Will I Regret This? Should I Care? On Regret and Wellbeing

ABSTRACT Regret colours many areas of our lives, from the vital to the trivial. One example is in medical decision‐making, when physicians hesitate to provide procedures they think their patients will regret. For instance, physicians sometimes refuse younger women's requests for elective sterilization. Hesitating when we believe that we or someone else will regret a decision seems commonsensical: presumably this protects us from making poor choices. But we lack a clear understanding of how regret impacts wellbeing. Before invoking the risk of regret to steer decision‐making, we must scrutinize the widespread aversion to making regrettable choices and the intuition that we fare poorly when we regret. Contrary to the commonsense view that regret should be avoided, this article shows that regret is not prudentially weighty, and we go wrong when we prioritize regret in decision‐making. This article isolates three ways in which something might be prudentially weighty: (1) it harms us; (2) it indicates that a harm has occurred; or (3) it inhibits a benefit. Despite our intuitions, regret is not itself harmful; it does not reliably indicate harm; and it does not preclude benefit. Knowing this enables us to evaluate critically how we currently treat regret in practical contexts.