Regret Paddy Mcqueen

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Regret
 Regret
PADDY MCQUEEN
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 Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Personal and Political Significance of Regret

PART I: THE PHILOSOPHY OF REGRET

1. Making Sense of Regret
1.1. Introduction
1.2. How to Develop an Account of Regret
1.3. What Regret Is (and What It Is Not)
1.4. The Psychology of Regret
1.5. Are There “Types” of Regret?
1.6. The Rational and Intelligible Limits of Regret
2. On the “Fittingness” of Regret
2.1. Introduction
2.2. The Moralistic Fallacy
2.3. The “Shape” and “Size” of Regret
2.4. Is It Always Unreasonable to Regret?
3. Reasons, Mistakes, and Justified Decisions
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Practical Identity and Decision-Justification
3.3. “Epistemically Available” Reasons
3.4. Perspective-Dependent and Perspective-Independent Reas
ons
3.5. Retrospective Justification
3.6. Reasons and Time
3.7. Self-Transformations
3.8. Akrasia and Regret
4. Regret, Agency, and Responsibility
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Regret and the Scope of Responsibility
4.3. Against Williams’s “Agent-Regret”
4.4. Description, Intention, and the Framing of Responsibility
4.5. Accidents, Apologies, and Interpersonal Relations
5. Regret, Valuing, and Virtue
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Regret, Attachment, and Affirmation
5.3. Assessing Wallace’s Account
5.4. Regret and Unrealised Values
5.5. Conflicts of Value and Tragic Choices
5.6. Coda: Aristotle and Stoicism

PART II: THE POLITICS OF REGRET

6. The Social Structuring of Regret
6.1. Introduction
6.2. The Cultural Politics of Emotion
6.3. The Social Contours of Regret
6.4. Pronatalism and Regret
6.5. Regretting Motherhood
7. Voluntary Sterilization and Regret
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Refused Sterilization Requests
7.3. Autonomy and Medical Paternalism
7.4. Sterilization, Well-Being, and Informed Consent
7.5. Permanency, Commitment, and Choice
7.6. Credibility, Identity, and Epistemic Injustice
8. Abortion and Regret
8.1. Introduction
8.2. The Politicization of Abortion Regret
8.3. The Rise to Prominence of Abortion Regret
8.4. Ripple Effects
8.5. The Normative Force of Abortion Regret
 9. Trans Regret
9.1. Introduction
9.2. A Note on Terminology
9.3. The Purported “Problem” of Trans Regret
9.4. Personally Transformative Treatment
9.5. Trans Regret and the Authentic Self
10. Living with and without Regret
10. Introduction
10. Refusing to Regret
1.
10. The Waxing or Waning of Regret
2.
10. Self-Forgiveness and Regret
3.
10. Looking to the Future
4.
10. Regulating Regret
5.
6.
Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Patrick Cockburn for extensive discussions

about the main ideas and arguments in this book. He gave up a
great deal of his time—far more than could reasonably be expected
—to help me to clarify my understanding of regret. Thanks, also, to
Chris Cowley for first stoking my interest in this topic. I had many
enjoyable and stimulating conversations with him about regret.
Without them, this book may never have been written. I am grateful
to three anonymous reviewers from Oxford University Press, who
provided very helpful feedback. I also want to sing the praises of
Lucy Randall, my editor at OUP, who has been unfailingly helpful and
supportive.
I have been thinking and writing about regret for nigh on ten
years now. This book draws from the following articles that I have
published during this time: ‘Authenticity, Intersubjectivity and the
Ethics of Changing Sex’, Journal of Gender Studies 25, no. 5 (2016):
557–70; ‘Feminist and Trans Perspectives on Identity and the UK
Gender Recognition Act’, British Journal of Politics and International
Relations 18, no. 3 (2016): 671–87; ‘When Should We Regret?’,
International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25, no. 4 (2017): 608–
23; ‘The Role of Regret in Medical Decision-Making’, Ethical Theory
and Moral Practice 20, no. 5 (2017): 1051–65; ‘A Defence of
Voluntary Sterilisation’, Res Publica 26, no. 2 (2020): 237–55. I am
very grateful to the respective publishers for their permission to
reprint and rework parts of these works.
 Introduction
The Personal and Political Significance of Re
gret

Towards the end of the film Casablanca, Rick Blaine (played by

Humphrey Bogart) is trying urgently to convince Isla Lund (played by
Ingrid Bergman) to board a plane with her husband, Victor Laszlo,
that will enable her to escape Vichy-controlled Casablanca. This will
part Rick and Isla for good, despite their professed love for each
other, as Rick will remain behind. Uttering the following, memorable
lines, he tells her: ‘If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not
with him [Victor], you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not
tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life’. This is a hugely
momentous decision, which will significantly affect the rest of their
lives. Therefore, it is noteworthy that Rick invokes regret in order to
persuade her to leave Casablanca and, thus, him.
Rick’s use of regret may seem perfectly understandable. We want
to avoid regretting our choices and often spend a great deal of time
deliberating in order to ensure that we do not regret them. The
experience of regret is a painful one and seems to indicate that we
made a poor decision, which can serve as a further source of
frustration. We often beat ourselves up about the mistakes that we
make, sometimes dwelling on them and, in extreme cases, becoming
obsessed with them. Thus, warning someone that they will regret
their decision can be a powerful way of influencing them. It alerts
them to the fact that they are making a terrible mistake (or so it
seems to us). If we can avoid making a decision that we will regret
later, then, surely, we should do so. We expect Isla to be persuaded
by Rick’s warning of regret. At the very least, we are not surprised if
she is. However, why is this the case? Why should we care that we
might regret something? Is the possibility of regret a strong reason
to avoid a course of action? More generally, why do we regret many
of our choices and is such regret intelligible or appropriate? What
does this reveal about how we understand ourselves and the world?
Ultimately, how should we determine what regret is and the place
that it ought to have in our lives? My aim in this book is to offer
some plausible answers to these questions.
To begin, it is worth noting how prevalent regret is. Many people’s
lives—I suspect most people’s lives—are littered with regrets, both
minor and more major. The experimental data certainly suggest this.
In a 1984 study, Susan Shimanoff monitored people’s everyday
conversations to see which emotions were mentioned in them.1
Regret was the second most frequently mentioned emotion, after
love, and thus the most frequently mentioned negative emotion.
More recently, Saffrey et al. reported that of nine negative emotions,
participants said that regret was the one they experienced most
frequently.2 A lot of regrets are low-key and relatively trivial, such as
when one misses the bus to work because one overslept, gets a
small fine for forgetting to return a library book on time, or makes a
stupid remark at a social event. However, some regrets—indeed,
quite a few of them—can be substantial, such as regretting whom
one married, the career one did or did not pursue, or one’s failure to
reconcile with someone before she died.3 Deep regrets can become
all-consuming, defining in large part how we make sense of our
lives. Think, for example, of the character Terry Malloy in the film On
the Waterfront.4 Malloy was a talented young boxer, who deliberately
lost a fight so that his brother could win a lucrative bet. Many years
later, after his boxing career has fizzled out and he is working as a
bodyguard, he declares, ‘I coulda had class. I coulda been a
contender. I coulda been someone. Instead of a bum, which is what
I am’. Thus, not only can our regrets be felt intensely, but they can
also be brooded over, providing a fresh pang of pain each time we
focus on them. In extreme cases, our entire life can be seen as a
failure, as a huge mistake, and hence as one big regret.
In addition to its impact on our emotional lives and decision-
making, regret is also important for reflecting on our beliefs about
personal identity. For example, if I regret something that I did ten
years ago, then I must think that “me” now and “me” back then are,
in some significant sense, the same person: I regret what I did. It
may well be correct to think this, but it indicates that our
experiences of regret are underpinned by beliefs about personal
identity. If someone denies that they are quantitatively the same
person as the one who committed the regrettable act, then they
may refuse to regret it. They may say, “I did not make that decision.
Therefore, why should I regret it?”. One may think that this is a
flawed attitude to adopt towards the past and personal identity, but
it does not seem to be utterly incoherent or impossible, especially if
a large amount of time separates the two selves. At a minimum, the
temporal distance between a past and present self might diminish
the intensity of the regret I feel about something my past self did.
More understandably, someone may refuse to regret what they did
because of a substantial qualitative change in who they are. For
example, someone may have done something very stupid when they
were a teenager, which caused them significant regret. Now, forty
years later, they feel little or no regret about it, because they are
such a different person. Conversely, someone may have done
something that they did not regret at the time, but which now
causes them great regret. Analysing the connection between regret,
changes in our self over time, and identification with past selves is a
major focus of this book.
Making sense of regret also involves engaging with debates about
time, reasons, and truth. If I regret ending a relationship with
someone when I was younger, then it is likely that I think that things
would have been better if we had stayed together. However, does
this counterfactual statement need to be true in order for my regret
to be coherent? If so, then can it be true? Perhaps I should think
that things would have been disastrous if we had stayed together,
and thus feel great relief instead of regret. What would make one
judgement more justified than the other? Similarly, if I regret not
spending more time practicing the piano, then I must think either
that I had a reason to practice the piano in the past or that I have a
reason now to have practiced the piano in the past. Either way, we
need to assess whether and, if so, how, reasons can “transmit” their
force across time and, more generally, what it means to say that one
“has” a reason to do something or, crucially, to have done something
in the past.
Furthermore, if the experience of regret involves thinking along
the lines of “how much better if things had been otherwise”, then
the experience of regret could be conditioned upon a view about the
nature of freedom and determinism. If one believes wholeheartedly
in a fully deterministic universe, then it makes little or no sense to
think “if only I had acted differently”, because it is impossible that
one did so. Thus, perhaps the intelligibility of regret is reliant on the
belief in human free will; in the belief that it is genuinely
metaphysically possible for us to choose one way or another when
deliberating about what to do.5 Nietzsche noted this with regard to
remorse, a close cousin of regret: ‘Thus, because he thinks he is free
(but not because he is free), man feels remorse and the pangs of
conscience’.6 This implies that one feels emotions like remorse and
regret because one thinks one is free. If one did not think this, then
one would not experience these emotions. Along similar lines, Henry
Sidgwick writes that ‘a man will not feel remorse for his actions, if he
regards them as necessary results of causes anterior to his personal
existence. I admit that so far as the sentiment of remorse implies
self-blame irremovably fixed on the self blamed, it must tend to
vanish from the mind of a convinced Determinist’.7 Of course,
Nietzsche advocated strong causal determinism and thus rejected
the idea of free will.8 He therefore asserted that it is “unjust” to
judge ourselves, e.g., to criticise or to blame ourselves for what we
have done or who we are is, because we are not responsible for
these things.9 Assuming, as I shall argue, that regret is a form of
self-judgement—specifically, a form of self-recrimination—then
Nietzsche’s view seems to suggest that we ought not to regret the
things we do, or, at least, that it is “unjust” if we do so.
As we shall see, a Stoic attitude toward regret may also reject its
coherence because of Stoicism’s understanding of human freedom
and the nature of the universe. One reason for this is that, like
Nietzsche, Stoics endorse strong causal determinism, which rules out
the idea that one could have acted otherwise. A second reason is
that it is part of the Stoic view that the world exhibits a
fundamentally rational order—or, put differently, is ordered according
to a fundamentally rational principle or divine will—and this, also,
would seem to rule out the coherence of regret. This is because
regret implies that things would have been better if one had acted
otherwise or if events had transpired differently. However, if this is
the “best of all possible worlds” (regardless of whether “best
possible” is all that good), then it makes no sense to assert that
things could have been better and hence it makes no sense to
regret. Consequently, to think about regret is to think about, among
other things, the nature of human agency, identity, time, reasons,
and even the physical universe itself.
Given all of this, it is somewhat peculiar that there has been
relatively little discussion of regret in the philosophical literature.10 I
suspect that many readers will be familiar with Bernard Williams’s
remarks on regret, especially in his paper ‘Moral Luck’,11 and there is
a reasonable number of philosophy articles that discuss his view and
regret more generally. However, to the best of my knowledge, there
are only three philosophical monographs on regret—James Warren’s
Regret: A Study in Ancient Moral Psychology,12 R. J. Wallace’s The Vi
ew from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment and the Limits of Regret,1
3
and Brian Price’s A Theory of Regret14—along with Anna Gotlib’s
edited book, The Moral Psychology of Regret.15 The fact that these
texts were all published within the last ten years, coupled with the
recency of many of the philosophy articles on regret, suggests that
there is growing philosophical interest in the topic.16 Nevertheless,
given the relative paucity of philosophical analyses of regret, there is
little agreement about how best to understand it and the role that it
should play in our lives. As Carolyn Price states, ‘Fundamental
questions about its fittingness conditions and functions have yet to
be settled’.17
Importantly, my exploration of regret includes an examination of
how our experiences of regret are shaped by the social world(s) that
we inhabit. For example, are some people more prone to regret
things than other people are and, if so, why? How do social
discourses and people’s identities affect their experiences of regret?
Potentially more troublingly, in what ways is regret used to regulate
people’s choices and to sustain social practices and policies? To give
one of the main examples that I discuss in the book, the concept of
“abortion regret” has become a central part of the anti-abortion/pro-
life movement. Campaigners offer the supposed fact that many
women regret their abortions as a compelling reason for
governments to ban abortion and for women to choose to avoid it. I
look at how beliefs about women’s natural and spiritual identity as
mothers—the tendency to equate women with motherhood—
generate the assumption that women will inevitably regret having an
abortion and the assertion that it is right that they do so. I also
document how, especially in the United States, but also elsewhere,
these beliefs became politicised in the battle to overturn the legal
right to abortion. Furthermore, I consider how these beliefs render it
very difficult, and highly stigmatizing, to express regret about having
had children. Thus, alongside a philosophical examination of the
nature and normativity of regret, I also develop a cultural politics of
regret.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the
philosophy of regret. This comprises an analysis of existing accounts
of regret within the philosophical literature and an account of how I
think we should understand regret. In developing this account, I
explore our reasons for regret and how these reasons connect with
beliefs about practical agency, personal identity, value, time, and
causality. Throughout this part, I consider a range of regrets, from
the relatively mundane (e.g., staying up too late at night) to the
existentially significant/life-defining (e.g., wasting one’s life in pursuit
of a career that one now considers to be of little value or meaning).
The second part looks at regret within specific practical contexts,
especially medical decision-making and choosing to have, or not to
have, children. Here I am interested in two issues. The first is
whether regret should play any role within these domains. For
example, can a doctor be justified in denying a woman’s request for
sterilization because she might regret it? The second is how the role
of regret in these contexts is shaped by social discourses and
identities, with a strong focus on gender. Along with the issue of
abortion regret outlined above, I also offer in-depth analyses of
post-sterilization regret and regret following gender confirmation
treatment.
A few final notes on the following. The two parts can be read
relatively independently of each other. Whilst the main arguments
that I make about the politics of regret in the second part of the
book are underpinned by the theoretical account of regret I set out
in the first part, it is not necessary to have read the first part in
order to make sense of what I say in the second part (and vice
versa). If you are purely interested in either the philosophy or the
politics of regret, then you could forgo my discussion of the other.
However, the claims I make in the second part will make more
sense, and hopefully seem more justified, if one has read the first
part, and you will get a richer, fuller appreciation of regret if you
read both parts sequentially.
In addition, as will be clear from this introduction, the book
considers a wide range of topics and theories. Amongst other things,
I cover discussions of practical reasons, the persistence of the self,
Stoicism, pronatalism, abortion politics, agency, responsibility, frames
of description, gender confirmation treatment, detransitioning,
paternalism, and the gendered dimension of autonomy. This breadth
is, I hope, interesting in itself, as it weaves together a plethora of
different ideas and arguments. It also shows the complex nature of
regret and the numerous philosophical and political issues that are
relevant to making sense of it. However, breadth requires the
occasional sacrifice of depth and, at times, you might think that an
important debate or theory is not covered as thoroughly as it could
or should be, that relevant parts of it are omitted, and/or that a
position I endorse is not justified sufficiently. That is unavoidable for
a book of this size, but I hope that you will agree that the benefits of
bringing together all of these important ideas and arguments
outweigh these costs.
 1 Susan B. Shimanoff, ‘Commonly Named Emotions in Everyday Conversations’,
Perceptual and Motor Skills 58, no. 2 (1984): 514.
2
Colleen Saffrey, Amy Summerville, and Neal J. Roese, ‘Praise for Regret:
People Value Regret above Other Negative Emotions’, Motivation and Emotion 32,
no. 1 (March 2008): 46–54. Happily, participants reported experiencing positive
emotions, such as love, pride, and joy, more frequently than negative emotions.
3 A review of existing studies on the most prevalent types of regret concluded

