Contingency + Love = No Regrets?

by Will Wilkinson on June 17, 2008

Bryan Caplan’s argument in his post on “Parenthood as the Trump of All Past Regret” proves both too much and too little. The general form of the argument has nothing to do with children, but applies to anything contingent one has come to value highly. Bryan’s argument has the same form as this: “If I hadn’t murdered those six toddlers with a hacksaw, I never would have met my cherished wife, the public defender, so I don’t regret it.” But that’s just silly. If you think the unintelligibility of regret follows from the fact of a world in which there is both contingency and deeply-held values (i.e., follows from from the actual world), then you are probably making a mistake. I’d say the mistake is assuming that what you are doing when you regret having done X is wishing that all the events conditional on X hadn’t occurred. Regret is more forward-looking than that.

  • Rasselas
    His point isn’t that you can’t regret anything in the past if you value a contingent thing in the present a lot. The point, I think, is that it is irrational to regret any past state of affairs that was a necessary condition for a given present state of affairs if the following condition holds: you prefer a world with the given present state of affairs to every world without the present state of affairs. We value a lot of states of affairs for which that condition doesn’t hold. I bet you deeply value your job, but you can think of possible worlds where you have a different job and you probably prefer some of those worlds to the actual world. As I see it Caplan is just saying that he doesn’t prefer any world in which his kids have different characteristics to the actual world, so if any of the necessary conditions for them having those characteristics had not been in place a world that is worse than the actual world would have come about.
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