R. Jay Wallace, The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret (Oxford 2013).The central thesis of R. Jay Wallace's fascinating essay in moral psychology is that it is easy, when reflecting on our lives from our current temporal standpoint, to make a mistake in how we think about the past events that have shaped it. Assume that your current life is one that you would affirm as worth living. Suppose also that you look back on certain past events with a degree of ambivalence. They were, you believe, wrong at the time. Yet, they have formed a necessary part of a chain of events that has led to the constitution of your current outlook. You affirm the events in the sense that you do not want them to have been otherwise. This thought excludes the possibility of regretting them, as that is to wish that they had been otherwise. Nevertheless, you also believe that your actions were, at the time, rationally unjustified. Can this combination of attitudes be consistent?Wallace thinks that it can. He diagnoses a tempting mistake, namely, to think that an inability to regret is, itself, a form of affirmation in a way that excludes the thought that the past action was unjustified. However, for Wallace, affirmation means that while you cannot regret the past action, you can still believe it was unjustified at the time. The standpoint of retrospective assessment is constrained by this fact, such that "we can find ourselves unable to regret actions of ours that were unjustifiable at the time" and "committed to affirming features of our lives and of the world we inhabit that are objectively lamentable".That idea -- that our appraisal is situated in a perspective dependent on a range of presupposed contingencies in the past...Wallace's general thesis is illustrated by a range of cases: in the first imagined example -- made famous by Derek Parfit -- a teenager conceives a child for reasons that, at that time, made the decision unjustified given her situation. However, the experience of being a parent "shifts" the woman's standpoint of appraisal so that she experiences the past decision as unjustified, but not as one that she can regret. She can affirm a past decision that was rationally unjustifiable. Wallace believes that, hitherto, attempts to resolve this paradox have involved different frameworks of evaluation or different ways of conceptualizing the same values. So his buck passing approach focuses instead on the relevant "reasons for action and response" on the part of the young mother. (p. 94) Her changed situation means that she has new reasons to love and care for her child that she can affirm while acknowledging the good reasons that she had in the past not to conceive a child so early in her life. For Wallace, if there is an air of paradox about such a case, it is generated by the idea of the impersonal evaluation of an outcome. By focusing, instead, on the reasons grounded on evaluative attitudes, the asymmetry between the reasons at the time of decision and those that feature in retrospective assessment no longer generates a paradox.
Another reviewer extends the analysis to his own example:
Consider the mother of a child born out of war rape. Suppose that she loves her child just as any other mother does. I would presume that her attachment to the child does not involve that she affirms the rape. Why would she do that? In her head and in her heart, she clearly separates the tragedy that brought about her child from the child that she loves, who played no role in that tragedy. Nor would I presume that affirming the tragedy is a condition for loving her child wholeheartedly, or for loving him more than she actually does. While casting a dark shadow on her life, the tragedy in no way enters or structures the nature of the loving relation between her and the child. Consider next the following three examples, which, while sharing the same structure as the example above, gradually bring the subject matter closer to home or normality.Consider first parents of handicapped children. Many such parents will love their children wholeheartedly while at the same time not affirming the unfortunate conditions necessary to their child’s handicap. Some of them, for example, will donate money to research aimed at making their child’s condition a thing of the past. Most of them will do all they can to neutralize the debilitating effects of the handicap. Now move to the case of children born to parents who eventually end up divorced and in bad terms. Presumably, some of these parents will regret having married each other, and hereby fail to affirm the conditions of their children’s existence.Yet I doubt that this fact would change much to their love for their children. Finally, and in a similar mode, consider love for any of the persons you may currently love, be it your spouse, your child, your friend, or your parent. Why think that these relations are any different from the ones above? Why think that the way in which we love others often involves any attitude whatsoever, beside disregard, about the historical conditions necessary for the existence of the object of our love?
