CONCEPT
Agent-Regret
Williams's name for the specifically first-personal regret an agent feels for outcomes her agency produced — even when blameless, even when she would act the same again. The emotion the dominant moral traditions cannot accommodate and the AI transition is generating at industrial scale.
Agent-regret is Bernard Williams's most consequential contribution to moral psychology: the recognition that a morally serious person feels the weight of outcomes her agency produced, even when she could not have prevented them and acted without fault. The concept rejects the utilitarian claim that correct calculation dissolves residue and the Kantian claim that fulfilled duty ends the moral story. The lorry driver who kills a child through no negligence feels something a bystander does not — not guilt, but the specific heaviness of causal participation. Williams argued that a person who felt nothing would not be admirably rational but morally deficient. The AI transition generates agent-regret among builders whose work accelerates the displacement of the practices that formed them.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept emerged in Williams's 1976 essay Moral Luck, where he used the case of the blameless lorry driver to expose a gap in