On Remorse
*unedited*
A moral claim seems to presuppose a moral goal and the evaluation of a moral claim with respect to said goal seems to be situationally unique to both actors and actions. Therefore any claims regarding an objective moral wrong is to make a prediction about future situations based on some past precedent. Furthermore, most moral judgments wish to take into consideration the intentionality of the actors as well as the manifestation of the acts. This further complicates such moral assessments since intentionality can only be know internally within the mind of the actor--which may be too generous a statement given how horrible our recording of memory can be. Recollecting past memories of past intentions also has a built in bias in that harboring immoral self-assessments can be hazardous to our livelihood. It thus makes evolutionary sense to skew our self reflections more toward "nonpology" type justifications than to deal with the remorse that comes from actual apologies. Apologies therefore seem to have more to do with social signals used to gain back lost social favor than in expressing actual remorse. Moreover, we tend to make statements that attempt to elicit forgiveness without actually admitting our fault. In hindsight, we justify our intentions by actively limiting the set of choices we were given at the time of the action. These non-apologies " may prove extremely useful in situations where little can be done to assuage the apparent offence or prevent its repetition".
Unlike regret and embarrassment, I'm not sure if remorse is as crucial as most of us think it is to our future actions. If we were to dive deep within the recesses of our neighbors mind we would probably find very little (if any) accounts of what we would consider true-remorse. This is not to insinuate that we don't have regret, instead it signals that our regrets don't tend to be rooted in true remorse. In contrast to remorse, regret seems to deal with emotional reactions to the outcomes of our preceding actions not the intentions. We may express regret for our prior actions but in truth we tend to regret what outcomes were born from that chain of events. It is a subtle distinction to differentiate the outcome of an act and the intent of the act but when we access previous chains of causality we tend to downplay the role of our intention and focus more on the role of the outcome. However crude it may seem to the observer, by focusing on the outcomes instead of the intention we can help to alleviate some the guilt/responsibility within the causal chain by allotting space for the role of chance. This allows each of us to move from a stage of regret (internal) to a stage of disappointment (external) and eventually to learn from our past mistakes and to gain the ability to introduce corrective action in our decision making process. This is what allows us to get on with our lives and seems to be natures coping mechanism for dealing with the inevitable, unforgiving reality of life and living.