Regret seems useless to me, especially if there’s no free will

I regret quite a few things that I’ve done in my life. Everybody does. At least, everybody that I know. But recently it dawned on me that regret is almost always a useless emotion, whether or not we possess free will. (I’m convinced that free will is an illusion.)

I’ll illustrate why I feel this way with a simple example.

This afternoon I left home a bit later than usual for the drive to our athletic club, where I exercise on Monday before going to my Tai Chi class in downtown Salem. I mildly regretted not leaving on time, since now I wouldn’t have much leeway in my workout routine if I wanted to get to the Tai Chi class before it started.

I parked at the athletic club. Walked briskly to the front door. Got there just ahead of an elderly woman using a walker who had been dropped off by a small bus with the name of a continuing care community on its side. The woman had paused before the rather heavy glass doors of the club. I opened a door for her. She smiled and said, “perfect timing.”

Sure, someone else would have held the door for her if I hadn’t. She just would have had to wait for a while. But I felt good that I’d been able to perform a small act of kindness for a fellow senior citizen with mobility issues.

That wouldn’t have happened if I’d left home when I usually do. So my regret at not leaving on time dissipated when I realized that arriving at the athletic club later than usual was perfect timing from the woman’s point of view. And the more I thought about it, regret seemed uncalled for in almost every other instance where we wish that we’d done something different than what we actually did.

For we just don’t know. We don’t know whether doing that other thing would have been better for ourself and the world than the thing we actually did. We just don’t know how our life, and the lives of other people, would have been affected by doing something other than what we regretted.

If a downhill skier attempts a slope that is beyond their abilities and breaks a leg, they likely would regret taking that black diamond run. However, if the accident leads to them giving up downhill skiing, because their leg never healed properly, perhaps the broken leg prevented an even more dangerous accident if the skier had continued to attempt risky runs.

Again, we just don’t know. We look upon a seemingly regretful action from a limited perspective, how it immediately adversely affected us. We usually fall to consider what we learned from the action, what benefits it brought to us, how it might have led to positive results for other people. (A broken leg, for example, likely would make us more compassionate toward others with mobility problems, something that wouldn’t have happened if we’d remained healthy.)

Of course, the uselessness of regret is much more obvious if we accept that free will doesn’t exist, even though it appears to. If we lack the ability to choose this rather than that, the fact of our doing that is as inescapable as gravity causing a thrown rock to fall to the ground. Gravity rules as one of many forms of determinism.

Psychologist Robert Saltzman has a chapter in his book, The 21st Century Self: Belief, Illusion, and the Machinery of Meaning, about the illusion of free will. Here’s some passages from “The Self on Trial.”

We speak as if we act, as if we choose, as if a self behind the eyes governs thought and motion — as if there were a center that is deliberately stable, and accountable. That assumption forms the grammar of law, morality, and civilization itself. But look closely, and it dissolves. It is a fiction.

The person, as commonly imagined, is a retrospective assembly — a narrating voice, a string of reasons draped over what has already occurred. The “I” is not the source of action. It is the story we tell ourselves about action after the fact.

Thoughts arise. Words are spoken. Movements occur. Then a voice appears: “I meant to do that,” it says. But that voice is no author. It’s a clerk. It documents. It revises. It defends. It edits the event into something others can understand. But it is not the origin.

You don’t have to believe this. You only have to look. Find the moment when you truly initiate a thought. Not when you notice it, not when you name it, but when you produce it. Track it to its root.

See if you can. You’ll find, I wager, that thought arrives before the thinker. The motion starts before the “I” claims it.

This does not negate experience. The world still appears. Sensation still arises. Feeling still occurs. But no separate self is there to feel it. What remains is a stream: perception, reaction, memory, speech — within which a voice, the clerk, arises, saying “I am this.”

Behind these questions stands the presumed subject: the agent, the actor, the self. Not just a person in the legal sense, but a moral entity — endowed with freedom and intention, capable of forming motives and choosing between alternatives. This self — decisive, coherent, responsible — is the cornerstone of modern jurisprudence.

But what if the cornerstone is hollow?

…What we call intention is not freely formed but arises from entangled conditions — upbringing, trauma, genetic disposition, neurological variance, socioeconomic pressures. None of this is new. Determinism — or at least causality — has haunted free will since before Spinoza, and neuroscience only deepens the unease.

And yet the fiction of free intention persists — especially in courtrooms. Why? Because without it, the whole structure collapses. If people are not the authors of their acts, how can they be held responsible? If not responsible, how can they be punished?