How to Avoid ‘Moralism’ about Obligation

Sometimes it seems that no matter how faultlessly we conduct ourselves, we cannot but fail in our obligations, making us apt to feel morally responsible. But according to the popular view I call ‘moralism’ about obligation, we cannot breach our obligations faultlessly, leading moralists to pathologize our feelings, or worse still, to find fault in our conduct. I argue that we should reject moralism, but that we should not do so in the ‘hard’ way, which denies the plausible claim that blameworthiness entails fault. Yet we cannot ‘soften’ our anti-moralism unless we can explain how ordinary agent-regret can rise to a ‘moral’ quality sufficient to do justice to the phenomenology. I offer the outline of a proposal according to which a failure to meet our obligations gives rise to agent-regret with the following ‘moral’ quality: it is extraordinarily hard to let go of or justifiably repress it.