose actions

are the product of some kind of conflict between distinct motivations in which
the better side in the conflict—usually identified with reason—comes off
worse. Aristotle’s view, for example, which will be one of the principal points
of focus for my discussion, is that those people who are free from such conflict,
either because they have harmonious and virtuous souls or because their
rational soul has become entirely subservient to their unrestrained and baser
desires, will all as a result be free from regret. Insofar as metameleia is a
backwards-looking attitude it is taken to be a sign of an agent who has been
subject to internal conflict later reasserting the better evaluation and better
desire but only when it is too late. In this way, regret is associated with those
people who sometimes act on the basis of only temporary episodes of domin-
ation by a worse motivation such that when that moment has passed, they are
capable of assessing their choice differently. That model, of course, fits well with
those accounts of moral psychology that do indeed posit multiple sources for
human motivation and imagine the possibility of synchronic motivational con-
flict within an individual person. But there are also pictures of human moral
psychology—in Plato’s Protagoras and in Stoicism, for example—which do not
recognize such a psychological complexity but nevertheless find room for an
account of regret. In considering both accounts of metameleia, therefore, it will
be possible to see the ways in which, despite the important distinction between
what might be called monistic or intellectualist moral psychologies on the one
hand and complex moral psychologies on the other, these two very different
models of human motivations nevertheless share some important general views
about the difference between wise or virtuous and other kinds of person.
Above all, it will emerge that in these Greek and Roman philosophical texts
regret is closely associated with a kind of ignorance, more specifically with a
previous instance of ignorance that has now been dispelled. This is an import-
ant point of contact between both the accounts of regret that are concerned
with voluntary actions (including those that are the result of reason being
overcome by other motivations) and also Aristotle’s instructive identification
in Nicomachean Ethics 3.1 of the presence of regret in certain cases of what he
calls ‘counter-voluntary’ actions. What these two classes of action share is that
the ignorance in question, the ignorance under which the action that is later
regretted is originally performed, is only temporary. What is regretted is
performed under a kind of ignorance but the regret itself can happen only
once that temporary ignorance departs and the agent is then able to form a
better estimation of what he has done. The regret can occur either because he
is now in possession of a full picture of the relevant situation or because he is
4 :      
now free from the impairment produced by an overwhelming motivation for

something other than what he rationally conceives to be the good. Regret is in
both cases a product of an agent coming to the right and full comprehension of
his action, but only in hindsight. That is an important part of why regret is
painful, since the affected agent realizes as he regrets that the mistake cannot
be undone, and this pain is in addition to whatever negative consequences flow
from the simple matter of having acted incorrectly in the first place. This
notion that regret requires both ignorance and comprehension—ignorance at
the time of acting and a later belated comprehension of the earlier error—is
what explains how these ancient philosophers can come to associate regret as a
characteristic of deficient but not irredeemable characters. It is also why they
tend not to associate it with either perfect, wise, and virtuous or incurable and
permanently corrupted characters. Someone who regrets must fall short of
excellence in a manner that allows him to act wrongly in the first place but that
same person must also be sufficiently capable of reassessing and properly
evaluating these actions in a better light, if only in hindsight. For philosophers
like Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics this makes regret an important marker for
distinguishing ideal from non-ideal characters and also a helpful indication of
those people who, though they currently fall short of being excellent moral
agents, are not beyond hope. Those who regret are capable of improvement.
Second, we should note how regret has been addressed in some modern
philosophical discussions and their relationship to the ancient notion of
metameleia. This is not only interesting in its own right, of course, but it will
serve to draw our attention to the deep contrasts as well as points of contact
between some modern assumptions and the guiding framework of the ancient
discussions. In particular, here I would like to highlight two broad areas in
which regret has been discussed in some modern accounts and then outline
briefly how the ancient philosophical discussions we will look at in the main
body of the book differ from the modern views. Further points of comparison
and contrast will emerge as we look more closely at specific questions and
texts. First, regret is sometimes taken in recent philosophical accounts to be an
indication that it is not always possible, even on the basis of a full understand-
ing of the situation at hand, to make a choice to promote or preserve
something of genuine value without having to sacrifice something else that
is also of genuine value. In other words, the assumption is that sometimes it is
right to regret an action even if we are sure we have done the right thing or
made the right choice. And this is so because sometimes there are competing
and conflicting values in play that cannot all be preserved; in brief, there are
genuine ethical dilemmas: choices that cannot be resolved without violating
:   ? 5
some moral requirement or without failing to promote something of genuine

moral value. If it is not always possible to resolve an ethical choice without
‘moral remainder’ or ‘moral residue’ then we should allow that someone can
act in a perfectly laudable fashion but nevertheless have good reason to regret
what they have done. Regret is appropriate in such a circumstance just in the
sense that it is appropriate for someone both to be sure that they have done
nothing wrong and also that what they did deserves to be regretted neverthe-
less. An action might be unavoidable but nevertheless regrettable; indeed, an
action may be the ‘right thing to do’ in the circumstances but nevertheless
regrettable. This argument justifies regret in even the wisest and most con-
scientious agents by reference to certain claims about values or obligations and
how different values or obligations may be in tension with one another. In this
case, the appropriateness of regret even for admirable agents is taken to be an
indication of the presence of potentially conflicting values.
This train of thought might also run in the opposite direction too: insofar
as we find it reasonable for someone to feel regret after making a choice
between two possibilities in such dilemmas—situations in which either there
are good reasons for pursuing (or avoiding) each of the two options but only
one can be chosen at the expense of the other or, more strongly, situations in
which an agent cannot perform everything that is morally obligatory—then
this may give us reason to think that there is a plurality of genuine values or
obligations that cannot always be reconciled. In this way, if such a picture of
reasonable regret is plausible then it presents challenges to various kinds of
accounts of value and of right action. And in doing so then it also suggests a
reason why we ought to allow room in the life of even the very best ethical
agents for cases of justifiable regret. Indeed, we should think that the absence
of regret from a person’s life is probably a sign that they have failed properly to
appreciate an ethical choice for the genuine dilemma that it is; the absence of
regret itself may become a reason for criticism and censure.
There are, therefore, interesting philosophical questions that emerge from
thinking about whether it is reasonable to expect the presence of regret in the
lives even of admirable moral agents. And there are interesting discussions
about whether the phenomenon of reasonable regret indicates anything
important about the nature of moral dilemmas and, if it does, just what that
might be.¹ Ancient examples often play a central role in these debates in the
¹ For the view that the presence of regret in fact offers no substantial support for the possibility of
moral dilemmas in the sense of cases of genuinely inconsistent obligations, see, for example, Conee
1982. Cf. MacIntyre 1990, 371–2; McConnell 1996, 37–9; Mothersill 1996, 77–8.
6 :      
modern philosophical literature, perhaps with the underlying thought that the
ancient Greek world, particularly in the form of Attic tragic drama, was able to
express and capture something important about moral psychology and the
nature of moral dilemmas that more modern philosophy has overlooked. For
example, we might consider the case of Agamemnon who is faced with a
choice between sacrificing his own daughter, Iphigenia, to allow the Greek fleet
to sail to Troy to reclaim his brother’s wife and saving his daughter but failing
in his obligations as a king and a brother. Certainly, how we understand such
choices and how an agent will react to making such a choice is an important
theme in some of Bernard Williams’ influential work and the importance of
the question is evident in the discussions of moral dilemmas and the consist-
ency of ethical requirements that have been written in response to him.
One of the important themes in what follows is that the ancient philosoph-
ical authors I will discuss seem to present a significant alternative to Williams’
line of thinking on this point because they all share the view that an admirable
ethical agent—the truly virtuous person or the wise person—will always be
without regret. As Aristotle puts it, the virtuous person will be without
metameleia: he will be ‘ametamelētos’. This is worthy of note first of all because
Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics can hardly be thought to have been unaware of
what we might well characterize as ‘tragic dilemmas’. The stories of
Agamemnon and Iphigenia or Antigone and Creon were part of their cultural
and ethical landscape. Nevertheless, regret in the sense of metameleia is
associated in their accounts of moral psychology with a class of deficient but
not incurably dissolute agents. This is also important because we should note
that Aristotle’s aversion to ascribing metameleia to a virtuous person appears
to be in tension with a claim sometimes made on behalf of virtue ethics. It is
sometimes claimed to be a positive characteristic of an approach to ethics that
is based on the concept of an agent’s virtue rather than on the assessment of
actions according to a set of obligations or certain desired consequences that it
is more hospitable to the phenomena of the tragic moral dilemma and the
good but regretful agent.² Aristotle is certainly a proponent of an ethical
outlook based on the cultivation of virtuous character and so we might expect
him to agree with this picture. But, in that case, it does seem again surprising
that he should so clearly state that the virtuous person is ‘without regret’. Part
of my task in this study will therefore be to try to explain why he might take
this view and how it is related to his more general understanding of value,
virtuous character, and ethical choice-making. In brief, I shall argue that
² See, for example, the rich discussion in Hursthouse 1999, 43–87.

:   ? 7
Aristotle can certainly acknowledge that a virtuous agent may, on occasion, act
well while also recognizing and feeling that in doing so something else of value
has been lost. But Aristotle will not call that an instance of metameleia because
for Aristotle the essential characteristic of metameleia is that an agent later
comes to know something that was not known at the time of the original
action and which, if it had been known then, would have altered what was
done. Aristotle is much more interested, in other words, in evaluating agents
on the basis of their understanding of the salient facts at the time of the action
and the later occurrence of metameleia is, for him, a sign of some form of
deficiency in this regard. Anyone acting in full knowledge of the relevant
ethical considerations, however challenging the decision and no matter the
cost of acting virtuously, will not be subject to metameleia. This is an import-
ant contrast between a modern understanding of ‘regret’ and the ancient
philosophical understanding of metameleia.
The second way in which regret has been addressed in some modern
philosophical discussions is in its relation to what is sometimes called ‘moral
luck’. In one well-known example, we are asked to consider the case of a lorry
driver who, through no fault of his, accidentally hits and kills a child with his
lorry. In this case the driver is likely to experience something we can call
‘regret’, not because of any thought that he is at fault for the death through
some kind of ethical failing but simply because he nevertheless has caused it.
This is one way in which the notion of ‘agent regret’ has been illustrated in
order to show that it may be appropriate not only for voluntary and inten-
tional actions. This case is interesting to me not only because, together with
the example of Agamemnon and Iphigenia, it also features in Bernard
Williams’ work and those articles too have become a focus of attention for
other philosophers interested in notions of regret and moral luck. It is
interesting also because Aristotle considers in Nicomachean Ethics 3.1 a series
of cases of what he labels ‘counter-voluntary’ actions and notes in that
discussion that the agent involved may well in retrospect feel metameleia at
recalling the action. In this respect, therefore, he seems to agree with some of
the intuitions behind Williams’ account while it seems he does not similarly
agree with Williams’ diagnosis of cases of ‘tragic dilemmas’, at least for
genuinely virtuous agents. Here too, it seems that Aristotle’s ascription of
metameleia in cases of counter-voluntary action is connected with thoughts
about the role played by ignorance in the original action. Once the agent
realizes—too late—some important fact about the situation at hand then they
come to feel metameleia for what they have done.
8 :      
Consideration of these two appearances of metameleia in Aristotle’s

