Why Can Doing the Right Thing Still Leave Moral Regret?

You have promised to attend an important gathering for a friend, but on the way you encounter an injured cyclist who has no immediate help. Stopping will break the promise; continuing will abandon an urgent and feasible rescue. Even if you stay, with strong reason to think that this is the right action, missing the gathering may leave a kind of regret unlike ordinary disappointment.

Strict Kantian approaches often seek to show that genuine duties ultimately cohere, because being required to perform two mutually impossible actions appears contradictory. In The Right and the Good, W. D. Ross instead describes “prima facie duties”. Fidelity, non-maleficence and beneficence each provide genuine moral reasons, but in a particular situation only the strongest requirement after due consideration becomes the actual duty. “Prima facie” here does not mean superficial or false; it means that the reason can be overridden by a stronger one.

This view explains why a correct choice can leave a moral remainder. Helping the cyclist may prevail, but it does not make the promise to the friend vanish as though it never existed. The person still has reason to explain, apologise and repair the disruption. Conversely, regret does not prove that the choice was wrong. It may simply acknowledge that a genuine claim went unmet.

The better judgement is that moral conflict cannot always be converted into a cost-free choice. We must decide what to do first, but should not use “I chose correctly” to erase the relationship that lost out. Choosing an action and addressing its remainder are two stages: one weighs the competing reasons, while the other acknowledges what the unfulfilled duty has left behind.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-dilemmas/
https://ia601405.us.archive.org/29/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.87082/2015.87082.The-Right-And-The-Good_text.pdf