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If not, circumstantial luck has made a moral difference. For his actions that morning, he was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to life in prison.1Just over ten years later in Cleveland, a different man intentionally shot and killed a twelve-year-old child within seconds of encountering him. Moral justification, as we have noted, is not supposed to be a matter of luck at all. The usual intuition about justification is that if we want to know whether Gauguin’s decision to leave his family and become a painter was a rational one, what we need to consider is the information Gauguin had available to him when he made that decision. As Williams points out, however, this will be cold comfort if morality doesn’t matter much. None of this is to deny that the way things turn out may figure in the justifications people give for their past actions. An anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out that there is a difference between dramatic circumstances that may radically change or even break down a person’s identity, and the ordinary circumstances that continuously support and (subtly) change one’s identity. In: Musschenga A, Siertsema B (eds) De Utopie van de Maakbaarheid, Ten Have, Kampen, 136–157, Statman D (1993) “Introduction”, in Statman (ed.) Suppose that we are genuinely grateful that Gauguin did what he did and, as a result, became a great artist. The surgeon has to decide – we can assume that both treatments require instantaneous action, so that there is also no time to consult relatives of the patient. This is important because there is reason to think the identification of luck with lack of control is mistaken. The claims of all these authors are controversial. His project will have failed but, as regards justification, a verdict will not be returned due to the interference of extrinsic bad luck. If we did so refrain, it is not clear we would be able to make any judgments at all. Althought these two papers by Nagel and Williams started the discussion of the problem of moral luck using the phrase “moral luck,” the relevant problem has been discussed before. We might, for instance, judge a drunk driver who kills a child (call him the “unfortunate driver”) more harshly than one who does not (call him the “fortunate driver”), even if the only significant difference between the two cases is that a child happened to be playing on the road at the wrong point on the unfortunate driver’s route home. On the other hand, if, at the start of his project, a freak accident causes him to sustain an injury which prevents him from ever painting again, he will be neither justified nor unjustified since his project is never really carried out. It may be that our gratitude is no indicator of whether or not it is better that Gauguin did as he did. We might say this shows that, on occasion, we have reason to be glad that the morally correct thing did not happen. Nagel sees this as, “the problem of moral luck.” A persons moral standing should not be affected by luck or chance, and the fact that luck plays such an essential role in determining whether a person is “good” or “bad,” morally, in the eyes of his peers is an inaccurate judgment. ‘Causal luck’ is ‘luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstances’; ‘resultant luck’ (or ‘consequential luck’, ‘outcome luck’), finally, is luck in ‘the way one’s actions and projects turn out’. We shall pay more attention to these varied differences in time, but the important point for now is that both Williams and Nagel argue that luck can make a moral difference. To do so, however, is to open oneself up to worries about constitutive moral luck. It is just that, despite this, the way things turn out has nothing to do with whether or not those past actions really were justified. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [1986], Pritchard D (2004) Epistemic luck. We focus on the core of the person, on his or her character. In particular, she presents Plato and Aristotle as disagreeing about whether a good life must be invulnerable to luck, arguing that for Plato it must, but for Aristotle it need not. This relationship between the controversy about free will versus determinism and worries about causal luck might, as has sometimes been suggested, be applied to the whole problem of moral luck. He goes to live on a South Sea Island, believing that living in a more primitive environment will allow him to develop his gifts as a painter more fully. Suppose that Jane wins the lottery, but everyone, including Jane, lacks the kind of control over their actions that freedom of the will requires. Like worries about the compatibility of free will and determinism, worries about moral luck get their start when we notice how much of what is supposed to be morally significant about us is simply thrust upon us whether we like it or not. This argument, glimpses of which can be found in Williams’ paper, is explicitly made in Thomas Nagel’s response to Williams. This might be due to an intuition that the notion of constitutive luck threatens to undermine everything – to do with morality, that is. In Gauguin’s case, she claims that the value which competes with morality for supremacy is that of art and that even if Gauguin fails, “he has reason to think it worthwhile to have tried” (1988, p. The epistemic luck I talk about in this article differs from this, in that it does not concern what the (un)lucky person knows, but what others come to know about him. Constitutive luck covers what we are, while circumstantial luck covers what happens to us. Although this lies beyond the confines of the present article, it would be interesting to investigate the relevance of this difference to the problem of moral luck. If he had been driving a little more slowly. Various sorts of difference have been considered. I focus on Zimmerman's argument because, unlike what most deniers of moral luck do, he offers an account of responsibility judgments from which it follows that all four types of luck-not only resultant or circumstantial luck, which tend to attract the lion's share of attention-are irrelevant to … This article is based on a Dutch article Schinkel (2008); I thank Bert Musschenga, Jan Boersema, and other members of the Blaise Pascal Institute, as well as Kees Schinkel for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this Dutch article. (1993), 235–250, Williams B (1981) [1976] “Moral Luck”, in Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, 20–39, Zimmerman MJ (1993) [1987] “Luck and moral responsibility”, in Statman (ed.) In Florida in 2003, a 20-year-old woke up after a night of drinking, gave his roommate permission to borrow his car, and went back to sleep. any argument from the former debate, change some terms, adapt the examples, and end up with an argument relevant to the latter. It is difficult to tell. To those on the losing end of these matters, this often seems unfair. We are sure we can handle writing a new unique essay on this topic within the tight deadlines. Consider what we might call a person’s “moral standing”—an expression we can use to stand for all the sorts of moral difference luck might be thought to make. We shall see that Williams’ argument seem to fail and that what is interesting in his argument is captured much better by Nagel. Presumably luck can enter into moral justification in the same ways, but, with good reason, no one has ever suggested there is anything troubling about this.). All this seems, from our perspective, a matter of luck. We are surely inclined to blame such a person, to hold him or her responsible for what he or she did. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, Schinkel A (2008) “Moreel Toeval”. But Nagel asks us to contrast this person with a German who moves to Argentina shortly before the War for business reasons. Nagel gives us several examples of resultant luck. The worry about causal luck should be clear enough since it is precisely the sort of worry found in the debate on free will and determinism. (Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness (1986) is an important work in which she considers Greek views towards luck and ethics. Williams’ aim in “Moral Luck” and much of his other work is to discredit the Kantian view of morality and to suggest that it would be best to abandon the notion of morality altogether (replacing it with the wider notion he calls the “ethical”). philosophers build their accounts of moral responsibility on this luck-free condition, and we may call their views Luck-Free Moral Responsibility (LFMR). The problem Nagel points out, however, is that when we consider the sorts of things that influence us “Ultimately, nothing or almost nothing about what a person does seems to be under his control” (Nagel, 1993, p. 59) That is, everything we do seems at some level to involve luck. Subscription will auto renew annually. Concomitantly, just talking about "lack of control" instead of "moral luck" won't work, since it reduces to concepts incompatible with moral luck phenomena. It is not clear, for instance, that moral value has to be the supreme sort of value. Williams appears to want constitutive luck to encompass what we have called “circumstantial” and “causal” luck (Williams, 1993a, p. 36). We tend to believe that people are morally responsible only for things (actions, outcomes) that are or were under their control. To see exactly how the challenge arises, let us begin with … In the end, people are assessed for what they are like, not for how they ended up that way. I’ll crit-icize the standard argument against circumstantial luck. A natural reaction to worries about resultant and circumstantial luck is to suggest that what matters is not how a person’s actions turn out or what circumstances they chance to encounter, but what is in that person’s “heart” so to speak. Nagel says very little about causal luck and the same is true of those who have written about moral luck after him. Is he concerned that the driver will be blamed for the event of the child’s death or that the unlucky driver himself will be rated morally worse than the lucky driver (that is, blamed more)? It involves a “taking on” of the responsibility for some action and the desire to make amends for it. It rests on a claim about rational justification that can quite easily be made to look doubtful. © 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. John says that luck affects the identity of our actions, while Ken argues that it does not. If his brakes had been checked more recently and so on and so on. 339).). He claims the idea that morality is immune to luck is “basic to our ideas of morality” (1993a, p. 36). But as reasonable as this may sound, Nagel also claims we cannot refrain from making judgments about a person’s moral status based upon just this sort of uncontrollable feature. She would certainly experience what Williams (1981) called ‘agent regret’, a form of regret characteristic of someone whose actions somehow contributed to the coming about of something bad or undesirable. In the case of Gauguin, intrinsic luck is luck arising from Gauguin himself, since he is the only one involved in his project. If we do not accept this claim, Williams has given us no