ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces remorse by presenting and reflecting on a number of scenes, reports and stories about it. Various themes concerning remorse and some of its relatives and neighbours are contrition, repentance, guilt, and shame. The stories are not meant to portray morally uplifting exemplars of remorse as some sort of object lessons in moral virtue. Often enough, the stories concern an absence or evasion of remorse, or mixed emotions in response to wrongdoing. The chapter draws the excerpts and vignettes from contemporary news reports, fiction, poetry, biography and religious texts. In the theoretical attitude of the sciences, reflection tends to move away from the particularities and contingent aspects of individual experiences and look for commonalities and more abstract principles. Rivkin was an Australian stockbroker who was found guilty of insider trading and sentenced to nine months' periodic detention. Rivkin himself was either simply maintaining his lie or suffering from self-deception.