that they are, in descending order of frequency, regrets about education, career,
romance, parenting, the self, and leisure. Neal J. Roese and Amy Summerville,
‘What We Regret Most . . . and Why’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
31, no. 9 (1 September 2005): 1273–85. For a useful analysis of this, see Daniel
H. Pink, The Power of Regret (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2022).
4
Credit goes to Chris Cowley for using this as an example of life-defining regret
(Christopher Cowley, ‘Long-Term Regret, Perspective, and Fate’, in The Moral
Psychology of Regret, ed. Anna Gotlib [London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019], 240–
58).
5 Some people, especially compatibilists, will reject this as an accurate depiction

of what the belief in free will involves, but I hope that it will suffice for the point
being made.
6
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and
Duncan Large (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 174.
7 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,

1981), 71.
8
‘When we see a waterfall, we think we see freedom of will and choice in the
innumerable turnings, windings, breakings of the waves; but everything is
necessary; each movement can be calculated mathematically. Thus it is with
human actions; if one were omniscient, one would be able to calculate each
individual action in advance, each step in the progress of knowledge, each error,
each act of malice’. Nietzsche, The Nietzsche Reader, 177.
9 Nietzsche, The Nietzsche Reader, 174.
10
There is a large body of literature on regret in psychology, economics, and
decision theory, which I draw on where relevant. However, whilst this is useful for
a descriptive understanding of regret, it says very little about the normativity of
regret. In other words, it tells us much about the regrets people have, but next to
nothing about whether and when we ought to regret the things that we do.
Furthermore, the types of regret analysed tend to be very specific and rather
contrived. For example, a study might examine people’s regrets about purchasing
a product that they then discover could have been bought cheaper elsewhere
(“buyer’s regret” is a common topic of study in behavioural economics). The more
interesting and meaningful regrets, such as relationship or career regrets, are
rarely engaged with, perhaps because they do not lend themselves to controlled,
replicable experiments.
11 Bernard A. O. Williams, ‘Moral Luck’, in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers,

1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 20–39.

12
James Warren, Regret: A Study in Ancient Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2021). As the title suggests, Warren’s book is largely confined to
examining the concept of regret (metameleia) in Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism,
although he does connect this with contemporary discussions of regret, especially
the views of Williams and Wallace.
13 R. Jay Wallace, The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the

Limits of Regret (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). As will become clear in
Chapter 5, where I discuss Wallace’s book in detail, he is focused on exploring how
our attachments place limits on what we can regret, rather than providing an
extensive analysis of the concept of regret itself.
14
Brian Price, A Theory of Regret (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
Despite the title, Price’s book says rather little about the nature of regret and next
to nothing about whether our regrets are warranted. Indeed, he argues that regret
is ‘of no real import for reason’ (5). Contrary to this claim, I and pretty much
everyone else who writes about it think that regret is of the utmost import for
reason. Thus, our books have very different focuses and very different ways of
examining regret.
15 Anna Gotlib, ed., The Moral Psychology of Regret (London: Rowman &

Littlefield, 2019).
16
There is also an interest amongst the general public in the topic, with books
such as Bonnie Ware’s The Top Five Regrets of the Dying and Daniel Pink’s The Po
wer of Regret being very successful. Ware’s book sold over a million copies and
has been translated into thirty-two languages. There is also a plethora of self-help
books that promise to free you from regret and to teach you how to live without
regrets.
17 Carolyn Price, ‘The Many Flavours of Regret’, The Monist 103 (2020): 147.
 PART I
THE PHILOSOPHY OF REGRET

I have two main aims in this part of the book. The first is to pin
down what regret is. My view, to put it nounally, is that regret is the
painful feeling of self-chastisement (i.e., self-reproach, self-rebuke,
self-recrimination, etc.) resulting from doing something that one
thinks is a mistake. To put it verbally, to regret is to reproach oneself
for acting poorly (more specifically, to reproach oneself for making a
decision that is not justified by one’s practical identity). This means
that there are two components of regret. First, to regret is to
experience the sting of self-reproach, which constitutes its
phenomenological core. Second, regret concerns the things that we
do, that is, our actions. More specifically, I claim that regret concerns
our mistakes. This means that I treat regret as a distinct emotion,
which differs from other, related emotions, such as guilt, remorse,
and disappointment. It also means that I reject many existing
philosophical discussions of regret, especially Bernard Williams’s
account of agent-regret, according to which we can and, more
importantly, ought to regret things that we do entirely
unintentionally/involuntarily.
The focus on mistakes is central to the second aim, which is to
identify when we should regret the things that we have done. This
involves distinguishing different senses of “should”, which, in turn,
requires identifying the different reasons we can have for regret. As
I explain, what is of fundamental importance is whether our regret is
“fitting”, that is, whether the features of the situation we are in
“warrant” regret. The challenge is then to ascertain what features of
a situation render regret a fitting response to it. I argue that it is
when we make mistakes, and only when we make mistakes, that the
situation warrants regret.1 Of course, this involves explaining what
constitutes a “mistake”. I argue for an evidence-relative perspectivist
account of “mistake”. In short, to make a mistake is to fail to act on
good practical reasons that were epistemically available to you at the
time you made your decision. As we shall see, this differs from the
views of some influential philosophers. For example, I reject the
claim that it is rational to regret a decision you believe to have been
the best you could have made, even if that decision has very
unwanted, negative consequences. In contrast, the likes of Bernard
Williams and Michael Stocker think that regret about such “tragic
dilemmas” is both rational and praiseworthy. Thus, I endeavour to
show why my account is preferable.

1 In so doing, I suggest that many philosophical discussions of regret are guilty

of committing what D’Arms and Jacobson call the “moralistic fallacy”. Justin D’Arms
and Daniel Jacobson, ‘The Moralistic Fallacy: On the “Appropriateness” of
Emotions’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61, no. 1 (2000): 65–90.
These accounts offer reasons for regret that do not pertain to its “fittingness” and
are thus irrelevant to whether regret is a warranted response to a situation itself.
 1
Making Sense of Regret

1.1. Introduction
Given our everyday familiarity with regret, it might seem that
providing a clear, succinct description of it would be a fairly simple
task. As I show in this chapter, that is far from the case. Despite the
ease and frequency with which we think and talk about it, regret is
surprisingly hard to pin down. Once placed under the philosophical
microscope, regret becomes a rather elusive, ‘slippery’ concept.1
Perhaps this is why philosophers have said quite different things
about what regret is and the sorts of things that we can and should
regret. I am puzzled by many of these views, which seem to be at
odds with the sorts of regrets that people have and what the typical
experience of regret is like. They also fail to meet what I consider to
be some important conditions for what an acceptable account of
regret should be like. In arguing this, I present how I think we
should understand regret. This will set things up for the following
chapters, in which I analyse when, if ever, regret is justified.

