As Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind, the moral foundation of loyalty helps groups cement bonds and form coalitions. It shows “who is a team player and who is a traitor, particularly when your team is fighting with other teams.”？[8]
To my mild disappointment, the surveys unearthed not a single modern-day Benedict Arnold or Judas Iscariot. Charlie, in fact, ended up working for a large defense contractor that equips the armed forces. Yet merely being adjacent to the military was insufficient. He regrets not having “the experience of hardship and sacrifice,” of depending on others for survival and of their relying on him. “If you’re serving someone, it means you’re not serving yourself,” he told me. “The act of sacrifice is good for the other, but it’s also good for the soul.”
4. Subversion
The fewest moral regrets involved the Authority/Subversion foundation. A handful of people regretted “dishonoring my parents” and “being disrespectful to my teachers”—like the twenty-four-year-old man from India, who relayed this tale:
My father and I run a shop. A teacher who taught me at school comes for shopping. My teacher knows me and my father, but my father doesn’t know him. We give a little discount to whoever who has a long relationship with us and my teacher is among them. I thought my father knew him, so I didn’t tell him that he was my teacher. Sir paid full amount, not that he minded. But after he left, my father demanded that I should have told him that he was sir. It was such a shame and disrespectful for us that we didn’t discount the price to show some respect and gratitude. I deeply, deeply regret that incident every time that memory is recalled.
Such entries, though, were relatively rare. One reason for the dearth of this type of moral regret is that the quantitative portion of my survey sampled only Americans and the qualitative portion included more respondents from the United States than from any other country. Had I taken larger samplings in nations and regions where the cultural values of deference are often more prominent, this type of regret might have been more common.
5. Desecration
Regrets about violating sanctity were more numerous than regrets about subverting authority. These regrets were also emotionally intense—especially when they centered on one of the most fiercely contested issues of the last sixty years: abortion.
Americans share a rough consensus about abortion’s legality, but they are deeply split on its morality. According to Gallup, about three-quarters of people in the United States believe that abortion should be legal in at least certain circumstances. However, 47 percent believe it is “morally wrong,” while 44 percent believe it is “morally acceptable.”[9] That divide came out clearly in my research.
Regrets about abortions were not as pervasive as regrets about bullying and infidelity, but they were prevalent. A fifty-year-old woman in Arkansas said:
I had an abortion at age twenty. That is the biggest regret of my life. My second-biggest regret is that I had another one at age twenty-five.
These regrets were partly about harm, but they were bigger than that: a belief that the actions amounted to a degradation of the very sanctity of life.
For example, a sixty-year-old woman from Pennsylvania wrote:
I regret that I aborted a fetus that would have been my third child with my husband. We’ve been married for thirty-four years. I had a tough pregnancy with my second. My husband did not want me to go through the suffering of another pregnancy just less than a year after our second child was born. I believe his thoughts were [also] the financial burden of a third child. . . . I cried the whole way to the clinic and have grieved every day since. . . . The burden of ending a life, a life created with love, bears on me every moment of every day.
A fifty-eight-year-old woman in Puerto Rico regretted:
Having an abortion. Having to say I’m sorry when I meet him/her in Heaven.
More than a hundred years ago, the French sociologist émile Durkheim wrote that the defining feature of religious thought—and, I’d argue, many other belief systems—is “the division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane.”[10] We don’t always agree on the boundaries between those domains. But when we forsake what we believe is sacred for what we believe is profane, regret is the consequence.
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Moral regrets are a peculiar category. They are the smallest in number, yet the greatest in variety. They are the most individually painful. But they may also be the most collectively uplifting. There is something heartening about grown women and men waking up at night despairing over incidents decades earlier in their lives in which they hurt others, acted unfairly, or compromised the values of their community. It suggests that stamped somewhere in our DNA and buried deep in our souls is the desire to be good.