reason to think that either rational or moral justification is a matter of luck, and so we cease to have a reason to imagine a conflict between rationality and morality (on these grounds anyway). Just as the problem of skepticism emerges from the clash of our intuition that knowledge should be certain and non-accidental with the fact that few, if any, of our true beliefs are entirely certain or free from accident, so: The erosion of moral judgment emerges not as the absurd consequence of an over-simple theory, but as a natural consequence of the ordinary idea of moral assessment, when it is applied in view of a more complete and precise account of the facts. Nagel concludes that “in a sense the problem has no solution” (1993, p. 68). The two main papers discussed in this article by Nagel and Williams, both entitled “Moral Luck,” were originally published in The Aristotelian Society Supplementary, Volume 1, 1976. Nagel suggests they should not. This seems the natural way to introduce it. (1995) “Moral Responsibility and ‘Moral Luck’.”, Walker, M. U. We do hold him responsible for the death of the child. Andre, J. Luck is thought to have nothing to do with his justification. Nagel suggests that the intuition is correct and lies at the heart of the notion of morality, but he also endorses the view that luck will inevitably influence a person’s moral standing. The answer is both. The literature on moral luck began in earnest in the wake of papers by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. tial luck. By the so-called epistemic argument they claim that what luck really does is not only to interfere with someone’s moral status, but to interfere with our knowledge of her/him, given that we are not omniscient There are four kinds of moral luck. In other words, is the entire problem of moral luck nothing but the problem of free will and determinism in different clothing? Athanassoulis N (2005) Morality, moral luck and responsibility: Fortune’s web. If we are satisfied that the driver could have done nothing else to prevent the child’s death, we will try to console him by telling him this. Whereas Zipursky’s convincing defense of moral luck depends on there being an agency-linking aspect to responsibility, my defense will focus on luck’s impact on character and identity – not least because of epistemic reductionists’ focus on character. Thomas Nagel (1979) identified four kinds of moral luck in his essay. (1993), 167–180, Ross L, Nisbet RE (1991) The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology. This doesn’t, however, quite get Williams’ point right. Correspondence to Indeed, it may be the case that Nagel thinks the two questions are inseparable, that we cannot make sense of the idea of holding a person morally to blame for some event without this, at the same time, being counted as a reason to lower that person’s moral credit rating. Suppose that determinism is true (and we were aware of this), such that it would have been possible in, say, 1897 to correctly predict that Jane would win the lottery this weekend. If she succeeds she will be a hero, if she fails she will bear “some responsibility” for the terrible consequences of that failure (Nagel, 1993, pp. The problem of moral luck had been discussed before Nagel’s and Williams’ articles, although not under the heading of “moral luck.” Though Nagel’s paper was written as a commentary on Williams’, they have quite different emphases. That is, is Nagel’s worry that luck seems to play a role in determining a person’s moral standing or that things which are beyond that person’s control seem to affect her moral standing? Just as luck may interfere in the course of our actions to produce results that have a profound influence on the way we are morally judged, so our luck in being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time can have a profound effect on the way we are morally assessed. In doing so, Williams takes himself to be challenging not just Kantian thinking about morality, but also commonplace ideas about it. Thomas Nagel 's Moral Luck 2462 Words | 10 Pages. See, for instance, Joel Feinberg (1962). We should ask first of all, what exactly Williams means by “rational justification.” He never says, but he seems interested in the question of whether Gauguin was epistemically justified in thinking that acting as he did would increase his chances of becoming a great painter. By the so-called epistemic argument they claim that what luck really does is not only to interfere with someone’s moral status, but to interfere with our knowledge of her/him, given that we are not omniscient beings and our knowledge is (Richards, 1993, 169), …if actual harm occurs, the agent and others considering his act will have a painful awareness of this harm. We can make this sort of case more troubling if we vary the way in which the person has “behaved badly.” If the bad behaviour is gleefully shooting hundreds of people as the guard of a concentration camp, then we may be inclined to think of the expatriate—who would have behaved the same way given the chance—as an undiscovered monster who rightly should be judged as harshly as the German. Law Philos 26:405–436, Franzoi SL (2006) Social psychology. ‘Constitutive luck’ is one of four kinds of moral luck first distinguished by Nagel (1983: 28) and later systematized (and named and renamed) by others; it is luck that influences the talents, capacities, and inclinations one has. (It is, however, possible to concede that morality is not the supreme source of value, but not give up the claim that our lives are, in some important respect, free of luck. And thus, for