Nicomachean Ethics, in cases of counter-voluntary actions and in the contrast
between the ‘regret-free’ (ametamelētos), virtuous, or unrestrained (akolastos)
agent and the ‘regretful’ (metamelētikos), akratic agent, will help us to under-
stand what Aristotle saw as the common link between those two. If there is
indeed a good reason to connect these two phenomena then Aristotle may be a
helpful guide in offering a consolidated account of ‘agent regret’ which will
cover both voluntary cases and cases like Williams’ driver. Further consider-
ation of the example of Agamemnon, who acts as he does in full awareness of
the consequences of either choice, should encourage us to reconsider whether
the ‘regret’ we might be tempted to identify here is in fact the same as the
regret we find in cases of akratic action or involuntary action. Once again, the
Aristotelian picture of metameleia requires ignorance at the time of action and
later recognition of something not known at the time. If cases like
Agamemnon’s do not fit this model then perhaps we should reconsider the
extent to which they are relevantly like those other examples and consider
whether the modern notion of ‘agent regret’ points to a sufficiently unified
phenomenon.
Aristotle’s view will be illuminated also by consideration of its Platonic
ancestor and the two of them together will help us to understand the later Stoic
classification of metameleia as a pathos and, therefore, as depending upon a
false judgement. Furthermore, I hope that this will illuminate the similarities
and differences between this ancient philosophical account of regret and some
modern discussions and distinctions. Grappling with those similarities and
differences is philosophically interesting in itself and not only as a means of
interpreting these ancient texts. What emerges, I think, is that metameleia in
these ancient philosophical accounts is neither to be identified with what we
might call ‘remorse’ nor does it cover a range of cases as broad as does the
modern ‘regret’, even when those cases are restricted to ‘agent regret’. It
overlaps with each of those categories in various ways but remains distinctive.
The outline of the remainder of the book is as follows. In Chapter One
I begin with Aristotle and use him to set out some of the agenda. Doing so not
only allows me to set out some specific questions concerning the interpretation
of important passages in his ethical works, but looking first at Aristotle will
also allow me to begin to clarify the specific form of regret that is captured by
his use of metameleia and associated terms. Aristotle helpfully makes some
clear but intriguing claims about the presence or absence of metameleia from
the lives of people of various psychological types and also sets out in a direct
fashion the relationship between metameleia and ignorance. He will therefore
:   ? 9
serve as the best introduction to the general picture I want to draw. In this first
chapter I will also return to the example of tragic dilemmas such as that faced
by Agamemnon and consider how Aristotle’s insistence that the virtuous
person will be free from metameleia relates to some modern accounts of
justifiable regret. In Chapter Two I then turn back to Plato. This is not only
because Plato is obviously a thinker Aristotle knew well and because Plato’s
understanding of metameleia will have influenced Aristotle profoundly, but
also because in Plato’s extensive philosophical output we can find metameleia
invoked in two contrasting contexts. It is invoked not only in connection with
cases of akratic action but also, specifically in the Protagoras, in a context
where Socrates is trying to offer an alternative account of mistaken action to
the one provided by akrasia. It might seem odd to turn to Plato only after an
initial look at Aristotle but it seems to me that the Platonic material is easier to
navigate once we have in place the general framework set out by Aristotle.
Plato never makes metameleia the central focus of any one particular philo-
sophical inquiry but it makes an appearance in a number of his varying
discussions of moral psychology. It is also helpful to look at Plato in the
light of the Aristotelian distinctions because different Platonic dialogues
famously work with different models of human moral psychology. Those
differences are best explained and understood, it seems to me, once we have
the Aristotelian picture in place as a comparandum. Although the most
extensive Platonic discussion of metameleia is connected with an analysis of
human motivation in terms of competing desires or parts of the soul—most
obviously in the Republic’s lengthy depiction of the tyrannical soul—there is
evidently some part that metameleia can play even if this underlying complex
psychological model is not in place. This is important not only because it will
allow us to pay attention to what is common to the role of metameleia across
these two pictures of human moral psychology, but it will also allow us to
notice aspects that differ according to the picture of the human soul that is
being assumed. Furthermore, the introduction of a Platonic account of meta-
meleia that is independent of the idea of akratic action caused by being
temporarily overcome by desire, rage, pleasure, and so on will also set the
stage for the Stoics’ account of metameleia to which I turn in Chapter Six.
Moving back from this Platonic background, in Chapter Three I consider
Aristotle’s view in book three of the Nicomachean Ethics that metameleia is
also appropriate in cases of certain counter-voluntary actions. These are
actions in which the agent is causally responsible for an outcome that is
contrary to the agent’s wishes and is the result of a certain ignorance of the
particular facts of the situation at hand. This is the closest ancient ancestor of
10 :      
Williams’ discussion of the regret appropriate for the unfortunate but other-
wise blameless lorry driver. It is important for us fully to appreciate why
Aristotle thinks that metameleia is relevant in such situations since they clearly
differ in important ways from actions performed akratically. But the two are
alike in that Aristotle identifies a certain form of ignorance as the cause of the
regretted action and the later removal of that ignorance as opening the
possibility for regret.
In Chapter Four I go back to look at Aristotle’s account of the connection
between metameleia and akrasia. In particular, here I look in some detail at
Nicomachean Ethics 9.4 and consider whether what he claims there is consist-
ent with his assertions in Nicomachean Ethics 7.7 and 7.8 that the akratic
person will be full of regret but the self-indulgent and unrestrained (akolastos)
person will be free from regret. I also pursue the common observation that in
9.4 Aristotle is looking back in particular to Socrates’ account of the tyrannical
person in Plato’s Republic. Chapter Five brings together the discussion of the
Platonic and Aristotelian material to consider more generally the specific
connections explored in the previous four chapters between, on the one
hand, metameleia and ignorance and, on the other, between virtue, wisdom,
and the absence of metameleia.
Chapter Six moves to the Hellenistic period and looks at the Stoic discussion
of metameleia in Arius Didymus’ epitome of Stoic ethics as transmitted by
Stobaeus. The Stoics, like Plato and Aristotle before them, note that the best
person—in their terms, the spoudaios—will be free from regret but deficient
characters—the phauloi—will be susceptible to it. The Stoic account can be
usefully compared in particular with the Platonic texts they read in detail. The
account of metameleia in Arius is sometimes thought to be a symptom of a
tendency in some later Stoic texts to accommodate a complex model of moral
psychology more like what is found in the Republic than what we see in the
Protagoras. I conclude that there is no compelling evidence to support this
suggestion but there is good reason to think that the Stoics were working hard
to include some of the useful features of the complex psychology in those
Platonic works and integrate them into an intellectualist model of human
motivation. Their account of metameleia is part of that project. This chapter
therefore builds on the work on different Platonic accounts of metameleia in
Chapter Two.
Chapter Seven adopts a rather different perspective on the notion of regret
by considering not only cases of agent regret but a broader class of preferences
for things to have been otherwise. It is nevertheless connected to the previous
discussion in various ways. A passage in Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights 17.1)
:   ? 11
explains that certain critics of Cicero objected to the orator’s use of the
vocabulary of regret (paenitentia) at a point early in his speech Pro Caelio.
They accuse Cicero of illegitimately using the terminology of regret for an
attitude towards things that are not appropriate objects of regret because they
are not things the agent in question has chosen or performed voluntarily. This
is clearly in tension with some of what the previous chapters have considered,
in particular Chapter Three’s discussion of Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 3.1
where there is a good case for attributing metameleia to agents who have acted
‘counter-voluntarily’. I take the critics’ accusation as an opportunity not only
to wonder why they might have offered this criticism and whether it is
legitimate but also to think whether there is a better explanation why some
of the cases they offer may appear to be inappropriate objects of regret. Here
I use R. Jay Wallace’s recent account of the intimate connection between
things for which we may feel what he calls ‘all-in’ regret and those things
which we ‘unconditionally affirm’. This allows me to look again at the con-
nection between regret and affirmation from a new perspective and return to
Chapter One’s earlier consideration of Aristotle’s view that the virtuous person
not only will not regret any of his past actions but also will affirm all of them.
Here too, it seems to me, the Greek and Roman philosophers—Aristotle in
particular—can enrich current accounts of regret, its nature, and its limits.
1
Virtue, Metameleia, Regret, and Remorse
In Nicomachean Ethics 9.4 Aristotle says that the virtuous person will be
‘without regret’ (ἀμεταμέλητος, 1166a29) and that bad people are full of regret
(μεταμελείας γὰρ οἱ φαῦλοι γέμουσιν, 1166b24–5). And in Nicomachean Ethics
7.8 he says that every akratic person is regretful (ὁ δ’ ἀκρατὴς μεταμελητικὸς
πᾶς, 1150b30–31) but an unrestrained person is free from regret (ἔστι δ’ ὁ μὲν
ἀκόλαστος, ὥσπερ ἐλέχθη, οὐ μεταμελητικός, 1150b29–30).¹ Why does he
think this? Are these claims consistent? Are these claims plausible? To answer
these questions, we will need to set out what Aristotle understands by meta-
meleia and the role of metameleia in Aristotle’s distinctions between his
different character types, particularly the virtuous, the akratic, and the unre-
strained akolastos.² Aristotle thinks that the actions of an akratic person are
voluntary and so the regret that the akratic experiences as a result of akratic
action will likewise be caused by voluntary actions. But a passage in
Nicomachean Ethics 3.1 shows that Aristotle also thinks that it is right to see
the presence of regret as the marker of a certain kind of ‘counter-voluntary’
action, namely an action whose outcome causes the agent pain and which is
committed as a result of the ignorance of certain relevant particular circum-
stances. So we might further ask whether there is anything that is shared by
these actions and the kinds of actions that the akratic person performs such
that Aristotle will happily associate regret with both of them.
The form of ‘regret’ I have in mind as the best English counterpart for the
Greek noun metameleia is a form of ‘autobiographical regret’ or ‘agent regret’.³
¹ The back reference is to 7.7 1150a21–2: ἀνάγκη γὰρ τοῦτον μὴ εἶναι μεταμελητικόν, ὥστ’ ἀνίατος· ὁ
γὰρ ἀμεταμέλητος ἀνίατος.
² The following account revises the discussion in Warren 2014, 158–61.
³ For ‘agent regret’: Rorty 1980 and Williams 1981a, 27–31. See also Wallace 2013, 34–45; 40:
‘Agent-regret, as Williams understands it, appears to be a special case of personal regret. It is called for
in cases in which one’s personal involvement in the regrettable circumstances takes the form of being
causally implicated in something unfortunate through one’s agency.’ This formulation is supposed to
be wide enough to encompass both intentional, or voluntary, and non-voluntary forms of agency.
Wallace argues that the more interesting contrast with impersonal regret is ‘personal regret’, which
requires that the past circumstance ‘affects you or your attachments in some significant way’, regardless
of whether you were implicated as a cause of that circumstance (2013, 44–5). Jacobson 2013 takes issue
with the notion of ‘agent regret’ as it is used by Williams; he argues that it conflates the distinct
sentiments of guilt and regret. Cf. Scarre 2017, 575–6.
Regret: A Study in Ancient Moral Psychology. James Warren, Oxford University Press. © James Warren 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198840268.003.0002
, , ,   13
This will distinguish it from a more general sense in which the English word is
used to mean a negative assessment of any action or event, usually an action or
event in the past, such an assessment often being accompanied both by a wish
that things had been otherwise and a negative and also painful emotional
response. It is not a simple matter, however, to identify a single English term
that will cover all and only those actions with which Aristotle associates
metameleia.
Some people think that ‘remorse’ is the single term in English that best
captures this autobiographical sense of metameleia particularly in cases of
voluntary actions that are later a cause of pain and self-chastisement on the
part of the agent. ‘Remorse’ is preferred on this account, I think, because of
two particular connotations of the word. First, it is more closely associated
with cases in which the agent intentionally and voluntarily contributed caus-
ally to an unwanted outcome and it is an appropriate label for the painful
emotion the agent feels on realizing this. Second, it carries clear connotations
of the acceptance by the agent concerned of culpable personal responsibility
and perhaps a public demonstration of a desire to put things right. It also may
seem to be a stronger emotional response than ‘mere regret’ and therefore
more appropriate for certain cases, particularly tragic dilemmas, in which the
agent has performed something that is reasonably subject to strong moral
censure. ‘Regret’, by contrast, might seem to be too mild or thin an attitude for
some of the cases covered by the term metameleia since we often use that term
to cover a very general preference for things to be different from how they are,
whether or not we feel ourselves responsible for them. Regret also does not
carry such a sense of painful emotion. Remorse, however, will not cover all of
what Aristotle associates with metameleia, since, as we have already noted,
Aristotle is happy to associate metameleia also with some cases of what he calls
‘counter-voluntary’ action and, as we shall see, these are actions for which
‘remorse’ would seem to be an unwarranted reaction.⁴ For example, in one of
Aristotle’s examples someone accidentally kills an opponent when they are
practising fighting because he did not know that the weapon he is using had
not been made safe by having its tip blunted. In this case, remorse seems to be
an unwarranted reaction to something that was certainly not intentionally
caused, but Aristotle does nevertheless insist that metameleia is an appropriate
⁴ Cf. Hursthouse 1999, 76–7, who argues that neither ‘regret’ nor ‘remorse’ are quite appropriate
ways to characterize the response in question even in cases of tragic dilemmas since ‘regret’ seems to
her to be an insufficiently powerful reaction to the kind of situation in question and ‘remorse’ is
powerful but not appropriate if there is no blame or censure to which the agent should be subject
(76–7).
14 :      
emotion. ‘Regret’, on the other hand, does seem to be an appropriate emotion

to associate with an agent’s later attitude to such actions.
Here we might consider two examples taken from Bernard Williams’
influential discussions of regret. They will provide useful comparanda for
our discussion once we begin to look more closely at what our ancient
philosophers have to say about metameleia. First, consider Williams’ presen-
tation of the example of Agamemnon, the Greek general who intentionally
sacrifices his daughter in order to allow the Greek fleet to sail to Troy.
The agonies that a man will experience after acting in full consciousness of
such a situation are not to be traced to a persistent doubt that he may not
have chosen the better thing; but, for instance, to a clear conviction that he
has not done the better thing because there was no better thing to be done. It
may, on the other hand, even be the case that by some not utterly irrational
criteria of ‘the better thing’, he is convinced that he did the better thing:
rational men no doubt pointed out to Agamemnon his responsibilities as a
commander, the many people involved, the considerations of honour, and so
forth. If he accepted all this, and acted accordingly: it would seem a glib
moralist who said, as some sort of criticism, that he must be irrational to lie
awake at night, having killed his daughter. And he lies awake, not because of
a doubt, but because of a certainty. Williams 1973, 173
This is certainly a case of agent regret since the painful feelings that
Agamemnon feels are directed at his own past actions. The case of
Agamemnon is interesting for our present concerns because it seems quite
appropriate to think that Agamemnon may feel painful regret and, as Williams
insists, it is also appropriate to think that he may do so even if he is sure that
his action was the better of the alternatives available to him.⁵ Agamemnon
may even be an admirable moral agent and act in a consistently virtuous
manner (contrary to the assessment of his wife, Clytemnestra) but even this
will not prevent him from feeling regret at what he has done. Indeed, we might
make the point even stronger and say something like the following. It would be
hard to imagine that an admirable moral agent would not feel regret at having
⁵ Williams 1993, 132–6 returns to consider the case of Agamemnon, this time with a particular focus
on Aeschylus’ portrayal of the situation in his Agamemnon; 133: ‘A major difficulty in understanding
the passage from the Agamemnon has been ethical: the critics could not understand how someone
might have to choose between two courses of action both of which involved a grave wrong, so that
whatever he does will be bad, and, whatever he does, he will suffer what, in discussing responsibility,
I called an agent’s regret at what he has done. The ethical question in such a case is not soluble without
remainder.’
, , ,   15
acted in this way; not to feel regret would suggest that the agent has failed to
appreciate adequately the nature of the choice and is therefore somehow
deficient in character or in his appreciation of the situation at hand.
Williams considers the possibility that the case of Agamemnon may point to
a problem that arises only when there is a conflict between what he labels
‘moral motivations’ (for example, to obtain justice for Menelaus) and ‘natural
motivations’ (for example, the love for a child). But he goes on to show that
much the same can be said about cases in which the regret is generated by an
inability to act so as to satisfy both members of a pair of moral motivations. An
agent may regret being unable to keep a promise to a friend because of a
motivation to act according to what is just. Here too, even if the agent is
morally admirable and is indeed acting for the best, the agent’s regret at
breaking a promise is ‘a reassuring sign that the agent took his promises
seriously’ (Williams 1973, 175). In some circumstances it is impossible to be
a morally admirable agent and act accordingly but not later feel regret when
considering what one has done. If that is correct then Aristotle’s claim that a
virtuous agent will be ‘regret-free’ begins to look very implausible.
The case of Agamemnon as described here is not, I think, a case which
would strike Plato or Aristotle as one in which it would be appropriate to talk
of metameleia. So it is an interesting case for us to consider as we work through
their discussions and we should keep in mind Williams’ assessment of the
example as a helpful comparandum. Let us assume that Agamemnon has
indeed acted for the best and has been motivated throughout to act for the
best. Let us also assume that he has not acted in ignorance of the ethically
relevant aspects of the situation at hand. In that case it is hard to think that his
action would fall into Aristotle’s preferred understanding of those for which
metameleia is appropriate because Agamemnon, at least as described in
Williams’ example, meets the relevant qualifications for being a virtuous
agent. As we have already noted, Aristotle is insistent that a virtuous person
will be ‘without regret’, so if Agamemnon is virtuous then he will not feel
metameleia for what he has done. Perhaps that result is by itself enough to
qualify Aristotle as a ‘glib moralist’, at least in Williams’ eyes.⁶ But before we
draw that conclusion it is important to think a little more about just why
Aristotle might not detect metameleia in this sort of case.
We will come back to this example a little later and I will have more to
say about whether Aristotle’s denial of metameleia in such a case might
⁶ Note the critical assessment of Aristotle’s general framework in the Nicomachean Ethics in
Williams 1985, esp. 34–40 and 49–53.
16 :      
nevertheless be compatible with much of what Williams wants to insist about

