Kant’s account of the pain of remorse involves a hybrid justification based on self-retribution, but constrained by forward-looking principles which say we must channel remorse into improvement and moderate its pain to avoid damaging our rational agency. Kant’s corpus also offers material for a revisionist but textually grounded alternative account based on wrongdoers’ sympathy for the pain they cause. This account is based on the value of care, and has forward-looking constraints much like Kant’s own account. Drawing on Kant’s texts and recent work in empirical psychology, I argue that sympathetic remorse may fulfil Kant’s forward-looking goals better than self-retributive remorse.

康德对悔恨之痛的描述涉及一种基于自我报复的混合辩护，但受到前瞻性原则的限制，即我们必须将悔恨转化为改善并减轻其痛苦，以避免损害我们的理性能动性。康德的语料库还为基于不法行为者对他们造成的痛苦的同情而进行的修正主义但有文本基础的替代叙述提供了材料。这个账户是基于护理价值的，和康德自己的账户一样有前瞻性约束。借鉴康德的著作和最近在经验心理学方面的工作，我认为同情的悔恨可能比自我报复的悔恨更能实现康德的前瞻性目标。