Hello and welcome to Overthink. I'm philosophy professor David Peña Guzman.

And I'm philosophy professor, Ellie Anderson.

Today we're doing an episode I've been wanting to do for an entire year.

Regret.

One might say that you regret not having done the episode earlier, Ellie.

Already starting with the bad jokes.

Okay, let's talk about a common perspective on regret, which is that regret is a useless

sentiment.

The idea here is that what's done is done.

There's no use crying over spilt milk.

This is a view of regret that I was raised with.

I don't know about you, David.

But according to

this perspective, regret is nothing more than a nostalgic hand-wringing over the past. Maybe it's

distracting us from living in the present moment or it's serving as some kind of masochistic

activity that is weirdly self-absorbed. But I actually hear this view pretty regularly from

people in my life. If something goes wrong, I have a tendency to really focus on how and why it went wrong. Like I'm obsessed with figuring out who is to blame. Is it me? Is it someone else? Is it no one? Is it both of us? And if I did something wrong, I find it useful to just rest in that feeling for a little bit. And my loved ones often tell me to just move on because it's not worth litigating the past. So I think I'm much more like your loved ones in this regard because I do tend. Maybe you are one of them in this case. I am one of your loved ones. Thank you, Ellie. That's actually really nice to hear. I don't know why is that in this case weird.

Actually, yeah, what the hell was that?

I didn't even notice.

No, but in connection to regret, I do tend to give my past self a lot of leeway in the sense

that I assumed that even if things turned out terribly on account of a decision that I made in the past,

I probably acted at that time according to the best judgment that I had available to me.

...