the affective state of ethically praiseworthy people acting in such circum-
stances. For now let us compare the case of Agamemnon with Williams’
later example of the case of a lorry driver who ‘through no fault of his’ runs
over a child and who also is said to be likely to regret his action.
The sentiment of agent-regret is by no means restricted to voluntary agency.

It can extend far beyond what one intentionally did to almost anything for
which one was causally responsible in virtue of something one intentionally
did. Yet even at deeply accidental or non-voluntary levels of agency, senti-
ments of agent-regret are different from regret in general, such as might be
felt by a spectator, and are acknowledged in our practice as being different.
The lorry driver who, through no fault of his, runs over a child, will feel
differently from any spectator, even a spectator next to him in the cab, except
perhaps to the extent that the spectator takes on the thought that he himself
might have prevented it, an agent’s thoughts . . . We feel sorry for the driver,
but that sentiment co-exists with, indeed, presupposes, that there is some-
thing special about his relation to this happening, something which cannot
merely be eliminated by the consideration that it was not his fault. It may be
still more so in cases where agency is fuller than in such an accident, though
still involuntary through ignorance. Williams 1981a, 28–9
In this case, Williams plausibly contends, it is appropriate to imagine the

driver feeling regret since, although the lorry driver is not at fault he recognizes
that he is nevertheless the agent whose actions cause the death of the child.⁷ In
this way the case of the lorry driver is an example often invoked in discussions
of ‘moral luck’; we can compare the case of this unfortunate driver with the
case of his colleague who drives no more and no less carefully along the same
road and does not hit a pedestrian. One is morally lucky and the other
unlucky.⁸ By saying that the driver is not at fault, Williams means, I think,
that the driver was not driving without due care and attention, that the vehicle
has been properly maintained, and so on. But nevertheless, although the driver
is not at fault, we would be surprised if the driver did not regret hitting and
killing the child; indeed, we would more than likely think it peculiar and
reprehensible if he did not feel painful regret at what happened. Here,
⁷ See also Taylor 1985, 98–100, and Baron 1988. Cf. Wallace 2013, esp. 32–65 and the comments on
Wallace’s expanded notion of regret in Bagnoli 2016, 767 and Holroyd 2017, 404–6 and 411–12.
⁸ Cf. Nagel 1979, 28–9, who also considers the case of two drivers, both of whom drive negligently
but only one of whom hits and kills a pedestrian. Cf. Parfit 2011, vol. 1 461 n. 157.
, , ,   17
‘remorse’ seems to be a less appropriate description of the driver’s emotional

attitude and response to the event simply because the action was not inten-
tional. Williams emphasizes that the driver is not at fault in the sense that the
driver does not intend to kill the child. Rather, he kills the child involuntarily
through ignorance—presumably, ignorance that the child would run into the
road at that point. There are many aspects of this case, as we shall see, that
match cases of actions with which Aristotle will associate metameleia, par-
ticularly the examples of ‘counter-voluntary’ actions he discusses in
Nicomachean Ethics 3.1.⁹ That is why Williams’ more specific category of
‘agent-regret’ has been helpful in understanding ancient accounts of metame-
leia. But it also suggests that ‘remorse’ may carry connotations inappropriate
for the entire range of cases for which Aristotle, for example, uses the term
metameleia.¹⁰
Nevertheless, as we noted above, ‘regret’ in general and even the more
specific ‘agent regret’ are terms that are probably too broad to capture
Aristotle’s account of metameleia. ‘Regret’ can also cover the more general
bare wish for something in the past or something the agent did in the past to
have been different without even the thought that the actual outcome was the
result of some mistake, intentional or otherwise. Furthermore, there is an even
broader sense of ‘regret’ that may cause confusion when we are talking
principally about metameleia; it is possible, after all, for a person to regret
things even though they played no part in them coming about. We can in this
sense regret the loss of life during the First World War and perhaps even regret
the loss of life when Vesuvius erupted in 79 . It is something of a strain to
imagine someone regretting the destruction caused by a meteorite impact at
the end of the Cretaceous period but sometimes such a negative assessment is
also thought to be included in this very broad form of ‘impersonal’ regret.¹¹
⁹ It is tempting to speculate that Williams’ own conception of the nature of agent-regret, particu-
larly in this example, was itself prompted or informed by his understanding of Aristotle or other
ancient authors. However, I have not been able to find any direct reference by Williams to the relevant
sections of Aristotle’s works (e.g. to NE 3.1). There are some remarks on Aristotle’s notion of voluntary
action in Williams 1995a.
¹⁰ Stern-Gillet 1995, 86–9, does not consider the appearance of metameleia in Nicomachean Ethics
3.1 and therefore, I think wrongly, concludes (89): ‘In as much as it inevitably accompanies weakness of
the will, metameleia, in the Nicomachean Ethics, thus designates a moral emotion, self-present to the
agent, which is generated by the consciousness of a gap between deeds and convictions. In this sense
metameleia is properly translated by “remorse”.’
¹¹ Cf. Scarre 2017, 573–4. There is also, I think, an even looser usage of the word in which it just
means that the person concerned is expressing that they recognize that something has happened that
someone else might think unwelcome. Consider, for example, the following: ‘We regret to inform you
that your application has been unsuccessful.’ Here the act of informing is, for the recipient at least, very
present. What the phrase means, I suppose, is that the informant is simply saying that your application
18 :      
In brief, metameleia clearly covers a range of cases broader than those for
which remorse would be warranted but narrower than those we might imagine
giving rise to ‘regret’, even ‘agent regret’. Without prejudicing too much the
discussion yet to come, it is already evident that metameleia is associated by
Aristotle principally with an agent’s painful evaluation of something the agent
did in the past and that is why I think ‘autobiographical’ or ‘agent’ regret is for
now, at least, the most helpful way of glossing that term. There is, however, a
distinctive mark of metameleia which further sets it apart from most modern
accounts of regret or remorse. As we shall see, Aristotle associates metameleia
with cases in which the agent’s original action is performed under a certain
kind of ignorance which is later dispelled. This is a characteristic of both those
counter-voluntary actions and also the actions of akratic agents for which
Aristotle says that metameleia is appropriate. For example, some commenta-
tors are inclined to say that the sailor in one of Aristotle’s examples in NE 3.1,
who throws his cargo overboard in order to save the crew from drowning in a
storm, will regret his action even though he is clearly doing what he ought.
Perhaps that is right; the case of the sailor is in many ways a less tragic example
of the case of Agamemnon we considered earlier. Both people are led to
perform something that they would under normal circumstances never wish
to do but are led by their understanding of the particular conditions they face
to choose to do just that in order to avoid some other worse outcome. But
Aristotle does not refer to metameleia in his brief discussion of the case of the
sailor and, as I shall try to explain in Chapter Three, we should not expect him
to. His general conception of metameleia does not fit this case, principally
because there is no way in which the sailor acts as he does because of a relevant
kind of ignorance. In fact, the sailor acts as he does precisely because he
understands very well the situation he faces.
Autobiographical or agent regret is the attitude taken by a person in respect
of one of that person’s earlier actions or omissions which the person now
comes to assess negatively; this negative assessment will usually be accompan-
ied by a negative, painful emotional reaction. Indeed, in the case of autobio-
graphical or agent regret it is perhaps easy to see the connection between
the negative evaluation and a negative emotional reaction since the object
of the evaluation is oneself and one’s past actions. A negative evaluation of
one’s own actions is very likely to produce negative and painful feelings
of embarrassment, shame, guilt, and so on, while it is not obvious why
was unsuccessful and acknowledging that this is something you are likely not to want. On prospective
regret see also Munoz-Dardé 2016, 778.
, , ,   19
a negative assessment of someone else’s past action should do so, let alone a
negative assessment of some impersonal event.¹² Regret of this autobio-
graphical kind is interesting also because its presence indicates that the
person in question has changed over time at least in respect of their overall
evaluation of this earlier action. Moreover, metameleia tends in Attic prose
to carry a specific ‘moral tone’: to express metameleia is to acknowledge
publicly that one previously performed an ethically bad action and that one
now wishes not to have done so.¹³ Aristotle himself notes in the Rhetoric that
expressions of regret tend to calm the anger of the slighted party and this can
therefore be a useful tactic for an orator to deploy.
καὶ τοῖς ὁμολογοῦσι καὶ μεταμελομένοις· ὡς γὰρ ἔχοντες δίκην τὸ λυπεῖσθαι

ἐπὶ τοῖς πεποιημένοις παύονται τῆς ὀργῆς.
[And men become mild] also to those who agree that they have done wrong
and feel regret. For it is as if, finding justice in the pain that the perpetrators
feel, people cease to be angry. Aristotle Rhetoric 2.3 1380a14–16
Here, regret at having committed an unjust action causes the perpetrator pain
and the pain of regret is sometimes taken by the jury to mitigate the anger that
it is warranted for them to feel towards the offender. The idea seems to be that
the pain of regret is a sign of the underlying good character of the perpetrator,
now that they are able to reflect coolly on their past actions. And the pain of
regret that they feel may be taken as itself forming part of the punishment for
their wrongdoing and therefore partially assuages the anger of the victim.¹⁴
We may also use this as another indication of what Aristotle has in mind in
characterizing his virtuous person as ametamelētos since a virtuous person
on his view has a stable disposition to act always in a virtuous manner as the
situation demands. No virtuous person will find himself being pained by
regret at some prior unjust or cowardly or intemperate action he has com-
mitted simply because he will never act in those ways. Perhaps a virtuous
person will look back at some action prior to the full acquisition of virtue and
feel regret (regret that he was not yet virtuous) but there is no sense in which
¹² There are arguments to the effect that we should not feel regret even for things we have genuinely
done wrong in the past. For example, it may be thought that to regret such actions is simply to be
miserable twice. Further, if regret does not in fact make it more likely that a person will do better in the
future (for example, it will not make Williams’ faultless lorry driver a better and safer driver) then it
seems to serve no good purpose and should therefore be avoided. See Bittner 1992.
¹³ See Fulkerson 2004 and 2013, 22–4 and 27–32, who generally uses ‘remorse’ or ‘repentance’ for
metameleia. Cf. Curzer 2012, 344 n. 5.
¹⁴ For some further discussion see Konstan 2006, 77–90 (on praotēs) and Konstan 2012, 18–19.
20 :      
a virtuous person will look back at an action that was performed virtuously
and feel regret.
The Virtuous Person is Free from Regret
Regret is a negative retrospective attitude and its positive counterpart is

something we can label ‘affirmation’: to affirm some past action is to form a
positive assessment of that action, with that assessment perhaps being accom-
panied by a positive emotional response.¹⁵ When Aristotle says that the
virtuous person will be ‘without regret’, he means not only that in such people
there will never be any negative assessment of a past action and no ensuing
negative emotion but also that such people will always affirm their own past
actions and will usually experience positive emotional reactions as a result.
That seems to be the overall message of a passage in NE 9.4, which is part of
Aristotle’s explanation of the way in which a good person is related to himself
in virtue of his own excellent character just as he is also related to those other
people who are his friends (philoi) in virtue of their excellent characters:
συνδιάγειν τε ὁ τοιοῦτος ἑαυτῷ βούλεται· ἡδέως γὰρ αὐτὸ ποιεῖ· τῶν τε γὰρ
πεπραγμένων ἐπιτερπεῖς αἱ μνῆμαι, καὶ τῶν μελλόντων ἐλπίδες ἀγαθαί, αἱ
τοιαῦται δ’ ἡδεῖαι. καὶ θεωρημάτων δ’ εὐπορεῖ τῇ διανοίᾳ. συναλγεῖ τε καὶ
συνήδεται μάλισθ’ ἑαυτῷ πάντοτε γάρ ἐστι τὸ αὐτὸ λυπηρόν τε καὶ ἡδύ, καὶ
οὐκ ἄλλοτ’ ἄλλο· ἀμεταμέλητος γὰρ ὡς εἰπεῖν.
A person like this wants to spend time with himself, for he does this with
pleasure. And the memories of what he has done are enjoyable and his
anticipations of what is to come are good; and those sorts of memories and
anticipations are pleasant. And, what is more, he has plenty of things to
contemplate in his mind. And he shares his pleasures and his pains with
himself in particular, for the same thing is consistently painful or pleasant
and is not pleasant at one time but not another. For, in a word, he is without
regret. NE 9.4 1166a23–9
We should immediately recognize that Aristotle is presenting a very unusual

sort of person and a set of very unusual characteristics.¹⁶ This person will look
backwards and forwards at his past and future actions and will always take
¹⁵ Cf. Wallace 2013, 5. ¹⁶ Cf. Pangle 2003, 144.

, , ,   21
pleasure in such thoughts. He will constantly affirm what he has done and
what he plans to do and can therefore always enjoy the recollection and
anticipation of his own actions. Not only, in that case, does he never form
painful negative assessments of his past pleasant actions; he will also always
form positive assessments of his past actions.
That notion of the virtuous person always affirming and indeed taking
pleasure at the thought of his past actions is already perhaps at odds with
other conceptions we might have of laudable moral agents.¹⁷ Consider again
the case of Agamemnon but now consider Agamemnon as he sits in the Greek
camp and looks back at his decision to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia in order
to allow the Greek expedition to sail to Troy to avenge the kidnap of his
brother’s wife. This is an extreme example, of course, but the point would still
hold for less tragic cases. To simplify things and allow us to focus on the
specific problem at hand, let us leave aside for the moment questions about the
portrayals of Agamemnon and his choice in Attic drama and with which Plato
and Aristotle would have been familiar. I am not interested on this occasion
in how Aeschylus and Euripides, for example, portray the situation and how
they show Agamemnon’s own character and reaction to being faced with
this situation. I shall make no claims about how we should understand the
psychology of the dramatic character of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Euripides’
Agamemnon. There are, of course, interesting things to be said about those
passages and there is no doubt that Aeschylus’ powerful depiction of the
events in particular has been influential in guiding some important philo-
sophical discussions of tragic dilemmas and regret. More specifically,
Aeschylus’ depiction of Agamemnon’s choice in the first great choral ode of
the Agamemnon clearly played an important part in Williams’ understanding
of the problem and has therefore figured prominently in some discussions
influenced by his work.¹⁸
¹⁷ Aristotle is not alone in claiming that the best kind of person will never be subject to regret. As we
shall see below in Chapter Six, the Stoics agree with him. See Stobaeus 2.7.11i43–57 (102–3W), and cf.
Cicero Tusculan Disputations 5.81: ‘sapientis est enim proprium nihil quod paenitere possit facere,
nihil invitum, splendide, constanter, graviter, honeste omnia . . . ’ (cf. 5.54) and Seneca Epistulae
Morales 115.18: ‘itaque hoc tibi philosophia praestabit, quo equidem nihil maius existimo: numquam
te paenitebit tui.’ See Graver 2007, 193–6.
¹⁸ See Aeschylus Agamemnon 206–16 for the chorus’ account of Agamemnon’s own understanding
of the dilemma (e.g. 211: τί τῶνδ’ ἄνευ κακῶν;). Williams 1973, 173 invokes this passage and he returns
to it in Williams 1993, 132–6. In that later piece he also responds to Nussbaum 1986, 32–8; see esp.
Williams 1993, 208 n. 11. The disagreement between Williams and Nussbaum turns in part on the
correct understanding of Agamemnon 217 and the chorus’ assertion that Agamemnon ‘put on the yoke
of necessity’ (a phrase echoed in Euripides Iphigenia at Aulis 443) and the subsequent passage
(Agamemnon 217–26) as a description of Agamemnon’s attitude towards what he proceeds to do.
Compare also MacIntyre 1990, 367, who observes acutely: ‘It is an oddity in recent philosophical
discussions of moral dilemmas that some of the examples from an older past recurrently cited in the
22 :      
Let us instead imagine that Agamemnon is not and was not ever in any real
doubt over what he should do: he thinks now as he thought then that, despite
the terrible personal loss his choice involved, this was the only possible way in
which he could act in a way that best fitted his role as king and brother.¹⁹
Imagine, too, that he is right in that assessment and that what he did was
indeed the correct or the virtuous thing to do. In short, imagine that
Agamemnon is a virtuous Aristotelian agent who acted wholeheartedly in
the knowledge that he was acting well.²⁰ In that case, Aristotle must think that
Agamemnon will be ametamelētos: ‘without regret’. But Williams is surely
right to insist that it is strange to think that Agamemnon would not feel some
residual regret nevertheless when looking back to that action, even if we accept
the premise that Agamemnon is a virtuous agent. Indeed, we will likely think
worse of him if he is not pained by what he did precisely because he is faced
with a genuine ethical conflict and neither option can be taken without there
being some ‘moral remainder’: something of genuine value that was overrid-
den or damaged. It is the mark, we might say, of a perceptive and reasonable
ethical agent at the very least to feel regret in such circumstances while
someone who can take such a decision and not feel regret afterwards must
have failed properly to appreciate the ethical contours of the situation.²¹
Indeed, it might even be a positive characteristic of virtue-based ethics that
it can appropriately capture the sense in which Agamemnon does face a truly
tragic dilemma. Other competing ethical outlooks, such as a consequentialist
literature are of persons confronting daunting alternatives, who nonetheless themselves found no
apparently insuperable difficulty in deciding between those alternatives, that is of persons who did
not experience their own situation as dilemmatic. So it is for instance with such fictional characters as
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Sophocles’ Antigone.’
¹⁹ This assumption contrasts markedly with the depiction of Agamemnon in Euripides’ Iphigenia at
Aulis in which he changes his mind more than once. On hearing Calchas’ declaration of what will be
needed to alter the winds, first he is minded to dismiss the army and return home but is persuaded by
Menelaus to summon his daughter on the pretext of a marriage to Achilles. He then decides to dispatch
a messenger with a second letter telling Clytemnestra not to send their daughter after all (Euripides
Iphigenia at Aulis 80–143). Menelaus discovers this and intercepts the message; he accuses
Agamemnon of lacking resolve (lines 334–75) but then himself changes his mind (lines 473–503).
Agamemnon finally expresses his dilemma in lines 1255–75.
²⁰ We cannot be sure whether Aristotle considered Agamemnon to have been a virtuous person. He
is mentioned, however, at Nicomachean Ethics 8.11 1161a10–15. There Aristotle is describing a king
who, since he is good (agathos), is concerned for and benefits his subjects as a shepherd cares for his
flock. This is why, Aristotle notes, Homer called Agamemnon the shepherd of the people (ὅθεν καὶ
Ὅμηρος τὸν Ἀγαμέμνονα ποιμένα λαῶν εἶπεν). This connection is also made by Socrates in Xenophon
Memorabilia 3.2.1. See Haubold 2000, esp. 17–23.
²¹ Williams 1973, 173: ‘The agonies that a man will experience after acting in full consciousness of
such a situation are not to be traced to a persistent doubt that he may not have chosen the better thing;
but, for instance, to a clear conviction that he has not done the better thing because there was no better
thing to be done.’ Cf. Williams 1981b, 74; 1985, 176–7; and 1993, 132–5; Nussbaum 1986, 27–30, 32–7,
41–7 esp. 43; Baron 1988, 263–7; Hursthouse 1999, 71–7; Jacobson 2013, 117–22; Scarre 2017, 570–2.
, , ,   23
calculus or a deontological rule-based system, tend to promise that they can

deliver a simple, clear, and unambiguous answer in recommending the right
action in a given circumstance and will show why all alternative possibilities
must be rejected. If that promise is fulfilled, then these outlooks will under-
mine the reasonable expectation that any decision we take in a case such as this
should be painful and regretted; there is no ‘moral remainder’ if any alternative
action would produce a worse consequence or violate some appropriate rule.
Unlike these competing general ethical outlooks, it is sometimes claimed
that according to a virtue ethics-based approach there is no such insistence
that any ‘moral remainder’ will be eradicated. It is hoped that the virtuous
agent can recognize all of the ethically relevant factors without the thought
that they must be assessed according to a measure of commensurable conse-
quences or a determinate set of rules that require or veto certain actions.²²
A person of admirable and virtuous character will act and feel appropriately
about the action.
It may therefore be surprising in that case that Aristotle, who is generally
understood to be an example or at least ancestor of a virtue-based approach,
asserts that the virtuous person will be without regret (ametamelētos). This
might even be an embarrassment for those who are inclined to prefer
Aristotle’s virtue-ethics approach over consequentialist or deontological
accounts and who are also persuaded that regret is indeed the correct response
to certain tragic dilemmas, precisely because of the thought that this virtue-
ethics approach best preserves the sense of these genuinely tragic cases. The
case of Agamemnon, which mostly through Williams’ influential work has
become in recent discussions of regret something of a paradigmatic illustration
of this kind of dilemma, only makes Aristotle’s position more surprising still
given Aristotle’s obvious deep knowledge of and appreciation for tragic drama
as a form of engagement with serious ethical matters. It is not hard to see why,
in that case, some commentators have sought to qualify Aristotle’s assertion in
9.4 that the virtuous person will be ametamelētos in order to bring it more into
²² Cf. Hursthouse 1999, 47–8; 48: ‘A proponent of virtue ethics, concentrating on the question,
“What would a virtuous agent do in this situation?”, is, given the concentration on the agent and the
wider scope of “do”, all set up to answer (for example), “x, after much hesitation and consideration of
possible alternatives, feeling deep regret, and doing such-and-such by way of restitution”.’ Later, she
writes (109): ‘Cases of emerging, with regret, from distressing or tragic dilemmas are, in the context of
“the moral significance of the emotions”, to be thought of as but some amongst a great range of
situations in which we want to say “The way to feel here/what one should feel about this/what anyone
decent would feel about this is . . . ”. Another way to describe the very same fact would be that it has
intrinsic moral value in so far as the emotional response had the right, i.e. correct, rational content.’
24 :      
line with their expectations of appropriate and virtuous reactions, particularly

reactions to difficult or tragic choices.²³
It seems to me that at least some of this difficulty can be addressed by paying
attention once again to a difference between the wide sense of the English
‘regret’ and the more specific sense of the Greek metameleia. I noted earlier
that ‘regret’ is probably too broad a term and ‘remorse’ is probably too narrow
a term to render metameleia. And the case of Agamemnon is an example
which illustrates that point quite well. When it is claimed by modern com-
mentators that Agamemnon will ‘regret’ his action and that this is in fact a
desirable facet of a virtuous character, then this is quite consonant with
Aristotle’s general account of a virtuous agent. After all, Aristotle agrees that
a virtuous person will properly appreciate and be appropriately affected by the
ethically relevant factors in the circumstance at hand. To say that even a
virtuous Agamemnon will ‘regret’ such an action in the sense of being pained
by it and indeed may anticipate regretting it even before he makes his choice is
just to say in other words that he will be acting and reacting virtuously.
However, this claim is not in tension with Aristotle’s assertion that a virtuous
person will be ametamelētos since this means more specifically that the
virtuous person will not regret his action in the sense that he will not be
pained at the thought now that he previously acted incorrectly; he will not
chastise himself as a result of such a thought. He will not be pained by the
thought that he should have acted otherwise because he knows that he acted
well. He may certainly appreciate what he has lost in acting as he did and that
can be a source of pain. But he will also be sure that he has acted well and will
not therefore be subject to metameleia. Indeed, as we have already noted, a
virtuous agent will affirm his past action and will take pleasure in recalling it.
²³ For example, Nussbaum 1978, 217–19, thinks that this picture in NE 9.4 1166a23–29 is too idyllic
and that the absence of regret in the virtuous person would be a moral failing. Moreover, she argues
that Aristotle must also accept this point of view such that his virtuous person would not be ‘morally
insensitive’. 218: ‘Surely a man who feels no regret in such situations, who lives in harmony with
himself, is not displaying a mean disposition, or responding as a man of practical wisdom would.’ So
she proposes to translate the final clause in a way that emphasizes ὡς εἰπεῖν in the Greek so as to
provide an appropriate softening of the claim: ‘He has just about nothing to regret.’ Her translation is
accepted by Wiggins 1978–9, 265–6; cf. White 1992, 299: ‘virtually without regrets’. Rowe’s translation
in Broadie and Rowe 2002 has ‘practically speaking’ for ὡς εἰπεῖν here; Pakaluk 1998 has ‘so to speak’.
In other appearances in the NE ὡς εἰπεῖν does not denote a qualification or softening of the
accompanying claim but rather marks the rephrasing or amplification of some point: NE 8.8 1159b6,
9.6 1167b6, 10.6 1176b30, 10.8 1178b4. Aristotle here is likely not to be qualifying the degree to which
the virtuous agent is ‘without regret’ but emphasizing that we should indeed think that the virtuous
agent is ‘without regret’, amplifying that thought with the emphatic and unusual term ametamelētos.
He may also be signaling a subtly novel use of that term which is elsewhere used of some object which is
‘not (to be) regretted’: Plato Timaeus 59d1 (a pleasure which is not to be regretted), Laws 866e6 (a deed
which is not regretted).
, , ,   25
That may sound perverse in the case of someone faced with a situation like
Agamemnon’s but it is not. What Aristotle means is not that Agamemnon will
take pleasure in the fact of having sacrificed his daughter but, rather, that he
will take pleasure in having acted virtuously. This is perfectly compatible with
him also feeling pain at the loss of his daughter that this virtuous action
entailed. Here, in fact, we face the problem that what some philosophers and
commentators are happy to call ‘regret’ seems to others to be not regret at all
but rather a proper appreciation of the nature of the choice in question. That
appreciation is perfectly able to include a range of affective aspects too—
including frustration, anger, and sorrow—that may well be perfectly appro-
priate reactions even for the very best ethical agents. A virtuous person is not
required to be blind to and unaffected by these aspects of the situation even
though there can be no motivational conflict in his virtuous soul; otherwise,
his action will be the result of what Aristotle calls mere enkrateia. We can
distinguish between ‘regret’ as the label for a certain affective response to
something the agent has done and ‘regret’ as an affective response that shows
additionally that the agent now thinks that something else ought to have been
done.²⁴ Aristotle’s virtuous person has no reason ever to experience the latter
but may, indeed in certain circumstances certainly will, experience the former.
Only the latter would strike Aristotle as worthy of the label metameleia.
The disagreement between these two camps is therefore in part a verbal
disagreement that stems from the very broad range of the English term ‘regret’.
Aristotle’s metameleia is, once again, not equivalent to the broad notion of
agent regret in which Agamemnon might be said to regret his action although
he is sure he has acted rightly. More generally, it is incompatible with the agent
being in no doubt about the rightness of the past action, all things considered.
I shall nevertheless persist with using ‘regret’ as the best one-word equivalent
²⁴ See Annas 2011, 77–8; (78) ‘Having to cope with overwhelming circumstances does produce
difficulties for acting well and often regret for the imperfect way in which the person was able to deal
with the situation. This is distinct, however, from struggle and regret whose sources are in the agent’s
own character. A regret that I could not bring myself to be more generous is different from a regret that
I had to choose among worthy recipients of limited resources.’ Compare Foot 1983, 382, writing in
response to Williams: ‘It is a mistake then to think that the existence of feelings of regret could show
anything about a remainder in cases of moral conflict. The feelings are rational feelings only if it is
reasonable to think that given a conflict situation there is something regrettable or distressing even in a
choice that is clearly right. What we find is, I think, that there may indeed be a “remainder” in the shape
of obligations unfulfilled, and things left undone which it is correct to say that we ought to have done.
But whether it is always regrettable or distressing when obligations are unfulfilled or things left undone
which ought to be done is more doubtful.’ She returns to this theme in Foot 2002, 185: ‘So acting for the
best in a moral dilemma, while it can entail sorrow, and in serious cases even horror, does not, if we
have no doubts about the rightness of the action, make a place for regret. It is when there is no clear
answer (and perhaps no answer at all) to the question of what we should do that we are likely to waver,
so that some days we regret our action and some days we do not.’
26 :      
for metameleia notwithstanding the potential for confusions such as the