1.2. How to Develop an Account of Regret

Regret is an emotion. This much, I hope, is uncontroversial. What is
a matter of much debate is how we should understand the nature of
emotions. Cognitivist accounts assert that emotions can be defined
or are constituted by a particular thought or set of thoughts. For
example, to be afraid is to think (or believe or judge) that something
is fearful; to be envious is to think (or believe or judge) that
someone has something that you want. In contrast, “feeling”
accounts of emotion assert that emotions are bodily feelings, which
are differentiated by their experiential quality (what they feel like).
Thus, to be afraid is to be consciously aware of feeling fear; to be
angry is to be consciously aware of feeling anger. Each of these
broad theories has different versions, which are much more complex
than the very brief summary given here, and these are by no means
exhaustive of how emotions are understood. Thus, outlining which
account of emotion seems to be most plausible would be a book-
length task in itself. Rather than do this, I focus on how we should
understand the nature of regret, regardless of how this fits within a
particular theory of emotion.2 Thus, the way that I define the nature
and normativity of regret need not apply to other emotions.
I think that there are several features of regret that a plausible
account of it needs to accommodate. First, regret is about
something; it is “object-directed” or “intentional”. We do not have a
general mood of “regretfulness”, in which we feel regret without
being able to say what it is that we regret / what the cause of our
regret is. Rather, we regret specific things, such as staying up too
late or being unfaithful to our partner.3 This contrasts with occasions
in which we feel a general sense of, say, depression or happiness,
even though we cannot say what it is that we are depressed or
happy about. Second, regret involves both cognitive and affective
states (or, less technically, thoughts and feelings). To experience
regret, one must believe something to be the case and one must
have a certain sort of feeling. It is not sufficient to think, “I ought
not to have done that”, one must also feel pained by what one did.
Third, regret can be recalcitrant. That is, regret can be relatively
immune to our judgement about its appropriateness. For example, I
may regret the impulsive purchase I made, despite telling myself
that it does not matter or that it will prove to be a worthwhile
purchase in the future.4 Fourth, regret is motivating. Specifically, it
motivates us to improve our decision-making in the future. We can
also call this regret’s “action-tendency”. I think that this also
constitutes the function of regret, or, at least, its primary function.
Note that this need not be successful. For example, despite resolving
to avoid impulsive purchases in the future, I may be unable to resist
the shiny new gadget I see when I am next shopping. Nevertheless,
regret provides a pressure towards acting differently (i.e., less
regrettably) in the future.
Putting these requirements together, an account of regret needs
to state what it is that we regret, what regret feels like, what
thought(s) regret involves, how regret relates to rational judgement
and belief, and how regret improves our behaviour/decisions. In
addition, I think that an account of regret should enable us to
distinguish it from other, similar emotions, such as guilt, remorse,
and shame. These, I contend, are distinct emotions that have, inter
alia, different objects, action-tendencies, and valences (i.e., affective
qualities: they feel different). This is a controversial claim. A lot of
theorists treat regret as a broad, umbrella-like emotion that
encompasses a range of other emotions, such as guilt, remorse, and
disappointment. For example, Wallace writes about “generic regret”,
which ‘is typically understood to involve an affect of pain or distress
about a past event that is judged to be in some way unfortunate or
lamentable’,5 and which contains various “subclasses”, such as
remorse, sorrow, sadness, guilt, resentment, and indignation.6
Similarly, Landman states that ‘regret is a superordinate concept that
subsumes certain defining features of disappointment, sadness,
remorse, and guilt’.7 Contrary to such views, I argue that regret is a
specific emotion that has a different phenomenological and cognitive
structure to emotions such as guilt and remorse. In other words,
regret feels different to other emotions and involves different
thoughts or judgements.8
I call the requirement that an account of regret captures its
distinctness, and thus enables us to distinguish it from other
emotions, the “specificity condition”. Support for the specificity
condition comes from work by Roseman et al., who showed that
emotions can be differentiated in terms of distinctive feelings,
thoughts, action-tendencies, actions, and what they call
“emotivations” or “emotional motives”.9 Whereas actions are specific
behavioural responses, emotivations are general goals or motives.
For example, an emotivation of fear is wanting to avoid danger and
an emotivation of anger is wanting to break something (respective
actions for fear and anger could be running away and slamming a
door). Roseman et al. found that for ten selected emotions—fear,
sadness, distress, frustration, disgust, dislike, anger, regret, guilt,
and shame—each had different characteristic feelings, thoughts,
action-tendencies, actions, and emotivations, based on how
participants in their study described their experiences of these
emotions. For regret, these were “feeling a sinking feeling”, “think of
what a mistake you made”, “think about a lost opportunity”, “feel like
kicking yourself”, “feel like correcting your mistake”, “do something
differently”, “want to improve your performance”, and “want to get a
second chance”.10 Indeed, there is a general consensus in the
psychological literature that regret constitutes a discrete emotion,
which can be differentiated from other emotions along multiple
dimensions (see Section 2.3).
The specificity condition requires that we define regret in a way
that distinguishes it from other emotions; a definition of regret that
could also apply to guilt or remorse means that one cannot say that
regret is distinct from them. Somewhat oddly, Landman—who treats
regret as a “superordinate concept”—also asserts that regret can be
distinguished from disappointment, guilt, remorse, etc. Thus, she
seems to think that feelings such as guilt are a form of regret and
yet she also wants to treat them as separate emotions. I do not
think that she can have it both ways. If regret incorporates other
emotions, then it is not really an emotion but, rather, a way of
referring to a set of emotions (a sort of meta-emotion). Indeed, her
definition of regret seems to be exactly that:

Regret is a more or less painful cognitive and emotional state of feeling sorry
for misfortunes, limitations, losses, transgressions, shortcomings or mistakes .
. . the regretted matters may be sins of commission as well as sins of
omissions; they may range from the voluntary to the uncontrollable and
accidental; they may be actually executed deeds or entirely mentals ones
committed by oneself or by another person or group; they may be moral or
legal transgressions or morally and legally neutral.11
Regret is defined so broadly that it ceases to have anything unique
to it that marks it off as “regret”. This means that if you have reason
to feel remorseful or guilty or disappointed about something, then,
on Landman’s definition, you also have reason to feel regretful. At
least, you cannot say, “But regret does not apply here”, for,
definitionally, it does. In other words, if this is what regret is, then
we have no way of separating it, conceptually and in practice (i.e., in
our experiences) from other emotions. The problem is that we can
and do distinguish it. We say things like, “I feel disappointed about
what happened, but I do not regret it”. We can even feel guilty
about something we did, without feeling regret. Therefore, we need
to be able to give an account that allows us to distinguish it from
other emotions. Part of what may cause confusion, I think, is that
we can experience several emotions at once and this is often the
case when we experience regret. Imagine that you steal some
money from a friend in order to place a bet on a horse race, which
you lose. You are likely to feel—and likely would be justified in
feeling—guilt, disappointment, and regret, all at once. Nevertheless,
these are distinct emotions with distinct intentional objects. In this
scenario, you feel guilty about wronging your friend, disappointed
that the horse lost the race, and regretful at making a mistake (or
two mistakes: you ought not to have stolen the money and you bet
on the wrong horse). Because of this co-occurrence, it is tempting to
treat them as interchangeable or to see one as subsuming the
others. However, this temptation ought to be avoided. Regret is a
unique emotion and an account of it should reflect this.
Furthermore, to what extent should an account of regret
accommodate or be influenced by its linguistic use? If a sentence of
the form “I regret X” is linguistically intelligible, does that mean that
we can or do regret X and that an account of regret must be able to
incorporate regret about X? I am sceptical that we should be guided
by language too much in this regard. For example, it is conventional
to use “regret” as a social nicety when delivering bad news, e.g.,
“We regret to inform you that . . . ”, but the person who uses the
word in this way is not thereby expressing the emotional state of
regret. This point is important: we can use the word “regret” in a
sentence without declaring that we are experiencing regret and thus
without expressing a genuine instance of regret (just as we can say
“sorry”, in a meaningful way, without feeling sorry or trying to
communicate that we are feeling sorry). Indeed, it seems that we
can say that we regret something without it being either possible or
rational to feel regret about it. For example, according to David
Sussman we can regret things ‘that we know to be metaphysically or
even logically necessary . . . I might regret the fact that the circle
cannot be squared or that my students cannot all be above the class
average’.12 Similarly, Parfit states, ‘When they learnt that the square
root of two was not a rational number, the Pythagoreans regretted it.
We can regret truths even when it is logically impossible that these
truths be false’.13
Although a sentence such as “I regret the fact that the circle
cannot be squared” is perfectly correct linguistically—compared with,
say, “I remorse the fact that the circle cannot be squared”—I am
doubtful that someone could feel regret about this fact. Has anyone,
ever, genuinely regretted this fact? Could a human be pained at the
thought that the circle just will not be squared? Perhaps someone,
somewhere, really could regret this. I am not sure whether this
could be settled one way or another (there is the possibility, no
matter how slim, that tomorrow one meets such a person). Thus, I
will not say definitively that one cannot regret logical impossibilities,
at least in the sense of it being impossible to do so. What I will insist
on is that it is always irrational to do so and that it is at the very limit
of the possibilities of human psychology. I also insist that when
people do express “regret” about things such as the fact that spring
is over or that all fun must come to an end, they are not feeling
regret in the standard way that is felt (i.e., a somewhat painful wish
that one had acted otherwise). In short, they are not expressing the
emotion of regret. Instead, they are sad or disappointed that spring
has ended or that fun must come to an end, which is then labelled
as regret. Consequently, I agree with Daniel Jacobson’s view that
‘ordinary language is especially misleading with respect to emotion
terms’.14 We should not be guided too much by how we can use the
word “regret” when deciding how to understand it best.
As Jacobsen explains, “regret” can be used to express either an
evaluative judgement or an emotion.15 It is deployed as an
evaluative judgement when we articulate the wish that things were
otherwise, even if, in some cases, they cannot be: “I regret to inform
you that your application has been unsuccessful”; “I regret that
Putin invaded Ukraine”; “I regret that Frank Ramsey died so young”.
However, these evaluative judgements are not in themselves a
feeling of regret and thus they do not express an affective state
(and, hence, an emotion) that we should call “regret”. They are,
instead, either dispassionate assessments of events in the world or
else expressions of feelings that are characterised more accurately
as, say, anger or sadness (“I am angry that Putin invaded Ukraine”;
“I am sad that Frank Ramsey died so young”). Thus, we can say that
we “regret” something, and this is linguistically intelligible, without
actually regretting it, in the sense of being in the affect-laden
emotional state of regret. This is because, in order to experience
regret-the-emotion, we must feel the pain of self-reproach and be
subject to some of its standard action-tendencies (wanting to undo
what we did; resolving to avoid making the same mistake again).
Appreciating that the idea of regret can be used to express an
evaluative judgement is, I think, how to make sense of Sussman’s
“regret” that the circle cannot be squared. One may judge that it
would be better, in some sense (although I struggle to see what
sense), that the circle cannot be squared, but I think that
experiencing the emotion of regret about this fact is simply not
possible. If it is possible, then it is deeply mistaken. After all, it
would be highly unusual to resolve to act differently or to beat
oneself up about a metaphysical impossibility, but these are core
features of regret. This distinction enables us to explain how we can
use the word “regret” in meaningful English sentences without
thereby referring to an emotion. This, in turn, means that we can
argue for the narrow, specific nature of regret—the pain of self-
reproach about one’s mistakes—whilst acknowledging the linguistic
coherence of “regretting”, say, the world’s failure to tackle global
warming. What we should not do is assume that such “regretting” is
an expression of the emotion of regret and, therefore, that an
account of regret as an emotion should accommodate this type of
regret.
A further reason to avoid being guided too much about how we
can use the word “regret” when defining it is because its usage has
changed over time. The word emerged in the Middle Ages, when it
meant both to look back with distress or sorrowful longing, and to
grieve for something. Thus, I could regret someone or something
that I have lost, in the sense of missing or mourning them/it. It
seems to be connected to the Old English grætan (to weep) and/or
Old Norse grata (to weep; to groan). The modern version of the
word has largely dropped this more sorrowful element. It would
sound strained to the modern ear, if someone said that they were
“weeping with regret”. It has also shifted to the things that we do,
rather than the things that happen in the world, at least in terms of
the typical regrets that people have. Consequently, common usage
seems more aligned with bitterness, annoyance, or even anger,
given the common element of self-reproach in our regrets (“D’oh!”;
“How could I have been so stupid?!”). Given its shifting meaning,
asserting that the way we currently use the term is how we should
use it, is to assume what needs to be proven.
This point may be seen to conflict with my argument for the
specificity condition. If the meaning of regret changes over time,
why think that it picks out a distinct emotion? The issue of how we
should understand / identify / carve up the range of human
emotions is a large and complex one. I am not even sure that it has
a clear or complete solution. To state my view very briefly, I
understand the range of emotions we experience to be a complex
product of physiology, psychology, and culture. Our bodies are able
to generate a dizzying array of different, momentary psycho-
physiological states through the release of neurochemicals. Our
“feelings” are clearly connected to this: tweak the neurochemical
balance and one will feel differently. However, equally clearly, how
we talk about emotions shapes how we feel; it may even shape what
we can feel. To learn about emotional terms like “smug” and
“disgruntled” is to expand the descriptive range through which we
make sense of and communicate how we feel.
I do not know whether one should say that each unique
emotional term picks out an ontologically unique state of feeling (or,
one might say, a particular complex of neurochemicals), but they do
allow us to offer more fine-grained descriptions of our emotional
states. Thus, we can distinguish between feeling giddy and gleeful;
frustrated and impatient; fearful and trepidatious. This is useful,
both for understanding precisely how we feel—and, thus, how we
are—and for informing other people about this (which, in turn, helps
them to understand us and to know how to respond/interact with
us). It is a reasonable question to ask someone, including oneself,
which of these paired terms they are feeling (and, of course, the
answer could be “both”). Perhaps the colour palette is a useful
analogy here. We can almost endlessly subdivide colours or we can
use very broad terms. We can say “blue” or “sapphire, azure, cobalt,
navy, turquoise, aquamarine, etc.”. To see sapphire is to see
something subtly different to cobalt, just as, I argue, to feel remorse
is to feel something subtly different to regret. In terms of the
changing meaning of regret, I think that it is likely that its usage in
the Middle Ages picked out one specific feeling / emotional
experience and that its current usage picks out another. Thus, the
change in its use is a change in the specific emotional state that it
correlates with. I admit that this is rather speculative, but I think
that it is at least plausible.
Even if one denies that emotional terms are picking out
ontologically unique emotional states (in the way that shades of
colour pick out physically distinct colours, grounded in wavelengths),
I still think that it is better to distinguish between subtly different
emotions. Think of rain: we can carve up rain into ever more distinct
formations (drizzle; mizzle; squall, shower; downpour), or we can
just say “rain”, without assuming that forms of rain are natural kinds.
Distinguishing types of rain provides a richness to our experience
and our capacity to describe the world that simply having the
generic word “rain” does not. Regarding our emotions, the wider our
emotional language—the more fine-grained our emotional terms—
the better able we are to describe and to shape the deep, complex
emotional texture of our lives (regardless of whether they correctly
correlate with ontologically unique emotional states). In this regard,
Tiffany Watt Smith’s The Book of Human Emotions describes around
150 different emotions, including gems such as “umpty”—‘a feeling
of everything being “too-much” and all in the wrong way’16—and
malu—used by the people of Dusun Baguk in Indonesia to describe
‘the sudden experience of feeling constricted, inferior and awkward
around people of higher status than us’.17 If we can formulate
unique, discrete emotions, then I think that we should, as this
enhances our ability to make sense of and to communicate how we
are feeling. It helps us to paint a richer, more detailed landscape of
our emotional lives. This is one reason why I endorse the specificity
condition and apply it to my analysis of regret.
Finally, it is clear that the experience of regret is not a pleasant
one. It is very hard to imagine someone wanting to regret
something or enjoying their regrets, although I suppose one might
in the same way that a masochist enjoys pain. Thus, I think it is
reasonable to assume that our lives are better if they contain fewer
regrets. This is both because of the negative experiential quality of
regret (it hurts) and because regret is often about our mistakes—
things we wish that we had not done—and so fewer regrets
suggests we have made fewer mistakes, and fewer mistakes
suggests that we have made better decisions and thus crafted
happier or more satisfying lives. Given this, it would be useful if an
account of regret was able to show that some, perhaps many, of our
regrets were unwarranted and that we should reject them. In other
words, it would be nice if there was a therapeutic value to how we
understand regret.
I say “nice”, as I do not think that this should figure in how we do
define regret and determine when we ought to regret. Rather, it
would be a welcome benefit of an account of regret if it had a kind
of therapeutic value. At a minimum, perhaps it could function as a
“tie-breaker”, if we could not decide between different accounts of
regret. Conversely, it may be a mark against an account of regret if
it justifies our having a great deal of regrets. As it happens, I think
that my account of regret does have this therapeutic value, whereas
several competing accounts seem to give us reason to regret a great
deal of things, or, at least, they provide no reason not to regret
them. Based on my understanding of regret, I argue that we ought
not to regret a lot of the things that we do regret and that we often
ought not to worry about whether we will regret what we are
doing.18 Thus, reading this book does not promise you a life free
from regret, but it will, I hope, help you to understand and analyse
your regrets, to work out when you should accept your regrets and
when you should reject them. It may even prevent fewer regrets
from arising in the first place and reduce any worry or anxiety you
might experience about coming to regret the things you do.

1.3. What Regret Is (and What It Is Not)

As I hope to have made clear, regret, as an emotion, is more than
just a judgement about the state of the world. It is also affective: it
has a particular feel to it. However, both elements—thought and
feeling—are integral components of regret. As Landman observes,
‘regret is conceptually, logically, and experientially a matter of
thought and feeling as interdependent and co-constitutive’.19
Similarly, Gilovich and Medvec conclude that ‘there is general
consensus that regret is an unusually cognitively-laden or
cognitively-determined emotion’.20 The feeling of regret is a negative
one; it is, Scarre notes, ‘essentially painful’.21 More specifically, I
consider the phenomenological core of regret to be “kicking oneself”
or “beating oneself up” for a mistake that one made. We can thus
call the constitutive feeling of regret “self-reproach” or “self-
recrimination”. As for the thoughts, I do not think there is a single
constitutive thought of regret. Rather, as we have seen, regret can
be characterised by thoughts such as “I have made a mistake”, “I
wish I had not done that”, “I should have acted differently”, or “What
an idiot I am!”. There are almost endless variations of these
thoughts. What matters is that they express the belief that one
made a mistake and, thus, it would have been better if one had
acted differently. They also need to express the belief that one was
responsible for what happened; that what happened was a result of
one’s agency. Perhaps we can say that the “type” thought is that one
has made a mistake, which can be expressed via a wide range of
“token” thoughts.
Consequently, I think that Jacobson gets it mostly right when he
describes regret as ‘the syndrome of painful feelings of self-reproach
focused on [one’s] blunder and its disastrous consequences,
accompanied by the wish to undo the error and the intention to act
differently next time’.22 The only issue I take with this is the idea
that regret must be about, or even is just typically about, “disastrous
consequences”. Many of our regrets are about things we did that
had relatively trivial outcomes, such as forgetting a friend’s birthday,
embarrassing ourselves at a party, or making a poor purchase. What
is true is that the intensity of our regret—the level of self-
chastisement—tends to correlate with the perceived disastrousness
of the outcome (I discuss this in Chapter 2). Tweaking slightly
Jacobson’s definition, I define regret as “the painful feeling of self-
reproach for making a mistake”.
This distinguishes regret from similar emotions, such as guilt,
remorse, and disappointment. One important thing to note is that,
on this view, regret is not a moral emotion. It is not about
transgressing a moral norm but, rather, acting poorly. Contrast this
with guilt, which is about transgressing a moral norm (e.g.,
committing a crime; failing to fulfil an obligation). Of course, one can
act poorly by transgressing a moral norm, in which case one will
experience both guilt and regret. However, one can feel guilty
without regretting what one has done. For example, you may be
blackmailed into stealing from someone. You feel guilty for
committing theft, but you have no regret as you were blackmailed
and thus do not think that you acted poorly (although you may
regret an action that resulted in your being susceptible to blackmail).
Conversely, one can feel regret without feeling guilty, such as when
you miss your flight because you took too long packing your bag.
Remorse is very much like guilt, but seems to pertain primarily to
wronging or harming another person and also contains an element
of repentance, of wishing to make amends (recall that emotions can
be distinguished by their action-tendency as well as by how they
feel). Remorse also contains a stronger sense of blameworthiness
and responsibility: I may feel guilty about what my brother did you
to, but it would seem wrong to feel remorse about this. As with guilt,
I can feel regret without feeling remorse, and vice versa. Of course,
I can experience any combination of these emotions. Indeed, this
may be typical, but it should not lead us to deny that they are or
should be treated as distinct emotions.
My definition of regret thus satisfies the specificity condition. In
contrast, consider Bittner’s definition of regret: ‘a painful feeling
about something we did which we think was bad’.23 Assuming “bad”
is used in both its non-moral (e.g., a “bad” bit of acting or a “bad”
essay) and moral (a “bad” decision to lie) senses, then this could
apply equally to regret, guilt, remorse, lamentation, sorrow, etc. The
same can be said of the definitions offered by Landman and Bagnoli
respectively: ‘regret is a more or less painful judgement and state of
feeling sorry for misfortunes, limitations, losses, shortcomings,
transgressions, or mistakes’;24 regret ‘is a somewhat painful
experience originated by a kind of counterfactual reasoning, a
thought experiment about what might have been instead’.25 These
definitions are not completely wrong, but they are only partially
right. What they omit is the crucial element of believing that one
made a mistake and, therefore, the specific nature of regret’s painful
feeling, namely self-reproach.
I am not ploughing a completely lonely furrow here. I have
already quoted Jacobson’s view of what regret is, which largely
accords with mine. Chris Cowley asserts that ‘in contrast to its broad
use in ordinary language, I want to take regret as essentially
referring only to voluntary choices in the past’.26 In another paper,
he distinguishes regret from disappointment, nostalgia, lamenting,
and remorse, arguing that these other feelings lack the sense of
personal choice and control that is constitutive of regret (except
remorse, but this has a moral dimension that regret lacks).27
Philippa Foot notes that, in the normal case, we use regret to refer
to our choices or actions, and it expresses our belief that we ought
not to have done what we did. This is contrasted with sadness (or
disappointment, or some related feeling) at the bad things that befall
us: ‘If one is burgled, one is sad about having been burgled; but it is
the burglar, if anyone, who regrets the burglary, whereas what one
oneself regrets is carelessness in locking up’.28 D’Arms and Jacobson
write, ‘What we regret, paradigmatically, are our bad choices or
actions: Our mistakes, in a word. . . . In the sense of regret on
which we will focus here, it involves reproaching oneself for a
decision’.29 They do note that we can regret things other than our
mistakes, although it is regret about our mistakes that is ‘clearly the
standard case’.30 Finally, Sugden argues that a key component of
regret ‘is self-recrimination or repentance or self-blame—the state of
mind you have when you come to believe that a previous decision
involved an error of judgement, that it was wrong at the time you
made it’.31 Finally, as I discuss in Section 5.6, Aristotle, the Stoics,
and Descartes seem to understand regret in much the same way
that I do.
Whilst I may not be alone in how I understand regret, I deviate
from the most well-known, and likely the most influential,
philosophical discussion of it. According to Bernard Williams, ‘the
constitutive thought of regret in general is something like “how
much better if it had been otherwise”, and the feeling can in
principle apply to anything of which one can form some conception
of how it might have been otherwise, together with consciousness of
how things would then have been better’.32 Thus, to regret is to
think how much better things could have been. Within this sentence,
Williams seems to swap or to merge the constitutive thought of
regret with the feeling of regret. I am not sure whether this is a
mere slippage by Williams or something that he intended. Either
way, it seems odd. The thought “how much better if things had been
otherwise” is not a feeling and no particular feeling need attend this
thought. I can formulate the abstract thought (i.e., the
dispassionate, evaluative judgement) that the world would be much
better if it were different in some way—for example, the world would
be much better if there were more trees—without feeling anything
about this. Rather, it is simply the case that I believe that more trees
would make the world much better. No feelings of sadness or
happiness or whatever must accompany this thought (even though I
think it is true that the world would be much better if it had more
trees).33 Thus, the “constitutive thought” of regret identified by
Williams is not itself a feeling and is not necessarily accompanied or
followed by a feeling. It also does not necessitate a particular
feeling.
Furthermore, “constitutive” indicates that the essential element of
regret is the thought “How much better if things had been
otherwise”. However, to reiterate a key point, I can formulate the
thought that things would be much better if they had been
otherwise without thinking I am regretting something or feeling
regret. Instead, I might feel sad or disappointed, rather than
regretful (as happens to be the case when I think about the number
of trees in the world that have been chopped down). Indeed, what
Williams seems to think is “regrettable” is better termed
“unfortunate”. Of course, Williams’s thought may be a necessary
component of regret, but not a sufficient one. It could be an
essential element of multiple emotions and an additional, essential
element is required to cause us to regret something. As it happens,
this does not seem to be Williams’s view. At least, he does not
specify any such additional constitutive thought of regret. Instead,
he establishes this as the constitutive thought of regret in general.34
Williams’s “constitutive thought” is a counterfactual, comparative
one. It asserts that X happened, Y could have happened, and Y
would have been better (at least in some relevant respect(s)).
However, as I have suggested, simply running this counterfactual
comparison need not result in, or involve, regret. Imagine that I am
at a friend’s house for supper. I look at the small, unappetizing plate
of risotto in front of me, compare it with being served a large curry
instead, and feel disappointment and/or sadness that I was given
risotto.35 Even though I think to myself, “How much better if things
had been otherwise”, I do not regret that my friend cooked risotto.
As I show in the next section, the distinction between
disappointment and regret is a real and important one. Regret
involves thinking about how I could have acted differently, whereas
disappointment involves thinking about how external events could
have turned out differently. To develop the above example, I regret
ordering the risotto instead of the curry in a restaurant, whilst I am
disappointed if my friend cooked risotto for me instead of curry.
In summary, there are two issues with Williams’s “constitutive
thought”. The first is that it is not sufficient for regret: one can have
this thought but not experience regret. The second is that it does
not distinguish regret from similar emotions, such as disappointment
and sadness. If there is a “constitutive thought” of regret, it is
something like “Things would be better if I had acted differently”,
although it would also need to include something like the thought
“What I did was a mistake”. One may think that the one thought
implies the other. However, as I argue below, we can acknowledge
that things would be better if we had acted differently without
thinking that we have made a mistake. This occurs when we made
the best decision we could, given the information available to us at
the time. Indeed, this claim is central to my account of when we
should regret what we have done (when it is fitting or apt or
appropriate to regret).
One may be thinking that this is too much verbal quibbling or
unnecessary, and perhaps unconvincing, conceptual analysis. To put
it bluntly, does any of this matter? I think it does. I have already
argued that it is preferable to distinguish emotions and thus to
formulate more, discrete emotions. In addition, as I noted above
and set out in detail later, there is a therapeutic value in adopting my
narrow definition of regret. Restricting regret to our mistakes—and
accepting the account of “mistake” that I defend in Chapter 3—
shows that many of our regrets are incoherent and/or inappropriate.
Thus, I claim, we regret a lot of things that we ought not to regret
and so we should have fewer—possibly far fewer—regrets than we
do. In contrast, a broad view of regret will view these regrets as
intelligible and even appropriate. Thus, they do not seem to be able
to exert a normative force towards rejecting at least some of one’s
regrets. Furthermore, as I discuss in Part II, the way that regret is
used as an argument against important life decisions, such as having
an abortion or changing one’s sex/gender, often invokes the belief
that such decisions are mistakes and the person’s regret is used as
evidence in support of this view. Thus, the fact that regret is taken
to indicate that the person made a mistake is central to the political
use of regret (or, to put it differently, the politicization of regret).
Consequently, I hope to show that what we understand regret to be
affects how we understand and judge our regrets and the regrets of
other people, and thus the place that regret does and should occupy
in our lives. Finally, my account of regret fits with the evidence from
psychology that almost all of people’s reported regrets are about
mistakes that they think they have made, as I show in the next
section.

