Links to the Material

• “Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure Agency” by Margaret U. Walker (1991)
• “Moral Luck” by Thomas Nagel (2012)

1. Thomas Nagel — “Moral Luck”

Kant thought that luck should not come into ethics. Every action which can be assessed in moral terms must be freely performed: you should not be held morally responsible for anything outside your conscious control. This view seems plausible: our notions of moral praise and blame are focused on what is and is not avoidable, on what is within the agent’s control. However, as Thomas Nagel (1937– ) shows in this article, the situation is more complex. If we take Kant’s notion of responsibility seriously we find that it leads to apparently paradoxical conclusions. Nagel does not claim to have any solution to the difficulties he lays bare, but his analysis suggests that our common notion of moral responsibility need to be refined.

Kant believed that good or bad luck should influence neither our moral judgment of a person and his actions, nor his moral assessment of himself. The good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes or because of its adequacy to achieve some proposed end; it is good only because of its willing, i.e., it is good of itself. And, regarded for itself, it is to be esteemed incomparably higher than anything which could be brought about by it in favor of any inclination or even of the sum total of all inclinations. Even if it should happen that, by a particularly unfortunate fate or by the niggardly provision of a stepmotherly nature, this will should be wholly lacking in power to accomplish its purpose, and if even the greatest effort should not avail it to achieve anything of its end, and if there remained only the good will (not as a mere wish but as the summoning of all the means in our power), it would sparkle like a jewel in its own right, as something that had its full worth in itself. Usefulness or fruitlessness can neither diminish nor augment this worth.

He would presumably have said the same about a bad will: whether it accomplishes its evil purposes is morally irrelevant. And a course of action that would be condemned if it had a bad outcome cannot be vindicated if by luck it turns out well. There cannot be moral risk. This view seems to be wrong, but it arises in response to a fundamental problem about moral responsibility to which we possess no satisfactory solution. The problem develops out of the ordinary conditions of moral judgment. Prior to reflection it is intuitively plausible that people cannot be morally assessed for what is not their fault, or for what is due to factors beyond their control. Such judgment is different from the evaluation of something as a good or bad thing, or state of affairs. The latter may be present in addition to moral judgment, but when we blame someone for his actions we are not merely saying it is bad that they happened, or bad that he exists: we are judging him, saying he is bad, which is different from his being a bad thing. This kind of judgment takes only a certain kind of object. Without being able to explain exactly why, we feel that the appropriateness of moral assessment is easily undermined by the discovery that the act or attribute, no matter how good or bad, is not under the person’s control. While other evaluations remain, this one seems to lose its footing. So a clear absence of control, produced by involuntary movement, physical force, or ignorance of the circumstances, excuses what is done from moral judgment. But what we do depends in many more ways than these on what is not under our control – what is not produced by a good or bad will, in Kant’s phrase. And external influences in this broader range are not usually thought to excuse what is done from moral judgment, positive or negative.

Let me give a few examples, beginning with the type of case Kant has in mind. Whether we succeed or fail in what we try to do nearly always depends to some extent on factors beyond our control. This is true of murder, altruism, revolution, the sacrifice of certain interests for the sake of others – almost any morally important act. What has been done, and what is morally judged, is partly determined by external factors. However jewel-like the good will may be in its own right, there is a morally significant difference between rescuing someone from a burning building and dropping him from a twelfth-storey window while trying to rescue him. Similarly, there is a morally significant difference between reckless driving and manslaughter. But whether a reckless driver hits a pedestrian depends on the presence of the pedestrian at the point where he recklessly passes a red light. What we do is also limited by the opportunities and choices with which we are faced, and these are largely determined by factors beyond our control. Someone who was an officer in a concentration camp might have led a quiet and harmless life if the Nazis had never come to power in Germany. And someone who led a quiet and harmless life in Argentina might have become an officer in a concentration camp if he had not left Germany for business reasons in 1930.

I shall say more later about these and other examples. I introduce them here to illustrate a general point. Where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him inthat respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral luck. Such luck can be good or bad. And the problem posed by this phenomenon, which led Kant to deny its possibility, is that the broad range of external influences here identified seems on close examination to undermine moral assessment as surely as does the narrower range of familiar excusing conditions. If the condition of control is consistently applied, it threatens to erode most of the moral assessments we find it natural to make. The things for which people are morally judged are determined in more ways than we at first realize by what is beyond their control. And when the seemingly natural requirement of fault or responsibility is applied in light of these facts, it leaves few pre-reflective moral judgments intact. Ultimately, nothing or almost nothing about what a person does seems to be under his control. Why not conclude, then, that the condition of control is false – that it is an initially plausible hypothesis refuted by clear counter-examples? One could in that case look instead for a more refined condition which picked out the kinds of lack of control that really undermine certain moral judgments, without yielding the unacceptable conclusion derived from the broader condition, that most or all ordinary moral judgments are illegitimate. What rules out this escape is that we are dealing not with a theoretical conjecture but with a philosophical problem. The condition of control does not suggest itself merely as a generalization from certain clear cases. It seems correct in the further cases to which it is extended beyond the original set. When we undermine moral assessment by considering new ways in which control is absent, we are not just discovering what would follow given the general hypothesis, but are actually being persuaded that in itself the absence of control is relevant in these cases too. 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. It would therefore be a mistake to argue from the unacceptability of the conclusions to the need for a different account of the conditions of moral responsibility. The view that moral luck is paradoxical is not a mistake, ethical or logical, but a perception of one of the ways in which the intuitively acceptable conditions of moral judgment threaten to undermine it all.

