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Kantian Remorse with and without Self-Retribution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2022

Benjamin Vilhauer
Benjamin Vilhauer*
Affiliation:
City College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
*
Email: bvilhauer@ccny.cuny.edu
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Abstract

Kant’s account of the pain of remorse involves a hybrid justification based on self-retribution, but constrained by forward-looking principles which say we must channel remorse into improvement and moderate its pain to avoid damaging our rational agency. Kant’s corpus also offers material for a revisionist but textually grounded alternative account based on wrongdoers’ sympathy for the pain they cause. This account is based on the value of care, and has forward-looking constraints much like Kant’s own account. Drawing on Kant’s texts and recent work in empirical psychology, I argue that sympathetic remorse may fulfil Kant’s forward-looking goals better than self-retributive remorse.

Keywords

remorseretributivismconsciencecaresympathytranscendental freedom
Type
Article
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 421 - 441
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Kantian Review

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