Philosophy of Emotion Research Papers (original) (raw)

Some emotional states are complex enough to serve as interesting, sufficient conditions for personhood. Regret is presented as such a case, as it fulfills standard criteria for personhood, such as self-consciousness, continuity of memory, reflective judgment, narrative sense of self, judgment, moral consideration, care, and second-order volitions. Regret is especially interesting in that it secures some degree of identity across time and is not only a mark of identity, but an identity-making emotion. That is, regret alters how we think of ourselves and establishes both a relation between past and present selves and an attitude towards future selves. By virtue of regretting, we put forward that we were a certain person, that we hold a (negative) judgment about that person, and that we would, if possible, choose to be a different person in the future. Thus, continuity across time, and the creation of character are united in regret, bringing together diverse strands of the personhood and identity debate, and establishing further that an emotional attitude may be a necessary and sufficient condition for personhood. Further, the capacity for regret a necessary condition. An entity that was incapable of regret would be a person in a reduced sense. It may well be that by happenstance or accident there is a human who never does anything regrettable. But if such a human did do something regrettable, but could simple shrug it off with no sense of regret or remorse, we would think them deficient just as we find the sociopath deficient, or the person incapable of love. If we accept that personhood is a success concept, as Dennett seems to, then perhaps we have not succeeded without the capacity to feel bad for what we have done when we have done wrong. As Williams points out, there is something wrong with the truck driver who does not regret the accident that killed the child.