Bernard Williams

Foreword

By Edo Segal

Nobody in the AI discourse talks about the driver.

I mean the thought experiment — the one where two people do the exact same thing, with the exact same care, and one of them kills someone and the other doesn't. Same intention. Same skill. Same moral quality. Radically different outcomes. The difference is luck, pure and simple, and yet we judge them differently, and the one whose hands were on the wheel feels something the other never will.

Bernard Williams built an entire philosophy around that feeling. He called it agent-regret, and he argued that a person who didn't feel it — who simply ran the numbers, confirmed the action was justified, and moved on unburdened — would not be admirably rational. That person would be broken.

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