1.4. The Psychology of Regret

I think that support for what I have said about regret can be drawn
from the extensive psychological research into it. One important
finding is the connection between regret and personal
control/responsibility.36 For example, Frijda et al. examined the
differentiation of thirty-two emotions. What they termed “self-
agency” (measured by the question “Were you responsible for what
happened or had happened”) was typically associated with regret.37
As Zeelenberg et al. summarise the research on this issue, ‘the more
a decision maker perceives him- or herself to be responsible for a
negative outcome, the more regret he or she experiences’.38 This
means that ‘there is no reason for regret following negative
outcomes that were not caused by the decision maker him- or
herself, that he or she could not prevent happening, and for which
he or she does not feel responsible. Other negative emotions, such
as disappointment, frustration, anger, or sadness, may be
experienced in these situations, but not regret’.39 This is also made
clear by Roese and Summerville. In their analysis of people’s regrets,
they assert that ‘the individual must believe that actions have been
freely chosen . . . If actions have been constrained by outside forces,
the individual seizes on these external attributions and hence feels
no dissonance, no regret, and no self-blame’.40 This is reflected in
their finding that, almost exclusively, what people regret is choices
that they wish they had made differently.
The issue of regret and personal responsibility connects with
another research focus, which is the distinction between regret and
disappointment.41 Whilst they have much in common, there are also
substantial differences between them. Perhaps most importantly,
although both of these involve counterfactual comparison, regret is
grounded in behaviour-focused counterfactual thought, whereas
disappointment is grounded in situation-focused counterfactual
thought.42 As Zeelenberg et al. explain, ‘regret is assumed to
originate from comparisons between the factual outcome and an
outcome that might have been had you chosen another action;
disappointment is assumed to originate from a comparison between
the factual outcome and an outcome that might have been had
another state of the world occurred’.43 Whilst they write “assumed”,
as this is the orthodox view in psychology and decision-theory, they
conducted studies that confirmed this assumption.
Zeelenberg et al. report that regret and disappointment are also
differentiated by what they call their respective “phenomenology”.44
In their study, participants were asked to recall an occasion on which
they felt either intense regret or disappointment. They were then
presented with questions about their feelings, thoughts, action-
tendencies, actions, and emotivational goals when experiencing
either regret or disappointment (thus replicating the method used by
Roseman et al. on differentiating emotions). The results showed that
the two emotions differed along each of these dimensions.
Specifically, regret ‘involves feeling more intensely that one should
have known better, thinking about what a mistake one has made,
having a tendency to kick oneself and to correct one’s mistake, and
wanting to undo the event and get a second chance’.45 In contrast,
disappointment ‘involves feeling powerless, feeling a tendency to do
nothing and get away from the situation, actually turning away from
the event, and wanting to do nothing’.46 This supports the assertion
that regret is behaviour-focused and disappointment is situation-
focused. Another way of putting this is that regret is inward-looking,
as I assess negatively something that I have done, whereas
disappointment is outward-looking, as I assess negatively something
that has happened in the world.47 Research has also shown that
regret is often focused on a non-obtained goal and promotes goal-
persistence, whilst disappointment is more likely to result in goal-
abandonment; regret is linked with the changing of behaviour, whilst
disappointment is linked with complaining; regret increases pro-
social behaviour, whilst disappointment reduces it.48 Thus, there
many ways in which regret and disappointment can be differentiated
as distinct emotions.
There is also strong evidence for regret’s ability to improve
decision-making.49 First and foremost, because the experience of
regret is painful and targets our decisions, regret can both (a)
motivate us to make better choices in the future; and (b) ensure
that we remember our mistakes, so that we learn from them. When
we regret, we focus on how we erred and, thus, can identify how to
act better in the future. As Zeelenberg writes, ‘Although it is painful
to remember regretful mistakes, it is functional to do so when it
helps us to prevent the same mistakes in the future’.50 For example,
regretting your failure to spend enough time writing your essay can
help you to work harder on the next essay. Similarly, by anticipating
regret, we can avoid behaviour that we are likely to regret (“I know I
will regret this in the morning”). This can work in tandem with
remembering one’s regret about a similar decision (“I really
regretted this last time I did it”). Thus, the pain of regret is a
double-edged sword. It is in itself unpleasant, which is bad for our
subjective well-being, but precisely because it is unpleasant, it can
facilitate rational decision-making. As Saffrey et al. note, ‘Current
theory therefore frames regret as a trade-off involving behavioral
benefits balanced against affective costs’.51

1.5. Are There “Types” of Regret?

I am claiming that we should use “regret” to denote the painful
feeling of self-reproach that we experience when we think that we
have made a mistake and, therefore, that things would be better if
we had acted differently. This is what regret is; anything that lacks
these elements is not regret and is likely better characterised as
disappointment or frustration or sorrow, etc. Contrary to my view,
Carolyn Price suggests that regret comes in a range of “flavours”.52
By this she means that there is a set of feelings that characterise
different types of regret. Specifically, she identifies five “flavours” or
“forms” of regret:

1. Hot regret, which involves feelings of agitation, frustration, and urgency.

Price’s example of this is accidentally turning down a career-changing
opportunity.
2. Despairing regret, which involves feelings of misery, sorry, and emptiness.
Price’s example of this is failing to have spent time with a loved one who
then dies unexpectedly.
3. Wistful regret, which involves a yearning for, and fantasizing about, what
might have been. Price’s example of this is turning down an opportunity to
study art in Italy because one was too timid.
4. Sickened regret, which involves feeling sickened at one’s decision and
recoiling from the memory of it. Price’s example of this is voting to kill a
proposal for a community campaign against a road scheme, only to discover
that the road scheme will require that one’s home is destroyed.
5. Bitter regret, which involves reflecting with bitterness on what one did,
perhaps also vacillating between resentment of one’s past self (“How could I
have been so stupid?”) and self-pity (“How could I have known?”). Price’s
example of this is rejecting a major role in a film that turned out to be a
major hit.53

