Regret and Obligation :: Just Assassins Camus Essays

Regret and Obligation ABSTRACT: In Albert Camus' 1950 play Just Assassins, terrorists are at work in nineteenth-century Russia. They kill people, and they all believe that there is a superior moral reason for doing so. But they also know that killing is wrong. In their own view, they are innocent criminals; innocent, because their action is justified, but criminals, because they kill. So tacitly they conclude that they deserve punishment that will remove the regret from their shoulders. Their execution, by the same despotic authorities they are attacking, completes their actions: regret, caused by justified killing, gets its counterpart. Regret is an interesting mental phenomenon. Some people say that feeling regret is irrational, or even that it is immoral. But surely the usual opinion is that in some situations regret is an appropriate way to react. An interesting question is what it means to say that sometimes it is 'appropriate' to feel regret. Do we have a moral obligation to feel regret sometimes? H ow could one have an obligation to feel anything, since, at least seemingly, feelings are not voluntary acts. If we do have a moral obligation to feel regret in some cases, does it follow that all good people are emotionally "hot," while "cool" persons, who are not able to feel deep regret, are bad? It is not crucial what one does; it is crucial what one does after that. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Regret is an interesting mental phenomenon. (1) Some people say that feeling regret is irrational, or even that it is immoral. (2) But surely the usual opinion is that in some situations regret is an appropriate way to react. An interesting question is what it means to say that sometimes it is 'appropriate' to feel regret. Do we have a moral obligation to feel regret sometimes? How could one have an obligation to feel anything, since, at least seemingly, feelings are not voluntary acts? If we do have a moral obligation to feel regret in some cases, does it follow that all good people are emotionally 'hot' while 'cool' persons, who are not able to feel deep regret, are bad? If persons feel automatically regret when they realize that they have done something blameworthy, is it not useless to suppose that they have a moral obligation to do so? In the next few pages, I would like to briefly consider the above questions and to explicate ways how regret might be a moral virtue.