Our moral lives are shot-through with concerns and even anxieties about the past. Only a lucky few, if anyone at all, can escape nagging and persistent regrets about actions and decisions in our past. But sometimes those very decisions that we now regret are the causal or conceptual antecedents of subsequent outcomes that we now affirm. That is, when we look back on our lives, we often find certain features of our past lamentable, even though without those features something of value in our present would not be. How is this mixture of regret and affirmation to be understood?
In his new book, The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret (Oxford University Press, 2013), R. Jay Wallace explores the complicated dynamic surrounding regret and affirmation. He develops a view that reconciles the apparent contradiction between regretting something that was a necessary antecedent to some attachment that one must now affirm. But in laying out this reconciliation, Wallace uncovers a pervasive and disconcerting truth about the human condition, namely that we must affirm aspects of our lives that are undeniably the products of highly objectionable features of the past.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices