2025.06.15 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Paddy McQueen, Regret, Oxford University Press, 2024, 294pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780197651384.
Reviewed by Max Lewis, Yale University
If to err is human, then so too is to regret. At least if we follow Paddy McQueen in his recent book about the nature, normativity, and politics of regret. According to McQueen, regret is, roughly, a painful feeling of self-reproach or self-recrimination for making a “mistake” (21). Like all emotions, regret is more than just a judgment, though it has a constitutive thought type (i.e., “I have made a mistake”), which can be realized by many different token thoughts (e.g., “I wish I had not done that”, “I should have acted differently” or “what an idiot I am!”). Regret’s “phenomenological core” is the feeling of “kicking oneself” or “beating oneself up” for a mistake (21). Regret directs our attention to the mistake in decision-making…
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