one we have just considered. I have already noted why I think it would be
unhelpful to address this particular misunderstanding by insisting instead that
metameleia should instead by rendered by the English ‘remorse’ since that
term too will be unhelpful for some situations for which Aristotle thinks
that metameleia is the appropriate term to use. If we adopt ‘remorse’ as the
best English equivalent for metameleia we will have simply abandoned a term
that is unhelpful because it is too broad for an alternative that will be unhelpful
because it is too specific. Another option, of course, is to mark the distinction
by labelling two types of regret.²⁵ That might be a helpful starting point, but it
has two drawbacks. First, distinctions of this sort are always somewhat clumsy.
Second, there is a temptation to infer that the need for this distinction is
generated by a lack of precision or understanding on Aristotle’s part rather
than our own failure to attend to his careful choice of terminology and
appreciate how and why his own terms may not have direct equivalents in
English. Rather, he wants to carve out a distinctive notion that is best captured
by his own term: metameleia.
Furthermore, perhaps the focus on the case of Agamemnon, together with
the attendant difficulties of interpreting the Attic tragic plays in which his
choice is most arrestingly depicted, is also liable to present obstacles to our
understanding of Aristotle’s general outlook. After all, it is not easy to envisage
Agamemnon in fact being sure that what he does is the right thing and to
imagine him remaining always committed to that decision and affirming it in
retrospect as we are supposed to think the Aristotelian virtuous agent will
affirm all of his past actions. It is because we are perhaps inclined to think of
Agamemnon wavering, even as he makes his choice and then over and over
again as he goes over the events in his mind, that we attribute to him a sense of
regret that might be more akin to Aristotle’s metameleia. But if we imagine
Agamemnon to be regretful in this way because he is subject to changing his
overall assessment of the matter and in retrospect chastises himself for his past
actions then he cannot stand as an example of an excellent and self-confident
²⁵ See, for example, White 1992, 300: ‘It is one thing to wish that fortune had been kinder, that
events had gone better or that others had acted otherwise; the virtuous are not entirely immune to such
“external regret”. But it is something quite different to wish that one had chosen and acted otherwise, to
reproach oneself, and to condemn the very values and desires by which one was motivated. To feel
resentment towards oneself for one’s own past actions implies a sense of self-betrayal, and this “internal
regret”, which amounts to the guilty conscience of remorse, verges of self-hatred rather than remorse.’
Cf. Morton 2012, 11: ‘Consider what you might feel if you took what seemed to you the lesser of two
unappealing options, which turned out disastrously for someone else. You would wish that you had not
done it, or that it could have had a different result: your regret would not be at all trivial, but it would
lack the sense of having been the wrong kind of person that accompanies classic remorse.’
, , ,   27
agent of the kind Aristotle says is ‘without regret’. We might even say that if
there is a very general difference of outlook between Aristotle and the world of
the Attic tragedians then it is that for Aristotle there is the possibility of
someone with the right character and the virtues of practical reasoning feeling
and recognizing in any given circumstance the correct thing to do. In a
tragedy, in contrast, it sometimes seems that there simply is no correct thing
to do, however well-motivated the agent concerned; every choice leads to
suffering and no one is ever in a position to foresee with sufficient clarity
the ethical circumstances and consequences of their choices.²⁶
There are other reasons why we might hesitate to affirm Aristotle’s view of
the virtuous and regret-free person. For example, it might be thought a
positive characteristic of a person to be able to reflect critically on their past
actions and express sometimes negative assessments about them, perhaps even
with an associated feeling of pain. After all, it might be thought not merely an
arrogant or obstinate stance always to affirm one’s past actions but also to
indicate a certain lack of self-reflection and a resistance to recognizing the
possibility of being subject to change over the course of a lifetime. Coming to
regret some past action is often a good indication of a change in one’s values or
character and openly expressing such regret is often a laudable step in both
improving one’s own character and, if possible, repairing relationships with
other people that were damaged by the past action.²⁷ It is likely, however, that
this particular positive estimation of the role of regret is foreign to the ancient
philosophical texts, in which metameleia and the like are mostly viewed as
indications that the person in question sees that he failed to act as he should
and are not generally taken to be signs of something ethically laudable.²⁸
(There is an important qualification to be made here. As we shall see, the
presence of regret is taken by Aristotle, for example, to be an indication that
the person in question is not completely incurable. The presence of regret
²⁶ Consider the discussion of the relationship between Greek tragedy and Greek philosophy in
Nussbaum 1986, who argues for more continuity between the two than this rough and simple contrast
suggests. Nussbaum is responding (see 1986, 18) in part to Williams once again, this time the closing
remarks in Williams 1981c. See also Long 2007.
²⁷ See Blustein 2008, 57–109, on taking responsibility for one’s own past.
²⁸ See Fulkerson 2013 for a full defence of this view. She comments (11): ‘So, for Aristotle, the issue
of metameleia is intrinsically linked to questions of consistency, and he is discomfited by the notion
that people may change their mind.’ I agree with the first part of this claim but hope that the remainder
of this chapter will explain how I think the second part should be qualified. Fulkerson 2013, 27 n. 83,
also notes as a possible exception the apparently positive appraisal of metameleia in Democritus B43
DK (one of the ‘Democrates’ fragments): μεταμέλεια ἐπ’ αἰσχροῖσιν ἔργμασι βίου σωτηρίη. Democritus’
claim is compatible with the thought that it is better still never to perform shameful deeds in the first
place. Regret at having performed a shameful deed may prevent further shameful deeds being
committed in the future. In this respect Democritus is close in spirit to Aristotle’s observation that
regret is a sign of a character capable of reform.
28 :      
suggests that improvement is possible even if it does not itself constitute a

praiseworthy reaction.) The importance or otherwise of coming to recognize
oneself as subject to change across a lifetime is, of course, explicitly addressed
by Aristotle himself towards the end of an important passage at NE 9.4
1166a23–9. I shall return to that chapter in more detail later, but we should
recognize now that Aristotle notes there that the reason for such a person
being constantly pleased by the recollection of past actions is that he is the sort
of person for whom the same things are consistently painful or pleasant. He is
the sort of person who now is pleased or pained by the same things as he was
in the past. Just as the best kind of friends will consistently take pleasure in one
another’s pleasures and be pained by one another’s pains, so this person will
now be pleased and pained by himself as he considers his own past actions and
experiences.
What underlies this absence of regret is a consistency of character at least in
the sense of a consistency of what this agent enjoys or is pained by. Aristotle is
confident both that a virtuous person will consistently enjoy and be pained by
the same things and also that the virtuous person will enjoy and be pained by
what he ought. Pleasure and pain are important because regret is understood
as a painful emotion and, in this autobiographical sense, is a painful assess-
ment of one of one’s own past actions. The inconsistency that is characteristic
of regret is being understood as an inconsistency between past and present
affective responses to the same action. To regret, in this sense, is to be pained
at the thought of something one previously took pleasure in; more precisely,
regret seems to involve being pained at the fact that one previously took
pleasure in something that one would not now similarly enjoy. It is a negative
assessment of the agent’s previous positive assessment of his own action. That
formulation highlights two related characteristics of Aristotle’s use of the
notion of regret here that will be important to bear in mind as we proceed.
First, regret is itself something painful and is understood to be related to the
current assessment of the agent’s own past pleasures and pains. Second, the
presence of regret indicates a change in the person over time, specifically a
change in the person’s evaluative criteria. Since a virtuous person will act
always according to a correct assessment of the relevant evaluative conditions
of a given action then such a person will always look back and affirm a past
action that was performed by a virtuous agent.
At this point we may begin to wonder what the precise limits are of the
changes over time that are and are not compatible with the absence of regret.
After all, a person may remain virtuous but change in various ways. For
example, over time a person may become less physically strong and dextrous.
, , ,   29
In this event, a virtuous person may in old age think back to a courageous
action of his youth and be pleased by the recollection without it being
necessary for us to imagine that this requires that he now would perform
the very same action if faced by those same circumstances. This can be true
even though the old man remains courageous since what the courageous
action is in any given circumstance will be affected by the agent’s own
capabilities. (Perhaps in that sense the old man is never going to be faced on
two different occasions by exactly the same circumstances.) Rather, what is
necessary for the old man to affirm the past action is just the assessment that
that was the virtuous thing to do at that time for him as he was at that time.
Perhaps more interesting is a case in which a virtuous person can look back
and affirm a past action even though he is now in a better position than he was
at that time. For example, a virtuous person will not regret not fighting to
defend his city when it was invaded last year if at that time he was suffering
from an illness that made it impossible for him to fight. He was not acting in a
cowardly way then even though, were the enemy to attack now, he would be
able to play a full part in the military action and now it would be cowardly for
him not to fight. So it is possible to say that someone will not regret an action
even if he would not perform the same action now, provided that he now
recognizes that it was the right thing to do at the time given the circumstances
at that time, including his own capacities.²⁹ We should remember this since we
will later consider an epistemic version of this general pattern: is it also a
reason for someone not to regret an action that they now think they performed
as well as they could, given their beliefs at the time and given the information
then available on which a decision could be based?
There remains the possibility I mentioned earlier that a virtuous person may
regret an action he performed before he became virtuous, but the presence of
regret in this instance merely shows that at least one change in character is
something to be welcomed, namely a change to being virtuous from being not
virtuous. It is nevertheless worth giving a little more consideration to the
question ‘Would a virtuous Aristotelian agent feel pain at the thought of some
action performed before he became virtuous and which he now assesses
negatively?’ It is hard to be certain how to answer this question since a lot
will depend upon the degree to which the virtuous agent continues to identify
himself with his pre-virtue self. But there is some reason to think that there is a
²⁹ Price 2011, 67: ‘Aristotle may mean that good men decide well and stand by their decisions,
whereas bad men come to realize either that they made the wrong choice, or that, while they had to
make the choice they made given the non-rational desires they had, it would have been better if these
had been different.’
30 :      
sufficient psychological break between the currently virtuous person and his
pre-virtue self that any pain of recollecting some youthful akratic act, for
example, would be significantly diminished. A virtuous person is pleased
and pained by a friend’s actions and experiences if that friend is sufficiently
like him in virtue as to be another self. We might speculate in that case that
since a virtuous person appears to lack a similar affective tie to people who are
not virtuous then he will also lack such a connection with his own pre-virtue
self. If the person does not now identify himself sufficiently with the person
who performed those past actions then the assessment of the actions is less
likely to generate the present affective response characteristic of autobiograph-
ical regret. To put the same point in another way: regret will not be present if
there is sufficient detachment between the present valuing agent and the past
evaluated action.
There is one way in which a virtuous person may nevertheless not be able to
regret some action performed before he became virtuous and, indeed, may
even come to affirm that action. The case in question is one in which the action
concerned was performed by the now virtuous person before he became
virtuous but the agent regards it as a necessary part or condition of his later
attainment of virtue. Cases such as these may initially seem to offer examples
of actions that even a virtuous person may look back to and regret. Think, for
example, of a case in which someone who is now courageous recalls as a young
person hiding away from military training out of fear of injury. In a sense, this
is the kind of action that a courageous person ought to regret. However, if we
also imagine that this action was in fact an important occasion for the
acquisition of their present courage, perhaps because the trainer was able to
use this as a moment for inculcating the correct attitudes, then the virtuous
person may instead look back and affirm rather than regret the action,
cowardly though it was. In such a case the agent may see that action not
only as not to be regretted, although it is not a virtuous action, but also even to
be valued and affirmed just because it produced the later excellent virtuous
state. This possibility requires the virtuous agent to identify himself with the
person who committed the earlier action and to think of that earlier action as a
necessary part of him becoming the excellent person he is now. This kind of
affirmation may even extend further beyond actions performed by the agent
himself also to include certain conditions or events that are recognized as
important factors in the agent’s positive upbringing. Aristotle notes in the last
chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics that young people not only need to receive
a correct upbringing and be properly supervised but also need to live under
proper laws so that they can see other people acting well and become
, , ,   31
habituated to acting well themselves (10.9 1180a1–5). So a virtuous person