If these are genuinely distinct types of regret, then they each may
have their own normative conditions, that is, conditions under which
it is appropriate to experience them. This, in turn, would mean that
there is no single account of when we should regret. Given that I
argue that there is a single account, it is important to see whether
Price’s view is convincing. An initial point to pick up is that, with
regard to “hot regret”, Price denies that self-recrimination is a
necessary feature of it. This is noteworthy, given that I have claimed
that self-recrimination is an essential feature of regret. In Price’s
example of hot regret, Holly accidentally turns down a career-
changing opportunity. Price claims that, ‘While Holly may well be
kicking herself, it is also possible that her attention is wholly
consumed by the magnitude of her blunder’.54 What Price means
here is that, if Holly is focused solely on her blunder, then she will
not reproach myself for what she has done. Her attention is entirely
on what has happened, rather than what she has done, and so her
regret lacks an element of self-reproach. If this is coherent, then we
have an intensely felt regret that lacks what I have claimed to be the
affective core of regret.
I think there are two ways of making sense of this example in
order to support my view that self-recrimination is indeed an
essential part of regret. If Holly is completely consumed by the
missed opportunity, without thinking at all about the fact that she is
responsible for it, then we should not characterise her as
experiencing regret. Instead, we can say that she is devastated by
the missed opportunity and perhaps experiences something like
dismay (“Oh no, what has happened?!”). It is only when she then
thinks, “I should never have turned down that opportunity!” that
regret kicks in, precisely because it is at this point that her thoughts
turn to what she did and she starts to recriminate herself.
Alternatively, if Holly is consumed by her blunder, then, it seems to
me, she is recriminating herself, precisely because she knows what
she has done is a blunder. After all, to blunder is to make a stupid or
careless mistake; to experience something as a blunder is to think
that one ought to have acted differently. Insofar as I recognise that I
acted stupidly and carelessly, then, it seems to me, I must chastise
myself. Surely to be consumed by one’s blunder is to think, in
anguish, “What have I done?!”. In other words, if Holly focuses
solely on the outcome, the missed opportunity, then she cannot
experience regret, because she is not thinking about what she has
done. Alternatively, if Holly focuses on what she has done, her
blunder, then the anguish she feels is surely, at least in part, by self-
recrimination. Thus, I think that one can explain how self-
recrimination is an essential element of hot regret.
What about Price’s main claim about the varieties of regret? As
she acknowledges, one could argue that each of these examples
involves the experience of regret, coupled with other feelings, such
as resentment, frustration, anger, or yearning.55 However, she
rejects this on the basis that we cannot identify the phenomenology
of pure regret as something distinct from these other feelings. For
example, if regret is a sad emotion, then sadness seems absent in
the case of hot regret; if regret is akin to frustration or anger, then
these feelings are absent in the case wistful regret. ‘Hence’, she
concludes, ‘it is far from clear that these different regretful
experiences share a common phenomenological core’.56 Price does
not consider the sting of self-recrimination as regret’s
phenomenological core, presumably because she has already argued
that this is not a necessary part of hot regret. However, given that I
think we can, and should, construe self-recrimination to be part of
hot regret, then it is a candidate for the phenomenological core of
regret. Indeed, Price notes that self-recrimination can be a part of all
flavours of regret, although she claims that it need not be present.
Instead, ‘its presence or absence is a further respect in which
experiences of regret can differ’.57
Contrary to this, I think that self-recrimination is a main way in
which regret differs from other emotions, rather than it being one
way in which regrets differ from one another. It could be a quite mild
sting, but regret must be painful in a particular way (the way that
marks it off as regret), and a plausible charaterisation of this is
something like “beating oneself up” or “being annoyed with oneself”.
Indeed, I think one can see easily how self-recrimination, even if
only mild, is present in hot, despairing, sickened, and bitter regrets.
The more interesting and challenging case is wistful regret. Price is
right that we do look back at our past decisions and think, “What if .
. .”, perhaps with a gentle sigh and the thought of what might have
been, but without any element of self-chastisement. If this is a
genuine case of regret, then it could well challenge my view, as
there does seem to be an absence of self-recrimination here. One
does not criticise oneself for the decision one made. Instead, one
simply mulls over how things could have turned out differently.
I think that it is important to distinguish between, on the one
hand, thinking about how things could have gone differently, and, on
the other hand, thinking that one really should have acted
differently. I assume that many of us often engage in this first
mental activity. It can be interesting, instructive, and even fun, and
it is probably unavoidable, to reflect on how one’s life would have
turned out if different choices had been made and different
opportunities pursued. I sometimes mull over being a drummer or
living in a sustainable eco-community in a forest (remnants of my
more musical and hippyish days, respectively). I do not regret my
past decisions that foreclosed these possibilities, but I still think
about the different kinds of life I could have had and the valuable,
rewarding experiences they may have contained.58 In reflecting on
the roads not taken, one may even yearn for some of the elements
that they contain, which one’s present life cannot. No life can
contain or satisfy the full plethora of values and preferences that one
holds. Every life involves loss, but this is an unavoidable and
unproblematic consequence of having to lead a life (and we must
not lose sight of the fact that the life we lead contains many things
we value and enjoy). None of this, however, should be construed in
terms of, or give rise to, regret.
I think this is part of the lesson imparted by Kieran Setiya in his
book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide.59 One of the main themes that
Setiya explores is the experience of reaching a certain age and
realizing that this is the life that one is going to lead; that other
possibilities, other hopes and dreams, are not going to be realised.
This realization prompts you to ask yourself whether the life you are
now committed to contains successes or failures, value or emptiness,
contentment or regret, which in turn can result in the famed “midlife
crisis”. Setiya thinks that this “crisis” is, ultimately, about the
irreversibility of time, the experience of mistakes that cannot be
undone, and the way that the seemingly infinite possibilities of youth
slowly but inexorably retract to what can feel like a stiflingly narrow
range. However, Setiya is keen to emphasise that life necessarily
involves loss; it necessarily involves missing out on things, because
no single human life could incorporate the full range of things one
values and enjoys. I cannot be a professional tennis player and an
artist and a devoted parent and a wild party animal. Nevertheless,
this is not something to be lamented or frustrated by. Rather, ‘It
reflects something wonderful: that there is so much to love and that
it is so various that one history could not encompass it all’.60
Consequently, ‘There is consolation in the fact that missing out is an
inexorable side effect of the richness of human life’.61
It may be thought that this “midlife”62 experience of the
inevitability of loss, missing out and the foreclosure of possibility,
which is an intrinsic part of the structure of a human life, is a cause
of inevitable regret, perhaps of the wistful kind that Price describes.
Maybe all of us will come to have regrets when we reflect on the
lives we could have lived and the opportunities that we let slip by.
However, whilst Setiya does indeed have thoughts about possible
lives lived (now foreclosed) and opportunities missed, he also states
that they do not amount to regret. Writing of his decision to study
and pursue a career in philosophy, despite his youthful ambitions to
be a poet and thoughts of being a doctor, he declares, ‘I don’t regret
my decision’.63 This is the case even though, ‘when I run the
experiment, draw “doctor” or “poet” from the hat of personal history,
trace a branch in the tree of possibilities now cut off, I feel a sense
of loss that is not unlike regret’.64 This is important: not unlike
regret, and so not regret. Consequently, I do not think that this
fantasizing about what might have been constitutes regret and thus,
if this is the sort of thing that Price has in mind when writing of
“wistful regret”, then I think this label is inappropriate. We will
always be able to think wistfully about the alternative lives we could
have led, which will contain things of value that are absent from our
actual life. However, we need not, and should not, regret these
passed over alternatives.65
Carolyn Morrel’s interviews with women who chose not to have
children support this point. All but one of the women she spoke with
rejected the label “regretful” as a description of how they felt about
not having children.66 Indeed, most were very clear that they had no
regrets and thus were very happy with their life without children.
Nevertheless, some women ‘tended to relate specific occasions when
they experienced “wistful” feelings, or unsettling “rumblings,” or
“twinges” of doubt, or “passing thoughts” about the road not taken’.6
7 These tended to occur during moments of personal transition or

were prompted by significant events in their life, such as the death

of a family member or when someone close to them gave birth.
Importantly, such “rumblings” or “musings” were rarely described as
painful and were always distinguished from regret. One woman said
that when she turned forty, ‘I started wondering if I did the right
thing. . . . When you sit still long enough you start thinking: “Gee,
what do I want to do now? Well, gee, I can’t have kids now, that’s
not going to occupy my time”. In that context it’s come up now. But
it’s never come up as a real sadness or never come up as something
I’ve regretted. It’s only really been something I’ve mused about’.68
Another woman said that on one Fourth of July, when she and her
partner were on their own together, she thought what it would be
like to have children. However, ‘that was the only time, just one day
in all these years when I’ve kind of felt nostalgic about it. And it
wasn’t even a regret or it wasn’t a change of heart, but just the
thought, “how would it have been different if I had had kids on this
July 4th?” But that was the only time. And I haven’t had that feeling
since then’.69
I think that this shows that people do distinguish wistful thoughts
of what might have been from regret and, crucially, that it is
important for them that they do so. This is because it reflects their
abiding belief that they made the right decision and are happy with
it. They do not think they have made a mistake or a decision that
they would undo, if they could. Consequently, describing their
thoughts and feelings about what might have been as “regret” is too
strong: it suggests a negative attitude towards their choice that they
lack. To label their feeling “regret” may also be seen by them to be
incompatible with affirming the decisions they made and thus the life
they lead. Consequently, Price’s “wistful regret” ought not to be
called regret. We can, and should, restrict “regret” to the mistakes
we make and consider self-recrimination to be its phenomenological
core.

1.6. The Rational and Intelligible Limits of Reg

ret
The conception of regret that one adopts has important implications
for what one thinks that it is coherent and rational to regret. Of
course, everyone agrees that regret can be about our mistakes, and
our decisions more generally. Furthermore, many philosophers assert
that a/the major form of regret is “agent-regret”, which is regret
about the things that we do. Nevertheless, they still insist that this is
simply one type of the more general phenomenon of regret, which in
turn determines what can be regretted. Amelie Rorty states that
‘there are no limits on the range of objects extensionally identified as
objects of regret’.70 This means that ‘anything can in principle be
thought regrettable’, so long as it can be ‘thought to be in some way
bad, damaging, harmful’.71 Similarly, Bernard Williams asserts that
regret ‘can in principle apply to anything of which one can form
some conception of how it might have been otherwise, together with
consciousness of how things would then have been better’.72 R. Jay
Wallace gives the examples of regretting ‘the destruction of a distant
village through the eruption of a volcano, or the natural extinction of
an insect species in the Amazon forest’73 and I have already noted
Sussman’s suggestion that we can regret things ‘that we know to be
metaphysically or even logically necessary’, such as ‘the fact that the
circle cannot be squared’.74
Another random document with
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cease from active assertion of their claims, and that in the event of
more than one of them being present with the clan, precedence for
the occasion would be decided by lot.
 APPENDIX VII
GENEALOGICAL TABLES SHOWING THE
KINSHIP OF CERTAIN HIGHLAND CHIEFS AND
LEADERS IN 1745.

Note.—These tables have been compiled chiefly from the

genealogical information given in the third volume of the
History of Clan Donald.
Click here for a full-size version.
 APPENDIX VIII
LISTS OF CERTAIN HIGHLAND GENTLEMEN
WHO TOOK PART IN THE FORTY-FIVE [646]

MACDONALDS
Clanranald Branch

Ranald of Clanranald, chief.[647]

Ranald, young Clanranald.
Æneas, br. of Kinlochmoidart.
Allan of Morar.
Allan, brother of Kinlochmoidart.
Alexander of Boisdale, Clanranald’s brother.[647]
Alexander of Glenaladale, major.
Alexander, brother of Dalelea.
Alexander, his son.
Angus of Borradale.
Angus of Dalelea.
Angus Maceachain, Borradale’s son-in-law (surg. in Glengarry’s
regt.).
Donald, son of Clanranald.
Donald of Kinlochmoidart.
Hugh, bishop, br. of Morar.[647]
John of Guidale, br. of Morar.
James, uncle of Glenaladale.
James, br. of Kinlochmoidart.
John, son of Morar.
John, brother of Glenaladale.
John, son of Borradale. (Killed at Culloden.)
John (bis), son of Borradale (author of narrative, Lyon in
Mourning, vol. iii. p. 375).
John, doctor, br. of Kinlochmoidart.
Neil Maceachain.
Ranald, son of Borradale.
Ranald of Belfinlay.
Ranald, brother of Kinlochmoidart.
Ranald, son of Morar.
Roderick, uncle of Glenaladale.

Glengarry Branch

John of Glengarry, chief.[647]

Alastair, young Glengarry.
Alexander of Ochtera.
Angus, son of Glengarry.
Angus, br. of Lochgarry.
Allan, brother of Leek.
Allan of Cullachie.
Archibald, youngest Barisdale.
Coll, young Barisdale.
Donald of Lochgarry.
Donald of Lundie.
Donald, his son.
Donald, young Scotus.
John, his brother.
John of Arnabea.
John of Leek.
Ranald, doctor, uncle of Glengarry.
Ranald of Shian.
Ranald, brother of Leek.
Ronald, nat. son of Barisdale.
Ranald, brother of Arnabea.
Donald Roy Macdonald, brother of Baleshare of the Sleat
branch, served in Glengarry’s regt.

Keppoch Branch

Alexander of Keppoch, chief.

Alex, of Dalchosnie, Atholl Brig.
Allan, his son.
Angus, natural son of Keppoch.
Archibald, br. of Keppoch, capt.
Archibald of Clianaig.
Donald, brother of Keppoch, major.
Donald of Tirnadrish, major.
Donald Glass, son of Bohuntin.
John, br. of Dalchosnie, Atholl Brig.
John Og, son of Bohuntin.
Ranald of Aberarder.

Glencoe Branch

Alexander of Glencoe, chief.

James, his brother, captain.
Donald, his brother.
Donald, a Glencoe cadet (poet).

CAMERONS

Donald Cameron of Lochiel, chief.

John, his father (retired chief).
Alexander of Dungallon, major.
Alexander, his son, standard-bearer.
Alexander of Druimnasaille.
Alexander, br. of Lochiel, priest.
Alexander of Glenevis.
Allan of Lundavra, lieut.
Allan of Callart, lieut.
Allan, brother of Glenevis.
Archibald, doctor, br. of Lochiel, A.D.C. to Prince Charles.
Donald of Erracht.
Donald of Glenpean.
Duncan, Fortingal, Epis. chaplain.
Duncan, Nine Mile Water.
Ewen of Inverlochy, capt.
Ewen of Dawnie, capt.
Ewen, uncle of Callart.
Ewen, brother of Druimnasaille.
Hugh of Annock.
James, ensign, k’ld at Prestonpans.
John, brother of Callart.
Ludovick of Torcastle.
Cameron of Arroch, capt.
—— of Clunes.
—— of Kinlochleven.
—— of Strone.
John, Presb. minister, Fortwilliam.

MACKENZIES
Lord Cromartie’s Regiment

The Earl of Cromartie.

Lord Macleod, his son.
Colin Mackenzie, br. of Ballone, capt.
John of Ardloch, capt.
William, brother of Kilcoy, capt.
William, br. of Allangrange, capt.
Donald, Irnhavanny, capt.
Colin, Cullecuden, capt.
Donald, Fetterboy, capt.
John, Elgin, surgeon.
Alexander, br of Dundonald, lieut.
Roderick, br. of Keppoch, lieut.
Alexander of Corrie, lieut.
Hector Mackenzie, lieut.
Alexander, Miltown of Ord, lieut.
Alexander, Una Ross, lieut.
Alexander, Killend, ‘officer.’
Colin of Badluachrach, ‘officer.’

Barisdale’s Regiment

Alex. Mackenzie of Lentron, major.

Kenneth and Colin, his brothers.
Kenneth, brother of Fairburn, a schoolboy, capt.[648]
John Mackenzie of Torridon was a nephew of Macdonell of
Keppoch, and attached himself and his following to his uncle’s
regiment.

MACLEODS

Alexander, son of Muiravonside, A.D.C. to Prince Charles.

Donald of Bernera.
Donald of Gualtergil, Skye.
Malcolm of Raasa.
Malcolm, cousin of Raasa.
Murdoch, son of Raasa, surg.
John of Glendale.
Roderick, his brother.
Roderick of Cadboll.

MACKINNONS

John of Mackinnon, Skye, chief.

John, his nephew, Elgol, Skye.
John of Coriechattan.

MACLEANS

Sir Hector of Duart, chief, major in Lord John Drummond’s

French regiment; made prisoner in Edinburgh, 9th June ’45, and
retained in custody throughout the campaign.
Allan, son of Calgary, Mull, lieut.
Allan, son of Drimnin, Morvern.
Charles of Drimnin, major.
Hugh, son of Kilmory, Mull, capt.
John, writer, Inverness.
John, brother of Kingairloch, capt.
Another brother of Kingairloch.
Lachlan, nat. son of Drimnin.
 MACLACHLANS

Lachlan of Maclachlan, chief.

Alexander, son of Corrie, capt.
Alex. tidewaiter, Fortwilliam, major.
Archibald, Maryburgh, ensign.
Dugald, Inversanda, capt.
James, Morvern, lieut.
Kenneth of Kilinachanich, adj.
Lachlan of Inishconel, capt.
John, Rev., Epis. chaplain.

FRASERS

Simon, Lord Fraser of Lovat.

Simon, Master of Lovat.
Alexander of Fairfield, major.
Alexander, Stratherrick.
Alexander, son of Relich, capt.
Alexander, Leadchune.
Alexander of Balchreggan, capt.
Alexander, br. of Culduthel, capt.
Donald, Moy, capt.
Charles, yr. of Fairfield, adj.-gen.
Charles, yr. of Inverallochy, lt.-col.
Hugh, son of Fraserdale, capt.
Hugh of Leadclune.
Hugh, Mirton.
Hugh, Inverness, adj.
Hugh, Dorburn, Borlum.
Hugh, Littlegarth.
James of Foyers, lt.-col.
John, son of Moydie.
John, yr. of Bochruben.
John of Bruaich.
John, Kilmorach, ensign.
John, Byrefield, capt.
John, Rossie, Kincardine.
Simon, Dalhaple, capt.
Simon of Achnacloich, capt.
Simon of Auchnadonch, capt.
Simon, vintner, ‘officer.’
Thomas of Gortuleg.
William, yr. of Culbockie, capt.
William of Culmiln, capt.
William, Fort Augustus, capt.
William of Dalernig.

MACPHERSONS

Ewen of Cluny, chief.

Alexander, Kingussie.
Alexander, Blanchybeg.
Andrew, son of Benachar, capt.
Angus, Flichaty.
Donald of Breackachy, capt.
Donald, Ruthven, Badenoch.
Ewen, Laggan of Nood.
Ewen, Dalwhinny, lieut.-col.
Hugh, Coraldy.
John, Cluny.
John, Pitachran.
John, Garvamore, capt.
John of Strathmashie.
Kenneth, Ruthven, Badenoch.
Lachlan, yr. of Strathmashie.
Lewis, Delrady, major.
Malcolm (Dow), Ballachroan.
Malcolm of Phoyness, capt.
William, Ruthven.

MACINTOSHES

Lady Mackintosh of Mackintosh.

Alex. Macgillivray of Dunmaglas, lieut.-col.
 Gillise Macbain of Dalmagarrie, maj.
Alexander Mackintosh, Elrig, capt.
Angus Mackintosh of Farr, capt.
Angus of Issich.
Duncan, Drummond.
Lachlan, Inverness, lieut.-col.
Simon, Daviot.

FARQUHARSONS

Alex., Lintrethan, capt. (Ogilvy’s).

Charles, Drumnopark, Glenmuick, ensign.
Cosmus, junior, of Tombea.
Donald of Auchriachan, capt.
Francis of Monaltrie, colonel.
Francis, Bogg, Tarland, ensign.
Henry of Whitehouse, capt.
James of Balmoral, lieut.-col.
John of Altery, capt.
John, Lintrethan, lieut. (Ogilvy’s).
John of Aldlerg.
John, Bogg, Tarland, ensign.
Robert, Tullick, Glenmuick, ens.
Robert, Mill of Auchriachan, ens.
William of Broughderg, captain (Ogilvy’s).
William, Mill of Auchriachan, ens.
Farquharsons of Inverey, names not found.

