Below are the papers in progress or published. If you are interested in my manuscripts, please feel free to email me.
Below are the papers in progress or published. If you are interested in my manuscripts, please feel free to email me.
My dissertation, Rationality of Regret, aims at defending the rationality of regret. When people regret past actions, they typically believe they should have acted differently. Often, however, they were unable to do so at the time due to epistemic, virtuous, or motivational limitations—they lacked the relevant information, virtue, or desire that would have led them to act in the way that they want them to have done. In other words, they could not have acted in that way. Looking back, at the time of the regretted action, it was the case that they cannot act as they now wish they had. According to the widely accepted principle that ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can,’ it follows that it was not the case that they ought to act in that way. Consequently, their current belief that they should have acted in that way is, strictly speaking, false. This raises a puzzle: is such regret irrational, given that it is based on the false belief that they should have acted in a way they couldn’t have done?
My primary goal is to demonstrate that regret, even when based on a false belief about what one should have done, can still be rational. While solving this puzzle—which I find philosophically interesting—is my main target, I also personally hope this work offers some relief to those who suffer from regret, conceiving the better way that they really couldn’t have done. Often, the advice “don’t regret because it wasn’t your fault” does not comfort them, and the persistent thought that they should have acted differently makes the regret seem as if it resulted from their own fault. By showing that one can have reasons for regret without it implying her fault, I hope to provide them with some comfort.
It consists of three papers as follows:
This paper engages in the debate over the truth of the ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ principle (OIC). It offers (i) an interpretation of OIC, proposing that reasons for infeasible actions are always attenuated to the extent that they have zero weight, due to the fact of the infeasibility, thereby entailing that reasons for infeasible actions can never be decisive; and (ii) three arguments supporting this interpretation of OIC. These arguments are based, respectively, on the three concepts: the transmission of reasons, the rational requirement of enkrasia, and the deontic dilemma. In each argument, this paper shows that denying OIC creates difficulties with these concepts, whereas they align well with the acceptance of OIC.
I argue that reason-responsiveness is essential to substantive rationality and that the concept of a ‘rational action’ cannot be separated from an action for which the agent deserves rational credit. Combined with the ‘Reason Implies Feasibility’ principle, this supports an internalist view of reasons. Ultimately, this defends my second thesis: if it is infeasible for one to be motivated to φ, then it is not the case that one ought to φ.
I argue that, even when people experience regret based on the false belief that they should have acted differently (which, according to internalism about reasons, is false because they couldn’t have acted differently), they still have reasons for regret. I contend that such regret can motivate an agent to become the person she was not but wishes she had been, demonstrating that the agent has a practical reason for regret. Additionally, I address the distinction between self-blame and regret: self-blame is appropriate only if the agent could have acted in the way she regrets not acting, while regret can be appropriate even when she could not have done so. Thus, rational regret does not imply rational self-blame.
Some papers are not included in, but related to my dissertation. They are related to important concepts and principles that I employ in my dissertation. Such papers are as follows:
This paper engages in the debate on expanding the widely accepted principle of the transmission of reasons from ends to their necessary means, aiming to also encompass non-necessary means. It examines recent proposals, raising some concerns. In response, this paper proposes the Reason Transmission Principle (RTP), which explains how reasons for ends transmit to their means, encompassing necessary or non-necessary. Crucially, it argues that RTP should be paired with the Negative Transmission Principle (NTP), which accounts for how the effect of negative factors against reasons for means, such as attenuators and defeaters, transmit to ends. By accepting both RTP and NTP, we can develop a more robust understanding of the transmission of reasons. It relates to my dissertation, as the first paper in my dissertation supports the ‘Ought Implies Can’ Principle by employing principles concerning the transmission of reasons.
This paper introduces the concept of a ‘way,’ arguing that it is not reducible to ‘possibility.’ There is an essential distinction between how the actual world could be—logically, metaphysically, or otherwise—and how the actual world could be if an agent acted within her capacity. I argue that his difference cannot be fully accounted for by the types of possibility alone. It calls for a non-modal concept. I use the notion of an open future to illustrate this: a world in which the future is open contrasts with the world in which the future is not open even when a different future is a nearby possibility. The former concept should not be conflated with the modal concept of possibility. In normative contexts where modal concepts like ‘can’ and ‘could have been’ are applied, it should not merely mean that there are some relevant possible worlds, in whatever way such worlds are understood. Instead, in these contexts, the actual world is expected to have ways to be qualitatively identical to certain possible worlds. Based on this, the modal notion of ‘Feasibility’ should be understood as a second-order modal notion, whose extension—feasible worlds—essentially is all and only the possible worlds to which this world has ways to be qualitatively identical.
Published in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, October 2024.
This paper addresses the problem of hard choices agents confront in scenarios referred to as “Hard Cases.” A key feature of Hard Cases is that an agent is presented with multiple options, each supported by reasons, but these reasons run out when considered against the reasons for other options. Another feature of Hard Cases is that it seems wrong for an agent to arbitrarily pick one option. Several views explain these features of Hard Cases, focusing primarily on the value relation between options, with discussions limited to the relata—namely, reasons for each option. However, reasons relevant to a choice encompass more than the set of reasons for individual options. After defining ‘choosing’ as distinct from ‘picking’ and introducing the notion of a ‘reason to choose,’ I argue that the reason to choose plays a role in what makes a case a Hard Case, and it is not necessarily grounded in any of the options but in the choice itself.
Contact: syang27(at)huskers.unl.edu