might look back and not only not regret various things he did before becoming
virtuous but might also affirm some of his own actions and the surrounding
conditions of his early life, taking pleasure in recalling them as he takes
pleasure in recalling his more recent virtuous activity. I shall return to this
connection between affirmation and regret in Chapter Six where I shall have
more to say about various possible constraints on what it is reasonable to
regret. For now, we should simply note that although in Nicomachean Ethics
9.4 Aristotle is interested principally in the point that the virtuous person will
not regret his own virtuous actions but will instead affirm them, there are
other relationships between affirmation and regret that will colour the virtuous
person’s attitude to his own past and also to those factors that have led to him
being the person he is now.
There is, of course, the possibility that someone might come to regret even a
past virtuous action because they are no longer virtuous and now regard that
previous action with embarrassment or anger. Aristotle may consider himself
to have avoided the possibility that someone might come to regret a past
virtuous action as a result of no longer being a virtuous person just because he
is confident that virtue is a stable state that it is difficult, if not impossible, to
lose. This is important because otherwise it would be possible to see the
presence of regret as a sign not only of an improvement in one’s character
and values in respect of the earlier action but also as a deterioration: as a
person becomes worse, he begins to regret all the noble actions he performed
in the past. But it is important to recognize that regret as such marks only a
difference in evaluative stance between the agent in the present and at the time
of the object action or choice. It does not always mark an improvement in
character or values, however much agents as a matter of fact tend to think of
their current state as better than their past and are inclined to neglect the
possibility of changing, let alone improving, in the future.³⁰ Aristotle and Plato
do tend to consider metameleia to be present in cases where a non-virtuous or
akratic person looks back and considers more soberly an action performed
under the influence of some passion. In that case the presence of regret does
point to something positive in that character and is taken to be a sign that the
agent is not beyond cure. But this emphasis is presumably because Aristotle
and Plato are principally interested in determining the limits of the possibility
³⁰ For further discussion see Parfit 1984, 149–58, who considers the case of a Russian aristocrat who
is concerned that, as he ages, he will gradually abandon the noble values he currently holds dear. (On
which see also Sullivan 2018, 58–67 and 163–4.) For the psychological ‘end of history illusion’ see e.g.
Quoidback et al. 2013.
32 :      
of ethical improvement and they both tend to think that once someone
manages to become wise or virtuous, this is a stable state that is hard, if not
impossible, to dislodge.
The question of identification and detachment and their relationship to
regret will come to the fore when we turn in Chapter Three to look more
closely at the explanation of Aristotle’s ascription of regret to akratic charac-
ters but not to characters who are unrestrained (akolastoi). But first, let us look
briefly at the end of Nicomachean Ethics 9.4 where Aristotle presents a case
which contrasts with the virtuous and regret-free agent we have been consid-
ering so far. There, Aristotle contrasts the virtuous person with ‘the many’,
whom he also labels ‘base’ (phauloi 1166b2–3).³¹ The discussion that follows
characterizes these phauloi as people who are subject to an internal psycho-
logical conflict; they are at civil war with themselves and are almost ripped
apart by being pulled in opposite directions at once.³² More specifically, they
are characterized by having simultaneously an appetite (epithumia) for one
object and a wish (boulēsis) for something else which is incompatible with the
satisfaction of the appetite. They choose things that are pleasant and seem
good but are in fact harmful. Aristotle explicitly notes that this conflict
between appetites and wishes is characteristic of akratic people (οἷον οἱ
ἀκρατεῖς 1166b8) but in a way that leaves it unclear whether these phauloi
are a group that includes akratics or whether they are a distinct group who
merely share this propensity for psychological conflict with akratic people.³³
Towards the end of chapter 9.4 he then addresses the question of regret and
this is the point at which he makes an interesting observation about the
attitude of a regretful person to his past:
εἰ δὲ μὴ οἷόν τε ἅμα λυπεῖσθαι καὶ ἥδεσθαι, ἀλλὰ μετὰ μικρόν γε λυπεῖται ὅτι
ἥσθη, καὶ οὐκ ἂν ἐβούλετο ἡδέα ταῦτα γενέσθαι αὑτῷ· μεταμελείας γὰρ οἱ
φαῦλοι γέμουσιν.
If it is not possible at the same time to be pained and pleased, then at least a
little later he is pained that he took pleasure and would not have wished to
have obtained those pleasant things. For bad people are full of regret.
NE 9.4 1166b22–5
³¹ Later he also refers to ‘the mokhthēroi’ (1166b14); it is unclear whether we are supposed to
understand these to include also the worst kind of vicious characters—akolastoi—since that term is not
used in the chapter. I shall return to this passage in Chapter Four.
³² 1166b7: διαφέρονται γὰρ ἑαυτοῖς; 1166b19: στασιάζει γὰρ αὐτῶν ἡ ψυχή.
³³ NE 9.4 1166b7–10: καὶ ἑτέρων μὲν ἐπιθυμοῦσιν ἄλλα δὲ βούλονται, οἷον οἱ ἀκρατεῖς· αἱροῦνται γὰρ
ἀντὶ τῶν δοκούντων ἑαυτοῖς ἀγαθῶν εἶναι τὰ ἡδέα βλαβερὰ ὄντα.
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by one into the arms of gendarmes below. The palaces along the
Riva were a broad ribbon of color with a binding of black coats and
hats. The wall of San Giorgio fronting the barracks was fringed with
the yellow legs and edged with the white fatigue caps of two
regiments. Even over the roofs and tower of the church itself specks
of sight-seers were spattered here and there, as if the joyous wind in
some mad frolic had caught them up in very glee, and as suddenly
showered them on cornice, sill, and dome.
Beyond all this, away out on the lagoon, toward the islands, the red-
sailed fishing-boats hurried in for the finish, their canvas aflame
against the deepening blue. Over all the sunlight danced and blazed
and shimmered, gilding and bronzing the roof-jewels of San Marco,
flashing from oar blade, brass, and ferro, silvering the pigeons
whirling deliriously in the intoxicating air, making glad and gay and
happy every soul who breathed the breath of this joyous Venetian
day.
None of all this was lost upon the Professor. He stood in the bow
drinking in the scene, sweeping his glass round like a weather-vane,
straining his eyes up the Giudecca to catch the first glimpse of the
coming boats, picking out faces under flaunting parasols, and waving
aloft his yellow rag when some gondola swept by flying Pietro’s
colors, or some boat-load of friends saluted in passing.
Suddenly there came down on the shifting wind, from far up the
Giudecca, a sound like the distant baying of a pack of hounds, and
as suddenly died away. Then the roar of a thousand throats, caught
up by a thousand more about us, broke on the air, as a boatman,
perched on a masthead, waved his hat.
“Here they come! Viva Pietro! Viva Pasquale!—Castellani!—Nicoletti!
—Pietro!”
The dense mass rose and fell in undulations, like a great carpet
being shaken, its colors tossing in the sunlight. Between the thicket
of ferros, away down the silver ribbon, my eye caught two little
specks of yellow capping two white figures. Behind these, almost in
line, were two similar dots of blue; farther away other dots, hardly
distinguishable, on the horizon line.
The gale became a tempest—the roar was deafening; women waved
their shawls in the air; men, swinging their hats, shouted themselves
hoarse. The yellow specks developed into handkerchiefs bound to
the heads of Pietro and his brother Marco; the blues were those of
Pasquale and his mate.
Then, as we strain our eyes, the two tails of the sea-monster twist
and clash together, closing in upon the string of rowers as they
disappear in the dip behind San Giorgio, only to reappear in full
sight, Pietro half a length ahead, straining every sinew, his superb
arms swinging like a flail, his lithe body swaying in splendid,
springing curves, the water rushing from his oar blade, his brother
bending aft in perfect rhythm.
“Pietro! Pietro!” came the cry, shrill and clear, drowning all other
sounds, and a great field of yellow burst into flower all over the
lagoon, from San Giorgio to the Garden. The people went wild. If
before there had been only a tempest, now there was a cyclone. The
waves of blue and yellow surged alternately above the heads of the
throng as Pasquale or Pietro gained or lost a foot. The Professor
grew red and pale by turns, his voice broken to a whisper with
continued cheering, the yellow rag streaming above his head, all the
blood of his ancestors blazing in his face.
The contesting boats surged closer. You could now see the rise and
fall of Pietro’s superb chest, the steel-like grip of his hands, and
could outline the curves of his thighs and back. The ends of the
yellow handkerchief, bound close about his head, were flying in the
wind. His stroke was long and sweeping, his full weight on the oar;
Pasquale’s stroke was short and quick, like the thrust of a spur.
Now they are abreast. Pietro’s eyes are blazing—Pasquale’s teeth
are set. Both crews are doing their utmost. The yells are demoniac.
Even the women are beside themselves with excitement.
Suddenly, when within five hundred yards of the goal, Pasquale
turns his head to his mate; there is an answering cry, and then, as if
some unseen power had lent its strength, Pasquale’s boat shoots
half a length ahead, slackens, falls back, gains again, now an inch,
now a foot, now clear of Pietro’s bow, and on, on, lashing the water,
surging forward, springing with every gain, cheered by a thousand
throats, past the red tower of San Giorgio, past the channel of spiles
off the Garden, past the red buoy near the great warship,—one
quick, sustained, blistering stroke,—until the judge’s flag drops from
his hand, and the great race is won.
“A true knight, a gentleman every inch of him,” called out the
Professor, forgetting that he had staked all his soldi on Pietro. “Fairly
won, Pasquale.”
In the whirl of the victory, I had forgotten Pietro, my gondolier of the
morning. The poor fellow was sitting in the bow of his boat, his head
in his hands, wiping his forehead and throat, the tears streaming
down his cheeks. His brother sat beside him. In the gladness and
disappointment of the hour, no one of the crowd around him seemed
to think of the hero of five minutes before. Not so Giorgio, who was
beside himself with grief over Pietro’s defeat, and who had not taken
his eyes from his face. In an instant more he sprang forward, calling
out, “No! no! Brava Pietro!” Espero joining in as if with a common
impulse, and both forcing their gondolas close to Pietro’s.
A moment more and Giorgio was over the rail of Pietro’s boat,
patting his back, stroking his head, comforting him as you would
think only a woman could—but then you do not know Giorgio. Pietro
lifted up his face and looked into Giorgio’s eyes with an expression
so woe-begone, and full of such intense suffering, that Giorgio
instinctively flung his arm around the great, splendid fellow’s neck.
Then came a few broken words, a tender caressing stroke of
Giorgio’s hand, a drawing of Pietro’s head down on his breast as if it
had been a girl’s, and then, still comforting him—telling him over and
over again how superbly he had rowed, how the next time he would
win, how he had made a grand second—
Giorgio bent his head—and kissed him.
When Pietro, a moment later, pulled himself together and stood erect
in his boat, with eyes still wet, the look on his face was as firm and
determined as ever.
Nobody laughed. It did not shock the crowd; nobody thought Giorgio
unmanly or foolish, or Pietro silly or effeminate. The infernal Anglo-
Saxon custom of always wearing a mask of reserve, if your heart
breaks, has never reached these people.
As for the Professor, who looked on quietly, I think—yes, I am quite
sure—that a little jewel of a tear squeezed itself up through his
punctilious, precise, ever exact and courteous body, and glistened
long enough on his eyelids to wet their lashes. Then the bright sun
and the joyous wind caught it away. Dear old relic of a by-gone time!
How gentle a heart beats under your well-brushed, threadbare coat!
SOME VENETIAN CAFFÈS
VERY one in Venice has his own particular caffè, according
to his own particular needs, sympathies, or tastes. All the
artists, architects, and musicians meet at Florian’s; all the
Venetians go to the Quadri; the Germans and late
Austrians, to the Bauer-Grünwald; the stay-over-nights, to the
Oriental on the Riva; the stevedores, to the Veneta Marina below the
Arsenal; and my dear friend Luigi and his fellow-tramps, to a little
hole in the wall on the Via Garibaldi.
A LITTLE HOLE IN THE WALL ON THE VIA GARIBALDI