For the Stewarts of Appin, see A List of Persons

concerned in the Rebellion, Scot. Hist. Soc., vol. viii. p.
383.
For the Grants of Urquhart and Glenmoriston,
see Urquhart and Glenmoriston, by William Mackay,
Inverness, 1893.
For The Gordons, see The House of Gordon (vol. iii.,
‘Gordons under Arms’), by J. M. Bulloch, New Spalding
Club, 1912.
 For the Atholl Regiments, see vol. iii. of Chronicles
of the Atholl and Tullibardine Families, by the Duke of
Atholl, Edinburgh, privately printed, 1896.
 FOOTNOTES:
[1] In this narrative, unless otherwise indicated, events
occurring in Great Britain are given in old style dates, those on
the Continent in new style.
[2] Original information on the Scots Plot is to be found in
The Life of Lord Lovat written by Himself, London, 1797; A
Collection of Original Papers about the Scots Plot, London,
1704; Original Papers, ed. by Jas. Macpherson, London, 1775;
Major Fraser’s Manuscript, ed. by Alex. Fergusson, Edinburgh,
1889; The Lockhart Papers, London, 1817; and an eclectic
account in Hill Burton’s Life of Lovat, London, 1847. Extracts
from many of the original authorities on this and subsequent
incidents are given usefully and ingeniously in consecutive
narrative form by Professor Sanford Terry in The Chevalier de
St. George, London, 1901.
[3] Original information: Histoire des Revolutions d’Ecosse
et d’Irlande: The Hague, 1758, of which there is a Dublin
reprint of 1761; The Secret History of Colonel Hooke’s
Negotiations in Scotland in 1707, of which there are London,
Edinburgh and Dublin editions, all of 1760 (it is practically a
translation of the Histoire des Revolutions); The
Correspondence of Colonel Nathaniel Hooke, an exhaustive
work edited by Rev. W. D. Macray: Roxburghe Club, 1870. A
not very friendly account of Hooke’s mission is given in the
Lockhart Papers. The military state of Scotland at the time is to
be found in An Account of the late Scotch Invasion as it was
opened by My lord Haversham in the House of Lords: London,
1709. The story of the naval expedition is given in Mémoires
du Comte de Forbin (Amsterdam, 1730), of which there is an
English translation; the third edition is dated London, 1740.
[4] The possibility of treachery was suggested by Hooke,
and his story is to be found in a Gask MS. Hooke, who had
been bred to the sea, found the steersman going on the wrong
course. He was put right, but as soon as Hooke’s back was
turned he went wrong again. See Jacobite Lairds of Gask, p.
15: London, 1870.
 [5] Esmond, bk. iii. chap. i.
[6] The authorities on the ’Fifteen are to be found noted in
most standard histories.
[7] This statement bears the authority of a MS. in the
Bibliothèque Nationale, and a casual reference in a letter of
Bishop Atterbury’s. (See Martin Haile, James Francis Edward,
the Old Chevalier: London, 1907, p. 210.)
[8] A full account from the original authorities of
Clementina’s rescue and marriage is to be found in Narratives
of the Detention, Liberation, and Marriage of Maria Clementina
Stuart, edited by J. T. Gilbert, LL.D.: Dublin, 1894.
[9] Clementina, by A. E. W. Mason.
[10] The best account of this expedition is in Mr. W. K.
Dickson’s exceedingly clear and exhaustive introduction to
The Jacobite Attempt, Scottish History Society, vol. xix.:
Edinburgh, 1895. All the original authorities for this incident
and the preceding Swedish plot are indicated in the Notes.
[11] Original authorities: Life of Christopher Layer: Norwich,
1723; Howell’s State Trials, vol. xvi. A full account is given by
Lord Mahon, History of England, chap. xii. The dispositions by
the Court at Rome are to be found in James Francis Edward,
M. Haile; and The King over the Water (London, 1907), A.
Shield and Andrew Lang.
[12] Hon. Arthur Dillon, second surviving son of Theobald,
seventh Viscount Dillon. Born at Roscommon, 1670. His father
raised a regiment for James ii. at the Revolution, which Arthur
accompanied to France, where he became its colonel, 1690.
Served in Spain, Germany, and Italy. Lieut.-General under the
Duke of Berwick at Barcelona, 1714. Created viscount
(Jacobite) in the peerage of Ireland, 1717. Created earl
(Jacobite) in the peerage of Scotland, 1721. Made Knight of
the Thistle, 1722. Died at Paris, 1733.—Ruvigny, Jacobite
Peerage.
[13] Shield and Lang, The King over the Water, pp. 360,
363.
[14] Mahon, History of England, chap. xii.
[15] Ruvigny, Jacobite Peerage, p. 16.
 [16] It is worthy of note that although the new Scots
Peerage as a rule chronicles the Jacobite titles conferred on
Scottish nobles, there is no mention of this peerage to Sir
James Grant in that work (see Scots Peerage, vol. vii. pp. 480-
483), nor is it referred to in his biography in the Grant family
history (Sir W. Fraser, The Chiefs of Grant, vol. i. pp. 371-392).
For the action of the Grants in the ’Forty-five, see infra, p. 269
et seq.
[17] The Lockhart Papers are the principal authority for
Jacobite history in Scotland from 1702 to 1728.
[18] James Urquhart was the only son of Jonathan
Urquhart of Cromarty and his wife Lady Jean Graham,
daughter of the second Marquis of Montrose. Jonathan was
the last of the Urquharts who owned the estate of Cromarty,
famous owing to its possession by Sir Thomas Urquhart, the
translator of Rabelais. Jonathan’s affairs having got into
disorder, he sold his ancestral property to George Mackenzie,
Viscount Tarbat, who was created Earl of Cromartie in 1703.
James Urquhart married Anne Rollo, daughter of Robert Rollo
of Powhouse, and had an only child, Grizel, who died
unmarried. Colonel Urquhart ‘was a man of noble spirit, great
honour, and integrity; he served in the wars both in Spain and
Flanders with great reputation, but left the Army, and lived a
retired life.... In him ended the whole male line of John, only
son of the first marriage of John, tutor of Cromarty ... the
representation devolved upon William Urquhart of Meldrum’
(Douglas, Baronage). Colonel Urquhart was born in 1691, and
died on January 3rd, 1741 (Family papers). His appointment
as Jacobite Agent for Scotland is dated May 28th, 1736
(Ruvigny, Jacobite Peerage, p. 234).
[19] Not the famous conqueror of Almanza, who was killed
in the War of the Polish Succession when besieging
Philipsburg, on June 28th, 1734, but his son, known until then
as the Duke of Liria.
[20] His commission as colonel is dated October 22nd,
1715.—Ruvigny, Jacobite Peerage, p. 244.
[21] For general information about Gordon of Glenbucket,
the reader is referred to Mr. J. M. Bulloch’s monumental work,
The House of Gordon (New Spalding Club, Aberdeen, 1912).
For Glenbucket’s character and his actions in 1745, see infra,
p. 113 et seq. It is remarkable how the designation ‘of
Glenbucket’ has adhered to the family for generations,
although the land from which it was derived was parted with a
hundred and seventy-nine years ago. Gordon’s descendants
are still tenants of the farm of St. Bridget’s, in Glenlivet, which
was old Glenbucket’s home in 1745, and are still termed
‘Glenbucket’ in the district. For the Macdonell marriages see
the genealogies in History of Clan Donald, vol. iii.
[22] M. Haile, James Francis Edward, p. 367.
[23] French historians generally blame Fleury for his
timidity, and ascribe to him the decline of the splendid French
navy, which he allowed to fall into decay for fear of English
jealousy.
[24] The commission is dated January 28th, 1738. See
Stuart Papers in Browne’s History of the Highlands, vol. iv. p.
21.
[25] See infra, p. 25.
[26] The terms of this message are given from a state
paper in the French Archives of which the following is an
extract: ‘il manda en Angleterre que le zèle de ses sujets
écossais était si vif, qu’il lui semblait qu’on pourrait opposer les
Montagnards de ce pays à la plupart des troupes que le
gouvernement avait alors sur pied, et qu’il y aurait lieu de tout
espérer même sans secours étranger, pourvu que les Anglais
affidés prissent de leur côté de justes mesures.’ See Colin,
Louis XV. et les Jacobites, p. 1.
[27] For Sempill’s descent and claim to the title, see
Appendix, p. 421.
[28] See infra, p. 21.
[29] See infra, p. 25.
[30] A. G. M. Macgregor, History of the Clan Gregor, vol. ii.
p. 358.
[31] Of the Associators only three were ‘out’ in the ’Forty-
five: the Duke of Perth, Lovat, and Lochiel. Lord John
Drummond, who was brother-in-law of Traquair, remained
inactive. Prince Charles spent the night of February 2nd, 1746,
at his house, Fairnton, now Ferntower, near Crieff. Lord
Traquair remained in England; he was arrested at Great
Stoughton in Huntingdonshire, on July 29th, 1746, and
committed to the Tower; but was released without trial before
August 1748. Traquair’s brother, John Stuart, married in 1740
and retired from the Concert then. Sir James Campbell was
too old for action. Macgregor of Balhaldies was in Paris during
the campaign.
[32] The name ‘Macgregor’ was then proscribed, and all
members of the clan had to adopt another name; that adopted
by Balhaldy’s branch was ‘Drummond.’ Balhaldy’s father,
Alexander, was a man of some consequence. He had been a
trader about Stirling, and made some money, and he married a
daughter of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, his son Balhaldy
being thus a first cousin of Lochiel of the ’45. In 1714 the Clan
Gregor being chiefless, certain of its leading members elected
Alexander to be hereditary chief. (A. G. M. Macgregor, Hist. of
Clan Gregor, vol. ii. p. 270.) He was created a Scots baronet
by the Chevalier in 1740, and he died at Balhaldie House,
Dunblane, in 1749. His son, William, was born in 1698.
Though never in Scotland after 1743 he was attainted in 1746,
and specially exempted from the act of indemnity of 1747. He
married Janet, daughter of Laurence Oliphant of Gask, at
Paris in January 1758. He died near Paris in 1765.
[33] The designation Balhaldy is spelt variously in
contemporary documents, Bohaldy, Bochaldie, Bahady, etc.
Cf. R. L. Stevenson’s Catriona, last chapter.
[34] War was declared with Spain, October 19th, 1739.
[35] Abridged from a State Paper in the French archives, of
which portions are printed in Capitaine J. Colin’s Louis XV. et
les Jacobites: Paris, 1901.
[36] The Emperor Charles vi. died on October 20th, 1740,
and France interfered in the War of the Austrian Succession
the following August.
[37] Colin, p. 7.
[38] A. G. M. Macgregor, Hist. of Clan Gregor, vol. ii. p.
359.
[39] Colin, p. 8.
[40] Lord Marischal wrote to the Chevalier in June 1740,
telling him that the King of Spain had refused an audience to
the Duke of Ormonde on this account. Mahon, Hist. of
England, 3rd ed., vol. iii. App. p. iv.
 [41] Se infra, pp. 12, 22.
[42] ‘Le roi très chrétien, touché du zèle des Ecossais, était
porté à leur accorder les secours dont ils avaient besoin: qu’en
conséquence, Sa Majesté voulait bien faire transporter dans
ce royaume toutes les troupes irlandaises qui étaitent à son
service, avec les armes et munitions et les 20,000 livres
sterling qu’on demandait pour aider les montagnards à se
mettre en campagne’ (Colin, p. 8).
[43] This document is printed by the special permission of
the French Government. The original signed and sealed with
seven seals is preserved in the National Archives in Paris.
[44] It was very disappointing to find that no trace of this list
of Highland chiefs referred to could be discovered.
[45] Balhaldy’s Memorial, History of Clan Gregor, vol. ii. p.
359.
[46] See Appendix, p. 422.
[47] He died on January 29th (18th O.S.).
[48] That Fleury had proposed something is most probable.
He had for some time been complaining of the ‘insults’—what
to-day we call pin-pricks—with which the British Government
had been annoying France in a time of peace. These pin-
pricks culminated in June 1742 when a British army under
Lord Stair landed in the Netherlands, with the intention of
thwarting the French in their campaign against Austria.
[49] Infra, p. 16 n.
[50] ‘Il n’y a pas grand inconvénient que le ministre voie
que le rempart de la mer ne met pas entièrement l’Angleterre
à couvert des enterprises de la France.’
[51] Colin, p. 35.
[52] Infra, pp. 41, 42.
[53] Memorials, pp. 93, 428.
[54] The Affairs of Scotland, 1744-46, by Lord Elcho.
Edited by Hon. Evan Charteris: Edinburgh, 1907, p. 63. Lord
Elcho gives a list of members of the club who undertook to join
the Prince in any event.
[55] Memorials, p. 64.
 [56] Anxious to learn the sources of this information, I wrote
to the author of the volume to inquire, and received a
courteous letter informing me that these statements were
made on the authority of the Stuart Papers.
[57] Memorials, p. 444.
[58] Infra, p. 116.
[59] Trial of Lord Lovat, p. 36.
[60] Memorials, p. 50.
[61] Life of the Duke of Cumberland: London, 1766, p. 242.
[62] Lord Macleod wrote a Narrative of the campaign,
including the march to Thurso. It is printed in Sir Wm. Fraser’s
Earls of Cromartie, vol. ii. pp. 379 et seq.
[63] P. 123.
[64] Chiefs of Grant, vol. ii. p. 155.
[65] Family information.
[66] See The Earl of Aberdeen, by the Hon. A. Gordon, p.
4: London, 1893.
[67] Cumin of Kininmont, Gordon of Cobairdie, and Erskine
of Pittodrie.
[68] See Blackwood’s Magazine for May 1829.
[69] Scottish Historical Review, vol. v. p. 288.
[70] Chiefs of Grant, vol. ii. p. 152.
[71] Spalding Club Misc., vol. i. p. 403.
[72] Ibid., p. 406.
[73] Compare p. 189.
[74] MS. Order Book in Editor’s possession. The story is
told with considerable fulness in Henderson’s Life of
Cumberland (p. 239), where the schoolmaster’s name is given
as Macaty, and where the blame of the sentence is ascribed to
Hawley. The punishment was five hundred lashes at each of
the cantonments.
[75] In a biographical appendix to his Life of Colonel
Gardiner who was killed at Prestonpans. (London, 1747.)
 [76] Original correspondence on the relations between the
Prince and Lord George Murray, together with references to
contemporary authorities on the battle of Culloden, will be
found in the Itinerary of Prince Charles Edward, Scot. Hist.
Soc., vol. xxiii., 1897.
[77] Scottish History Society, vol. xxiii.
[78] For Flora Macdonald’s relationships, see Genealogical
Table, p. 452.
[79] See Lyon in Mourning, vol. i p. 176.
[80] Ibid., vol. ii. p. 100.
[81] Cf. infra, p. 372 n. 2.
[82] Ruvigny, Jacobite Peerage.
[83] This letter, dated Kinlochiel, August 22nd, arrived after
Sir James Grant went to London, and was forwarded to him.
He sent it unopened to Lord Tweeddale, Secretary for
Scotland. The letter is preserved in the Tweeddale Archives.
[84] Urquhart and Glenmoriston: Inverness, 1893.
[85] P. 271.
[86] Pp. 275-276.
[87] Pp. 292-294.
[88] Pp. 307-309.
[89] Chiefs of Grant, vol. ii. p. 267.
[90] High Court Index Book No. 1.
[91] Scots Magazine, vol. ix. pp. 246, 247.
[92] The name in the original documents is spelt
sometimes with one s and sometimes with one t, sometimes
with one or both these letters doubled; occasionally he is
called ‘Grosert.’ In modern times the name is spelt Grosett by
Miss Collins, a descendant of Walter. In the new Scots
Peerage it is spelt Grosset, vol. i. p. 495.
[93] Newcastle Papers, British Museum, Add. MS. 32710, f.
491.
[94] Record Office, State Papers Dom., George ii., Bundle
98.
[95] Newcastle Papers, previously quoted.
 [96] Family Papers.
[97] See pp. 336 and 402. Grossett’s statement,
corroborated by Fawkener and Sharpe, is elaborated in the
Newcastle Papers quoted above. ‘He performed his duties at
great hazard to his life. The Rebells robbed and plundered his
house at Alloa and his house in the country [Logie] to such a
degree that they did not leave his infant children even a shirt to
shift them, and pursued his wife and daughter to an uncle’s
house, to whose estate they knew Mr. Grosett was to succeed,
plundered that house [Bredisholm, near Coatbridge], stript his
wife and daughter of the very clothes they had upon their
backs and used them otherwise in a most cruel and barbarous
manner.’
[98] Scots Magazine, vol. vii. p. 538.
[99] Record Office, State Papers Dom., George ii., bundle
91.
[100] This is one of the very rarest of Jacobite pamphlets.
There is a long account of the harsh proceedings of the
Edinburgh magistrates towards Robert Drummond, the
Jacobite printer who published the poem, in Hugo Arnot’s
History of Edinburgh, 1778, book iii. chap. iv. See also Book of
the Old Edinburgh Club, vol. viii., in which the poem is
reprinted for the first time.
[101] Mr. J. R. N. Macphail, K.C., has sent me a copy of
Accusations laid against Grossett in December 1747. These
are nine in number: he is accused (1) Of keeping an open
trade at Alloa for smugglers ‘particularly in the tobacco way.’
(2) Of secreting the public revenue for a tract of years and of
vitiating and forging the accounts. (3) Of granting land permits
for wine to smugglers all over the kingdom. (4) Of arranging
false prices with merchants who purchased at roup goods
seized from smugglers. (5) Of suborning evidence even to
perjury in connection with the sale of goods taken from the
Rebels. (6) Of being an accomplice of smugglers in trade and
profits. (7) Of passing goods after seizure and of accepting a
bribe. (8) Of mutilating the books of the public office. (9) Of
fraud, circumvention and oppression in many different cases.
[102] Scots Peerage, vol. i. p. 495.
[103] The Jacobite accounts of this incident will be found in
Jacobite Memoirs, p. 47; in Maxwell of Kirkconnell’s Narrative,