Title: Regret

Abstract: There are many ways to feel bad about things. This paper is about which of those ways of feeling bad count as regret, and why. I will suggest that a very great deal of our bad feelings are regrets, in opposition to the narrower view of some philosophers and psychologists who restrict the scope of the regrettable to our past mistakes. As well as defending this expansive conception of what we may regret (regret’s object) I will present a hypothesis about the structure of regret which allows us to understand it as a unitary phenomenon, despite the varied ways in which it can manifest in our emotional lives. On this hypothesis, regret is (in a certain, unorthodox, sense) a basic human emotion.