Richards, luck may influence how we ought to treat someone, “not by changing what he deserves, but by changing the grounds on which we are obliged to judge” (1993: 170). Judith Andre (1993) claims that we find cases of moral luck troubling because some of our thinking about morality is influenced by Kant. The kind most relevant to the above example is "resultant moral luck". (1993) “Nagel, Williams and Moral Luck.”, Browne, B. Though agent regret is ‘by no means restricted to voluntary agency’ (1981: 27-28), it cannot be separated from remorse and moral (self-)evaluation. The reality of moral luck, in this example at least, lies in its impact on character and personal and moral identity. Schinkel, A. Roughly, intrinsic luck is luck that arises from the elements of the project or action under consideration, while extrinsic luck is luck arising from “outside” the project. (1993) “Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure Agency.”. It would pose a problem for the Kantian, since, for Kant, to act morally is to act rationally. Brynmor Browne (1992), for instance, has argued that moral luck is only troubling because we mistakenly tend to think of moral assessment as bound up with punishment. So (respect for) autonomy and informed consent are not at issue here. We are supposedly stuck between two unpalatable options: (1) If the picture is as Williams describes it, we are in a situation in which moral value and another value (rationality) clash and the other value is the winner. We might well think, however, that morality is the one arena in which luck has no power. (1949) “On a Supposed Right To Lie From Altruistic Motives.”, Mendus, S. (1988) “The Serpent and the Dove.”, Rosebury, B. But to say something like this is to call into question part of the point of morality (or so Williams says). I came across an argument against moral responsibility that follows like this: P1 A person P is morally responsible for the occurring of an event only if the event was not a matter of luck. His claim was not that morality is the only source of value, but that it is the supreme source of value. Thus, just as it is essential to the notion of moral value that it is immune to luck, so, he claims, it is essential that moral value is the supreme sort of value. We might wonder whether the problem Nagel presents is best thought of as a problem about luck or if it is really about control. In particular, neither of the notions frequently discussed in the free will debate (free will or determinism) is of central concern when we think about moral luck. But the alternative is to preserve our notions of agency and responsibility by concluding that moral value is subject to luck. In this essay we purport to suggest a comprehensive argument against the existence of moral luck. He claims that we should not praise or condemn people for qualities that are not under the control of the will (and so not under their control). The mere fact that we do sometimes judge people for things that happen due to luck does not indicate that we should judge people for things that happen due to luck nor that we intend to. Even if, prior to making his decision, Gauguin had good reason to think he had considerable artistic talent, he could not be sure what would come of that talent, nor whether the decision to leave his family would help or hinder the development of that talent. Williams hopes to inflict fatal damage on the notion of the moral by setting up a collision between rational and moral justification. Problems only arise when we come to consider “where we place our gratitude” that Gauguin left his family and became a painter (Williams, 1993b, p. 255). Nagel identifies four ways in which luck plays into our moral assessments: Nagel identifies, but does not give names to all four types of luck. Nagel thinks that luck should be understood as operating where control is lacking, so for him the problem about control and the problem about luck are one and the same. But even if an event’s being lucky (or unlucky) for a given person is identical with that event being out of that person’s control, we are left with a problem of moral luck. Williams rightly observes that it is effectively impossible to foresee whether Gauguin will succeed in his attempt to become a great painter. b. the self is threatened with dissolution by the absorption of its acts into the class of events. The term “resultant luck” comes from Michael Zimmerman (1993, p. 219) Other names have been given to resultant, circumstantial, and causal luck. There can be more than one source of value so long as moral value trumps these others sorts of value. The problem of moral luck: an argument against its epistemic reduction 269 acts, and build on this in section 4, where I also draw on findings from social psychology that problematize epistemic reductionists’ assumptions about character and its relation to action. Since both the condition of control and the prevalence of moral luck seem philosophically plausible, perhaps even compelling, the dilemma points to a It also seems to be a redundant sort of luck, included by Nagel only to indicate the connection between the problem of moral luck and the debate about free will and determinism. Woodruff, P. (1989) “Review of Martha Nussbaum. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9153-y, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9153-y, Over 10 million scientific documents at your fingertips, Not logged in The driver, after all, caused the child’s death. The notion of constitutive luck illustrates the difficulty of the problem of moral luck. 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