Ahmet Gönüllü

Bernard Williams’s account of regret contains a lacuna with respect to the appropriate emotion for contributors to feel in response to faultless group harms. While he delineates ‘agent-regret’ for agents faultlessly causing harm and ‘spectator-regret’ for observers, neither suffices for individuals who unintentionally or unforeseeably contribute to harms resulting from group actions. This paper investigates the fitting emotion for such cases. I contend that contributors occupy ‘as-if positions’ in that they are quasi-agents in virtue of their own contributions and quasi-spectators owing to others’ roles. This dual standpoint generates a ‘biperspective’ that calls for a distinct form of regret, which is reducible to neither agent-regret nor spectator-regret but synthesises elements of both. I term this distinct form ‘biperspectival regret’. Taking the appropriateness of emotions to depend on their formal objects, I formulate the formal object of biperspectival regret as the ‘comparative disvalue of group harm to which one faultlessly contributed’. Because this formal object corresponds to the defining features of faultless group harms, I argue that biperspectival regret is the warranted emotion for contributors to experience in such scenarios.