And in the author's own words:
One of these is the perspectival character of our retrospective attitudes. We look back on things that have happened from a particular point of view, one that is conditioned importantly by the attachments that we have then formed. The young girl, as she grows older and looks back on her adolescent decision to conceive, thinks about it as someone who now loves the person that the earlier decision brought into existence. Insofar as our attachments evolve through time, it follows that rifts may develop between the standpoint of decision and the standpoint of retrospective reflection, with sometimes surprising effects. Thus, in the case of the young girl’s child, the mother may find that she cannot regret her decision to conceive, even though it was the wrong thing to have done at the time. There are decisions that were not justified that in this way become inaccessible to regret on the part of the agent who took them.Furthermore, he cannot know, at the time when he made this decision, whether it would turn out to be the right thing to do, because he cannot then know for certain from what standpoint he would eventually come to look back on the decision.In the agential cases, we settle the counterfactual question of what we would do if we could unspool the film of time and redeliberate an earlier decision that we have taken, thinking about this question from the perspective of our present attachments. In impersonal cases involving the past, by contrast, the question we address is doubly counterfactual; we ask, in these cases, what we would do if we both were able to unspool the film of time, and were in possession of powers and capacities that enabled us to intervene in the course of natural events (stopping the tsunami before it strikes land, for example).What other strategies might be adopted for resisting this pessimistic conclusion? One possibility would be to place temporal restrictions on the operation of the affirmation dynamic. Perhaps attachment involves a commitment to affirm the immediate historical conditions of its objects, but the commitment diminishes as the chains of historical causation reach back into the remoter past.5 This would rescue us from the unnerving thought that we might be committed to affirming distant historical calamities and disasters without which (for instance) the people we now love would not have come to exist. But this strategy seems to me unsatisfactory: once the affirmation dynamic is set in motion, it is arbitrary to block its more unpalatable commitments by postulating a “statute of limitations” on its operation.
This raises some theological issues:
i) Freewill theists sometimes allege that Calvinists can't express regret if they believe all events are predestined. But as philosophers like Parfit and Wallace demonstrate, the issue isn't that parochial. The paradox of regret has counterparts in freewill theism.
ii) In addition, the principle of retrospective justification is germane to theodicy. How we assess the goodness or badness of an event varies according to our temporal perspective. We might view an impending event with apprehension or horror. And it may be dreadful when it happens. Yes in hindsight, when we're able to put enough distance between ourselves and the event, we may view it more positively. Our evaluation may shift with the passage of time, which provides a larger context. So one issue in theodicy is which temporal viewpoint should be the basis of comparison. Past or present, prospective or retrospective?
iii) I don't think there's anything essentially contradictory in having ambivalent feelings about the same event. Both forward and backward-looing viewpoints can both be valid, as limited but complementary perspectives on the same event. The same event may be regrettable in some respects, yet be a cause for gratitude in other respects. That's because events can be morally complex: As another reviewer notes:
First example: the young girl’s child. A girl of 14 decides to have a child, though she is clearly not in a position to care for it adequately, as she would be if she waited until she was an adult. The decision also disrupts her life and limits her opportunities in ways that having a child later would not. But she loves the child, and despite its disadvantages the child itself is glad to have been born. Neither of them can wish the child did not exist, or regret the young girl’s decision to give it birth. Yet it seems that it was a decision she should not have made.Second example: disability. An amputee dedicates himself to becoming a world-class athlete and competes successfully in the Paralympics. Or a person born deaf finds the meaning of his life through immersion in the kinds of communication available only to people who lack the ability to hear. The way these people value their lives seems to exclude regretting their disabilities, but does that imply that such disabilities should not be prevented or repaired if possible?Wallace’s view is more complicated than this, however, because it also has a place for what he calls ‘deep ambivalence’. Sometimes we can’t avoid both affirming and regretting something that was objectionable but has played too important a role in shaping our lives to be simply rejected. To take an example of a kind Wallace does not discuss, suppose someone fails to marry his true love: she marries someone else, or dies. He then marries someone with whom he is not in love, has children and builds his life and commitments around these attachments. Though they are intimately involved in the way he values his actual life, he may always wish he had married the other woman, and regret that he didn’t. Yet according to Wallace the affirmation of his actual life spreads backwards to encompass his not having done so, which is its necessary condition. If Wallace is right about this, then deep ambivalence is inevitable in such a case: there is a conflict between valuing one’s actual life and regretting that it wasn’t different.
iv) However, the retrospective viewpoint can be relatively superior–because it views the same event, not in temporal isolation, but in the totality of its effects. That doesn't negate what may be bad in the original event, but it brings additional, compensatory or mitigating factors into consideration. Assessing the same event in temporal isolation is artificially truncated.
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