These caffès are scattered everywhere, from the Public Garden to
the Mestre bridge; all kinds of caffès for all kinds of people—rich, not
so rich, poor, poorer, and the very poorest. Many of them serve only
a cup of coffee, two little flat lumps of sugar, a hard, brown roll, and a
glass of water—always a glass of water. Some add a few syrups and
cordials, with a siphon of seltzer. Others indulge in the cheaper
wines of the country, Brindisi, Chianti, and the like, and are then
known as wine-shops. Very few serve any spirits, except a spoonful
of cognac with the coffee. Water is the universal beverage, and in
summer this is cooled by ice and enriched by simple syrups of
peach, orange, and raspberry. Spirits are rarely taken and
intemperance is practically unknown. In an experience of many
years, I have not seen ten drunken men,—never one drunken
woman,—and then only in September, when the strong wine from
Brindisi is brought in bulk and sold over the boat’s rail, literally by the
bucket, to whoever will buy.
In the ristoranti—caffès, in our sense—is served an array of eatables
that would puzzle the most expert of gourmands. There will be
macaroni, of course, in all forms, and risotto in a dozen different
ways, and soups with weird, uncanny little devil-fish floating about in
them, and salads of every conceivable green thing that can be
chopped up in a bowl and drowned in olive oil; besides an
assortment of cheeses with individualities of perfume that beggar
any similar collection outside of Holland.
Some of these caffès are so much a part of Venice and Venetian life,
that you are led to believe that they were founded by the early Doges
and are coëval with the Campanile or the Library. Somebody, of
course, must know when they first began setting out tables on the
piazza in front of Florian’s, or at the Quadri opposite, or yet again at
the Caffè al Cavallo, near San Giovanni e Paulo, and at scores of
others; but I confess I do not. If you ask the head waiter, who really
ought to know (for he must have been born in one of the upper
rooms—he certainly never leaves the lower ones), he shrugs his
shoulders in a hopeless way and sheds the inquiry with a despairing
gesture, quite as if you had asked who laid out San Marco, or who
drove the piles under Saint Theodore.
There is, I am convinced, no real, permanent, steady proprietor in
any of these caffès—none that one ever sees. There must be, of
course, somebody who assumes ownership, and who for a time
really believes that he has a proprietary interest in the chairs and
tables about him. After a while, however, he gets old and dies, and is
buried over in Campo Santo, and even his name is forgotten. When
this happens, and it is eminently proper that it should, another tenant
takes possession, quite as the pigeons do of an empty carving over
the door of the king’s palace.
But the caffè keeps on: the same old marble-top tables; the same old
glass-covered pictures, with the impossible Turkish houris listening
to the improbable gentleman in baggy trousers; the same serving-
counter, with the row of cordials in glass bottles with silver stoppers.
The same waiters, too, hurry about—they live on for centuries—
wearing the same coats and neckties, and carrying the same
napkins. I myself have never seen a dead waiter, and, now I happen
to think of it, I have never heard of one.
The head waiter is, of course, supreme. He it is who adds up on his
fingers the sum of your extravagances, who takes your money and
dives down into his own pocket for the change. He and his assistants
are constantly running in and out, vanishing down subterranean
stairs, or disappearing through swinging doors, with the agility of
Harlequin; you never know where or why, until they pop out again,
whirling trays held high over their heads, or bearing in both hands
huge waiters loaded with dishes.
The habitués of these caffès are as interesting as the caffès
themselves. The Professor comes, of course; you always know
where to find him. And the youthful Contessa! She of the uncertain
age, with hair bleached to a light law-calf, and a rose-colored veil!
And here comes, too, every distinguished or notorious person of high
or low degree at the moment in Venice; you have only to take a chair
at Florian’s and be patient—they are sure to appear before the music
is over. There is the sister of the Archduke, with the straight-backed,
pipe-stem-legged officer acting as gentleman-in-waiting; and he
does wait, standing bolt upright like a sergeant on dress parade,
sometimes an hour, for her to sit down. There is the Spanish
Grandee, with a palace for the season (an upper floor with an
entrance on a side canal), whose gondoliers wear flaming scarlet,
with a crest embossed on brass dinner-plates for arm ornaments;
one of these liveried attendants always dogs the Grandee to the
caffè, so as to be ready to pull his chair out when his Excellency sits
down. Then there are the Royal Academician, in gray tweed
knickerbockers, traveling incognito with two friends; the fragments of
an American linen-duster brigade, with red guide-books and faces, in
charge of a special agent; besides scores of others of every
nationality and rank. They are all at Florian’s some time during the
day.
You will see there, too, if you are familiar with the inside workings of
a favorite caffè, an underground life of intrigue or mystery, in which
Gustavo or Florio has a hand—often upon a billet-doux concealed
within the folds of a napkin; not to mention the harmless distribution,
once in a while, of smuggled cigarettes fresh from Cairo.
Poor Gustavo! The government brought him to book not long ago.
For many years he had supplied his patrons, and with delicious
Egyptians, too! One night Gustavo disappeared, escorted by two
gendarmes from the Department of Justice. Next morning the judge
said: “Whereas, according to the accounts kept by the Department of
Customs, the duties and expenses due the king on the cigarettes
unlawfully sold by the prisoner for years past aggregate two
thousand three hundred and ten lire; and whereas, the savings of the
prisoner for ten years past, and at the moment deposited to his
individual credit in the Banco Napoli, amount to exactly two thousand
three hundred and ten lire; therefore, it is ordered, that a sight draft
for the exact amount be drawn in favor of the king.” This would
entitle Gustavo to the pure air of the piazza; otherwise?—well,
otherwise not. Within a week Gustavo was again whirling his tray—a
little grayer, perhaps, and a little wiser; certainly poorer. Thus does a
tyrannical government oppress its people!
These caffès of the piazza, with their iced carafes, white napkins,
and little silver coffee-pots, are the caffès of the rich.
The caffè of the poor is sometimes afloat. No matter how early you
are out in the morning, this floating caffè—the cook-boat—has its fire
lighted, and the savory smell of its cuisine drifts over the lagoon, long
before your gondola rounds the Dogana. When you come alongside
you find a charcoal brazier heating a pan of savory fish and a large
pot of coffee, and near by a basketful of rolls, fresh and warm, from a
still earlier baker. There are peaches, too, and a hamper of figs. The
cook-boat is tended by two men; one cooks and serves, and the
other rows, standing in the stern, looking anxiously for customers,
and calling out in stentorian tones that all the delicacies of the
season are now being fried, broiled, and toasted, and that for the
infinitesimal sum of ten soldi you can breakfast like a doge.
If you are just out of the lagoon, your blood tingling with the touch of
the sea, your face aglow with your early morning bath, answer the
cry of one of these floating kitchens, and eat a breakfast with the
rising sun lighting your forehead and the cool breath of the lagoon
across your cheek. It may be the salt air and the early plunge that
make the coffee so savory, the fish and rolls so delicious, and the
fruit so refreshing; or it may be because the fish were wriggling in the
bottom of the boat half an hour earlier, the coffee only at the first
boiling, and the fruit, bought from a passing boat, still damp with the
night’s dew!
The caffè of the poorest is wherever there is a crowd. It generally
stands on three iron legs under one of the trees down the Via
Garibaldi, or over by the landing of the Dogana, or beneath the
shade of some awning, or up a back court. The old fellow who bends
over the hot earthen dish, supported on these legs, slowly stirring a
mess of kidneys or an indescribable stew, is cook, head waiter, and
proprietor all in one. Every now and then he fishes out some delicate
tidbit—a miniature octopus, perhaps (called fulpe), a little sea-horror,
all legs and claws, which he sprawls out on a bit of brown paper and
lays on the palm of your left hand, assuming, clearly, that you have
all the knives and forks that you need, on your right.
Once in a while a good Bohemian discovers some out-of-the-way
place up a canal or through a twisted calle that delights him with its
cuisine, its cellar, or its cosiness, and forever after he preëmpts it as
his caffè. I know half a dozen such discoveries—one somewhere
near San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, where the men play bowls in a
long, narrow alley, under wide-spreading trees, cramped up between
high buildings; and another, off the Merceria, where the officers
smoke and lounge; and still another, quite my own—the Caffè
Calcina. This last is on the Rio San Vio, and looks out on the
Giudecca, just below San Rosario. You would never suspect it of
being a caffè at all, until you had dodged under the little roof of the
porch to escape the heat, and opening the side door found yourself
in a small, plainly furnished room with little marble-top tables, each
decorated with a Siamese-twin salt-cellar holding a pinch of salt and
of pepper. Even then it is a very common sort of caffè, and not at all
the place you would care to breakfast in twice; that is, not until you
had followed the demure waiter through a narrow passage and out
into a square patio splashed with yellow-green light and cooled by
overlacing vines. Then you realize that this same square patch of
ground is one of the few restful spots of the wide earth.
It is all open to the sky except for a great arbor of grape leaves
covering the whole area, beneath which, on the cool, moist ground,
stand half a dozen little tables covered with snow-white cloths. At
one side is a shelter, from behind which come certain mysterious
noises of fries and broils. All about are big, green-painted boxes of
japonicas, while at one end the oleanders thrust their top branches
through the overhanging leaves of the arbor, waving their blossoms
defiantly in the blazing sun. Beneath this grateful shelter you sit and
loaf and invite your soul, and your best friend, too, if he happens to
be that sort of a man.
After having congratulated yourself on your discovery and having
become a daily habitué of the delightful patio, you find that you have
really discovered the Grand Canal or the Rialto bridge. To your great
surprise, the Caffè Calcina has been the favorite resort of good
Bohemians for nearly a century. You learn that Turner painted his
sunset sketches from its upper windows, and that dozens of more
modern English painters have lived in the rooms above; that Whistler
and Rico and scores of others have broken bread and had
toothsome omelets under its vines; and, more precious than all, that
Ruskin and Browning have shared many a bottle of honest Chianti
with these same oleanders above their heads, and this, too, in the
years when the Sage of Brantwood was teaching the world to love
his Venice, and the great poet was singing songs that will last as
long as the language.
ON THE HOTEL STEPS
F you drink your early coffee as I do, in the garden under the
oleanders, overlooking the water-landing of the hotel, and
linger long enough over your fruit, you will conclude before
many days that a large part of the life of Venice can be
seen from the hotel steps. You may behold the great row of gondolas
at the traghetto near by, ranged side by side, awaiting their turn, and
here and there, tied to the spiles outside the line, the more fortunate
boats whose owners serve some sight-seer by the week, or some
native padrone by the month, and are thus free of the daily routine of
the traghetto, and free, too, from our old friend Joseph’s summoning
voice.
You will be delighted at the good-humor and good-fellowship which
animate this group of gondoliers; their ringing songs and hearty
laughter; their constant care of the boats, their daily sponging and
polishing; and now and then, I regret to say, your ears will be
assailed by a quarrel, so fierce, so loud, and so full of vindictive
energy, that you will start from your seat in instant expectation of the
gleam of a stiletto, until by long experience you learn how harmless
are both the bark and bite of a gondolier, and how necessary as a
safety-valve, to accused and accuser as well, is the unlimited air-
space of the Grand Canal.
You will also come into closer contact with Joseph, prince among
porters, and patron saint of this Traghetto of Santa Salute. There is
another Saint, of course, shaded by its trellised vines, framed in
tawdry gilt, protected from the weather by a wooden hood, and
lighted at night by a dim lamp hanging before it—but, for all that,
Joseph is supreme as protector, refuge, and friend.
Joseph, indeed, is more than this. He is the patron saint and father
confessor of every wayfarer, of whatever tongue. Should a copper-
colored gentleman mount the steps of the hotel landing, attired in
calico trousers, a short jacket of pea-green silk, and six yards of bath
toweling about his head, Joseph instantly addresses him in broken
Hindostanee, sending his rattan chairs and paper boxes to a room
overlooking the shady court, and placing a boy on the rug outside,
ready to spring when the copper-colored gentleman claps his hands.
Does another distinguished foreigner descend from the gondola,
attended by two valets with a block-tin trunk, half a score of hat-
boxes, bags, and bundles, four umbrellas, and a dozen sticks,
Joseph at once accosts him in most excellent English, and has
ordered a green-painted tub rolled into his room before he has had
time to reach the door of his apartment. If another equally
distinguished traveler steps on the marble slab, wearing a Bond
Street ulster, a slouch hat, and a ready-made summer suit, with
yellow shoes, and carrying an Alpine staff (so useful in Venice)
branded with illegible letters chasing each other spirally up and down
the wooden handle, Joseph takes his measure at a glance. He
knows it is his first trip “en Cook,” and that he will want the earth, and
instantly decides that so far as concerns himself he shall have it,
including a small, round, convenient little portable which he
immediately places behind the door to save the marble hearth. So
with the titled Frenchman, wife, maid, and canary bird; the haughty
Austrian, his sword in a buckskin bag; the stolid German with the
stout helpmate and one satchel, or the Spaniard with two friends and
no baggage at all.
Joseph knows them all—their conditions, wants, economics,
meannesses, escapades, and subterfuges. Does he not remember
how you haggled over the price of your room, and the row you made
when your shoes were mixed up with the old gentleman’s on the
floor above? Does he not open the door in the small hours, when
you slink in, the bell sounding like a tocsin at your touch? Is he not
rubbing his eyes and carrying the candle that lights you down to the
corridor door, the only exit from the hotel after midnight, when you
had hoped to escape by the garden, and dare not look up at the
balcony above?
Here also you will often meet the Professor. Indeed, he is
breakfasting with me in this same garden this very morning. It is the
first time I have seen him since the memorable day of the regatta,
when Pasquale won the prize and the old fellow lost his soldi.
He has laid aside his outing costume—the short jacket, beribboned
hat, and huge field-glass—and is gracing my table clothed in what he
is pleased to call his “garb of tuition,” worn to-day because of a pupil
who expects him at nine o’clock; “a horrid old German woman from
Prague,” he calls her. This garb is the same old frock-coat of many
summers, the well-ironed silk hat, and the limp glove dangling from
his hand or laid like a crumpled leaf on the cloth beside him. The
coat, held snug to the waist by a single button, always bulges out
over the chest, the two frogs serving as pockets. From these depths,
near the waist-line, the Professor now and then drags up a great silk
handkerchief, either red or black as the week’s wash may permit, for
I have never known of his owning more than two!
To-day, below the bulge of this too large handkerchief swells yet
another enlargement, to which my guest, tapping it significantly with
his finger-tips, refers in a most mysterious way as “a very great
secret,” but without unbosoming to me either its cause or its mystery.
When the cigarettes are lighted he drops his hand deep into his one-
buttoned coat, unloads the handkerchief, and takes out a little
volume bound in vellum, a book he had promised me for weeks. This
solves the mystery and effaces the bulge.
One of the delights of knowing the Professor well is to see him
handle a book that he loves. He has a peculiar way of smoothing the
sides before opening it, as one would a child’s hand, and of always
turning the leaves as though he were afraid of hurting the back,
caressing them one by one with his fingers, quite as a bird plumes its
feathers. And he is always bringing a new book to light; one of his
charming idiosyncrasies is the hunting about in odd corners for just
such odd volumes.
“Out of print now, my dear fellow. You can’t buy it for money. This is
the only copy in Venice that I could borrow for love. See the chapters
on these very fellows—these gondoliers,” pointing to the traghetto.
“Sometimes, when I hear their quarrels, I wonder if they ever
remember that their guild is as old as the days of the Doges, a fossil
survival, unique, perhaps, in the history of this or of any other
country.”
While the Professor nibbles at the crescents and sips his coffee,
pausing now and then to read me passages taken at random from
the little volume in his hands, I watch the procession of gondolas
from the traghetto, like a row of cabs taking their turn, as Joseph’s “a
una” or “due” rings out over the water. One after another they steal
noiselessly up and touch the water-steps, Joseph helping each party
into its boat: the German Baroness with the two poodles and a silk
parasol; the poor fellow from the Engadine, with the rugs and an
extra overcoat, his mother’s arm about him—not many more
sunshiny days for him; the bevy of joyous young girls in summer
dresses and sailor hats, and the two college boys in white flannels,
the chaperone in the next boat. “Ah, these sweet young Americans,
these naïve countrywomen of yours!” whispers the Professor; “how
exquisitely bold!” Last, the painter, with his trap and a big canvas,
which he lifts in as carefully as if it had a broken rib, and then turns
quickly face in; “an old dodge,” you say to yourself; “unfinished, of
course!”
Presently a tall, finely formed gondolier in dark blue, with a red sash,
whirls the ferro of his boat close to the landing-steps, and a graceful,
dignified woman, past middle life, but still showing traces of great
beauty, steps in, and sinks upon the soft cushions.
The Professor rises like a grand duke receiving a princess, brings
one arm to a salute, places the other over his heart, and makes a
bow that carries the conviction of profound respect and loyalty in its
every curve. The lady acknowledges it with a gracious bend of her
head, and a smile which shows her appreciation of its sincerity.
“An English lady of rank who spends her Octobers here,” says the
Professor, when he regains his seat. He had remained standing until
the gondola had disappeared—such old-time observances are part
of his religion.
“Did you notice her gondolier? That is Giovanni, the famous
oarsman. Let me tell you the most delicious story! Oh, the childish
simplicity of these men! You would say, would you not, that he was
about forty years of age? You saw, too, how broad and big he was?
Well, mon ami, not only is he the strongest oarsman in Venice, but
he has proved it, for he has won the annual regatta, the great one on
the Grand Canal, for five consecutive summers! This, you know,
gives him the title of ‘Emperor.’ Now, there is a most charming
Signora whom he has served for years,—she always spends her
summers here,—whom, I assure you, Giovanni idolizes, and over
whom he watches exactly as if she were both his child and his
queen. Well, one day last year,” here the Professor’s face cracked
into lines of suppressed mirth, “Giovanni asked for a day’s leave,
and went over to Mestre to bid good-by to some friends en route for
Milan. The Brindisi wine—the vina forte—oh, that devilish wine! you
know it!—had just reached Mestre. It only comes in September, and
lasts but a few weeks. Of course Giovanni must have his grand
outing, and three days later Signor Giovanni-the-Strong presented
himself again at the door of the apartment of his Signora, sober, but
limp as a rag. The Signora, grand dame as she was, refused to see
him, sending word by her maid that she would not hear a word from
him until the next day. Now, what do you think this great strong fellow
did? He went home, threw himself on the bed, turned his face to the
wall, and for half the night cried like a baby! Think of it! like a baby!
His wife could not get him to eat a mouthful.
“The next day, of course, the Signora forgave him. There was
nothing else to be done, for, as she said to me afterwards, ‘What?
Venice without Giovanni! Mon Dieu!’”
The Professor throws away the end of his last cigarette and begins
gathering up his hat and the one unmated, lonely glove. No living
soul ever yet saw him put this on. Sometimes he thrusts in his two
fingers, as if fully intending to bury his entire hand, and then you see
an expression of doubt and hesitancy cross his face, denoting a
change of mind, as he crumples it carelessly, or pushes it into his
coat-tail pocket to keep company with its fictitious mate.
At this moment Espero raises his head out of his gondola
immediately beneath us. Everything is ready, he says: the sketch
trap, extra canvas, fresh siphon of seltzer, ice, fiasco of Chianti,
Gorgonzola, all but the rolls, which he will get at the baker’s on our
way over to the Giudecca, where I am to work on the sketch begun
yesterday.
“Ah, that horrid old German woman from Prague!” sighs the
Professor. “If I could only go with you!”
OPEN-AIR MARKETS
OMETIMES, in early autumn, on the lagoon behind the
Redentore, you may overtake a curious craft, half barge,
half gondola, rowed by a stooping figure in cowl and frock.
Against the glow of the fading twilight this quaint figure, standing in
the stern of his flower-laden boat, swaying to the rhythm of his oar,
will recall so vividly the time when that other
“Dumb old servitor ... went upward with the flood,”
that you cannot help straining your eyes in a vain search for the fair
face of the lily maid of Astolat hidden among the blossoms. Upon
looking closer you discover that it is only the gardener of the convent
grounds, on his way to the market above the Rialto.
PONTE PAGLIA ... NEXT THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS

If you continue on, crossing the Giudecca, or if you happen to be
coming from Murano or the Lido, you will pass dozens of other
boats, loaded to the water’s edge with baskets upon baskets of
peaches, melons, and figs, or great heaps of green vegetables,
dashed here and there with piles of blood-red tomatoes. All these
boats are pointing their bows towards the Ponte Paglia, the bridge
on the Riva between the Doges’ Palace and the prison, the one next
the Bridge of Sighs. Here, in the afternoons preceding market days,
they unship their masts or rearrange their cargoes, taking off the top
baskets if too high to clear the arch. Ponte Paglia is the best point of
entrance from the Grand Canal, because it is the beginning of that
short cut, through a series of smaller canals, to the fruit market
above the Rialto bridge. The market opens at daybreak.
Many of these boats come from Malamocco, on the south, a small
island this side of Chioggia, and from beyond the island known as
the Madonna of the Seaweed, named after a curious figure sheltered
by a copper umbrella. Many of them come from Torcello, that most
ancient of the Venetian settlements, and from the fruit-raising country
back of it, for all Torcello is one great orchard, with every landing-
wharf piled full of its products. Here you can taste a fig so delicately
ripe that it fairly melts in your mouth, and so sensitive that it withers
and turns black almost with the handling. Here are rose-pink
peaches the size of small melons, and golden melons the size of
peaches. Here are pomegranates that burst open from very
lusciousness, and white grapes that hang in masses, and melons
and plums in heaps, and all sorts of queer little round things that you
never taste but once, and never want to taste again.
These fruit gardens and orchards in the suburbs of Venice express
the very waste and wantonness of the climate. There is no order in
setting out the fruit, no plan in growing, no system in gathering. The
trees thrive wherever they happen to have taken root—here a peach,
here a pear, there a pomegranate. The vines climb the trunks and
limbs, or swing off to tottering poles and crumbling walls. The
watermelons lie flat on their backs in the blazing sun, flaunting their
big leaves in your face, their tangled creepers in everybody’s way
and under everybody’s feet. The peaches cling in matted clusters,
and the figs and plums weigh down the drooping branches.
If you happen to have a lira about you, and own besides a bushel
basket, you can exchange the coin for that measure of peaches. Two
lire will load your gondola half full of melons; three lire will pack it
with grapes; four lire—well, you must get a larger boat.
When the boats are loaded at the orchards and poled through the
grass-lined canals, reaching the open water of the lagoon, escaping
the swarms of naked boys begging backsheesh of fruit from their
cargoes, you will notice that each craft stops at a square box,
covered by an awning and decorated with a flag, anchored out in the
channel, or moored to a cluster of spiles. This is the Dogana of the
lagoon, and every basket, crate, and box must be inspected and
counted by the official in the flat cap with the tarnished gilt band, who
commands this box of a boat, for each individual peach, plum, and
pear must help pay its share of the public debt.
This floating custom-house is one of many beads, strung at intervals
a mile apart, completely encircling Venice. It is safe to say that
nothing that crows, bleats, or clucks, nothing that feeds, clothes, or is
eaten, ever breaks through this charmed circle without leaving some
portion of its value behind. This creditor takes its pound of flesh the
moment it is due, and has never been known to wait.
Where the deep-water channels are shifting, and there is a
possibility of some more knowing and perhaps less honest market
craft slipping past in the night, a government deputy silently steals
over the shallow lagoon in a rowboat, sleeping in his blanket, his
hand on his musket, and rousing at the faintest sound of rowlock or
sail. Almost hourly one of these night-hawks overhauls other strollers
of the lagoon in the by-passages outside the city limits—some
smuggler, with cargo carefully covered, or perhaps a pair of lovers in
a gondola with too closely drawn tenda. There is no warning sound
to the unwary; only the gurgle of a slowly-moving oar, then the
muzzle of a breech-loader thrust in one’s eyes, behind which frowns
an ugly, determined face, peering from out the folds of a heavy boat-
cloak. It is the deputy’s way of asking for smuggled cigarettes, but it
is so convincing a way as to admit of no discussion. Ever afterward
the unfortunate victim, if he be of honest intent, cannot only detect a
police-boat from a fishing yawl, but remembers also to keep a light
burning in his lamp-socket forward, as evidence of his honesty.
When the cargoes of the market boats are inspected, the duties
paid, and the passage made under Ponte Paglia, or through the
many nameless canals if the approach is made from the Campo
Santo side of the city, the boats swarm up to the fruit market above
the Rialto, rounding up one after another, and discharging their
contents like trucks at a station, the men piling the baskets in great
mounds on the broad stone quay.
THE FRUIT MARKET ABOVE THE RIALTO

After the inhabitants have pounced upon these heaps and mounds
and pyramids of baskets and crates, and have carried them away,
the market is swept and scoured as clean as a china plate, not even
a peach-pit being left to tell the tale of the morning. Then this greater
market shrinks into the smaller one, the little fruit market of the
Rialto, which is never closed, day or night.
This little market, or, rather, the broad street forming its area,—broad
for this part of Venice,—is always piled high with the products of

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Regret: A Study in Ancient Moral

Psychology James Warren

Earlier versions of parts of this work were presented to audiences at the

EE Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics

Regret is a complex emotion. The form of regret I am most interested in

2 :      

forms a painful negative evaluation of something that they themselves did or

:   ? 3

motivation, regret is instead to be associated with those people whose actions

4 :      

now free from the impairment produced by an overwhelming motivation for

:   ? 5

some moral requirement or without failing to promote something of genuine

6 :      

² See, for example, the rich discussion in Hursthouse 1999, 43–87.

:   ? 7

8 :      

Consideration of these two appearances of metameleia in Aristotle’s

:   ? 9

10 :      

:   ? 11

, , ,   13

14 :      

emotion. ‘Regret’, on the other hand, does seem to be an appropriate emotion

, , ,   15

16 :      

nevertheless be compatible with much of what Williams wants to insist about

The sentiment of agent-regret is by no means restricted to voluntary agency.

In this case, Williams plausibly contends, it is appropriate to imagine the

, , ,   17

‘remorse’ seems to be a less appropriate description of the driver’s emotional

18 :      

, , ,   19

καὶ τοῖς ὁμολογοῦσι καὶ μεταμελομένοις· ὡς γὰρ ἔχοντες δίκην τὸ λυπεῖσθαι

20 :      

The Virtuous Person is Free from Regret

Regret is a negative retrospective attitude and its positive counterpart is

We should immediately recognize that Aristotle is presenting a very unusual

¹⁵ Cf. Wallace 2013, 5. ¹⁶ Cf. Pangle 2003, 144.

, , ,   21

22 :      

, , ,   23

calculus or a deontological rule-based system, tend to promise that they can

24 :      

line with their expectations of appropriate and virtuous reactions, particularly

, , ,   25

26 :      

for metameleia notwithstanding the potential for confusions such as the

, , ,   27

28 :      

suggests that improvement is possible even if it does not itself constitute a

, , ,   29

30 :      

, , ,   31

habituated to acting well themselves (10.9 1180a1–5). So a virtuous person

32 :      

A LITTLE HOLE IN THE WALL ON THE VIA GARIBALDI

PONTE PAGLIA ... NEXT THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS

THE FRUIT MARKET ABOVE THE RIALTO

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