It resembles the situation in another area of philosophy, the theory of knowledge. There too, conditions which seem perfectly natural, and which grow out of the ordinary procedures for challenging and defending claims to knowledge, threaten to undermine all such claims if consistently applied. Most skeptical arguments have this quality: they do not depend on the imposition of arbitrarily stringent standards of knowledge, arrived at by misunderstanding, but appear to grow inevitably from the consistent application of ordinary standards. There is a substantive parallel as well, for epistemological skepticism arises from consideration of the respects in which our beliefs and their relation to reality depend on factors beyond our control. External and internal causes produce our beliefs. We may subject these processes to scrutiny in an effort to avoid error, but our conclusions at this next level also result, in part, from influences which we do not control directly. The same will be true no matter how far we carry the investigation. Our beliefs are always, ultimately, due to factors outside our control, and the impossibility of encompassing those factors without being at the mercy of others leads us to doubt whether we know anything. It looks as though, if any of our beliefs are true, it is pure biological luck rather than knowledge. Moral luck is like this because while there are various respects in which the natural objects of moral assessment are out of our control or influenced by what is out of our control, we cannot reflect on these facts without losing our grip on the judgments.

There are roughly four ways in which the natural objects of moral assessment are disturbingly subject to luck. One is the phenomenon of constitutive luck – the kind of person you are, where this is not just a question of what you deliberately do, but of your inclinations, capacities, and temperament. Another category is luck in one’s circumstances – the kind of problems and situations one faces. The other two have to do with the causes and effects of action: luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstances, and luck in the way one’s actions and projects turn out. All of them present a common problem. They are all opposed by the idea that one cannot be more culpable or estimable for anything than one is for that fraction of it which is under one’s control. It seems irrational to take or dispense credit or blame for matters over which a person has no control, or for their influence on results over which he has partial control. Such things may create the conditions for action, but action can be judged only to the extent that it goes beyond these conditions and does not just result from them.

Let us first consider luck, good and bad, in the way things turn out. Kant, in the above-quoted passage, has one example of this in mind, but the category covers a wide range. It includes the truck driver who accidentally runs over a child, the artist who abandons his wife and five children to devote himself to painting, and other cases in which the possibilities of success and failure are even greater. The driver, if he is entirely without fault, will feel terrible about his role in the event, but will not have to reproach himself. Therefore this example of agent-regret is not yet a case of moral bad luck. However, if the driver was guilty of even a minor degree of negligence – failing to have his brakes checked recently, for example – then if that negligence contributes to the death of the child, he will not merely feel terrible. He will blame himself for the death. And what makes this an example of moral luck is that he would have to blame himself only slightly for the negligence itself if no situation arose which required him to brake suddenly and violently to avoid hitting a child. Yet the negligence is the same in both cases, and the driver has no control over whether a child will run into his path.

The same is true at higher levels of negligence. If someone has had too much to drink and his car swerves on to the sidewalk, he can count himself morally lucky if there are no pedestrians in its path. If there were, he would be to blame for their deaths, and would probably be prosecuted for manslaughter. But if he hurts no one, although his recklessness is exactly the same, he is guilty of a far less serious legal offence and will certainly reproach himself and be reproached by others much less severely. To take another legal example, the penalty for attempted murder is less than that for successful murder – however similar the intentions and motives of the assailant may bein the two cases. His degree of culpability can depend, it would seem, on whether the victim happened to be wearing a bullet-proof vest, or whether a bird flew into the path of the bullet – matters beyond his control.

Finally, there are cases of decision under uncertainty – common in public and private life. Anna Karenina goes off with Vronsky, Gaugin leaves his family, Chamberlain signs the Munich agreement, the Decembrists persuade the troops under their command to revolt against the czar, the American colonies declare their independence from Britain, you introduce two people in an attempt at match-making. It is tempting in all such cases to feel that some decision must be possible, in the light of what is known at the time, which will make reproach unsuitable no matter how things turn out. But this is not true; when someone acts in such ways he takes his life, or his moral position, into his hands, because how things turn out determines what he has done. It is possible also to assess the decision from the point of view of what could be known at the time, but this is not the end of the story. If the Decembrists had succeeded in overthrowing Nicholas I in 1825 and establishing a constitutional regime, they would be heroes. As it is, not only did they fail and pay for it, but they bore some responsibility for the terrible punishments meted out to the troops who had been persuaded to follow them. If the American Revolution had been a bloody failure resulting in greater repression, then Jefferson, Franklin and Washington would still have made a noble attempt, and might not even have regretted it on their way to the scaffold, but they would also have had to blame themselves for what they had helped to bring on their compatriots. (Perhaps peaceful efforts at reform would eventually have succeeded.) If Hitler had not overrun Europe and exterminated millions, but instead had died of a heart attack after occupying the Sudetenland, Chamberlain’s action at Munich would still have utterly betrayed the Czechs, but it would not be the great moral disaster that has made his name a household word.

In many cases of difficult choice the outcome cannot be foreseen with certainty. One kind of assessment of the choice is possible in advance, but another kind must await the outcome, because the outcome determines what has been done. The same degree of culpability of estimability in intention, motive, or concern is compatible with a wide range of judgments, positive or negative, depending on what happened beyond the point of decision. The mens rea which could have existed in the absence of any consequences does not exhaust the grounds of moral judgment. Actual results influence culpability or esteem in a large class of unquestionably ethical cases ranging from negligence through political choice.

That these are genuine moral judgments rather than expressions of temporary attitude is evident from the fact that one can say in advance how the moral verdict will depend on the results. If one negligently leaves the bath running with the baby in it, one will realize, as one bounds up the stairs towards the bathroom, that if the baby has drowned one has done something awful, whereas if it has not one has merely been careless. Someone who launches a violent revolution against an authoritarian regime knows that if he fails he will be responsible for much suffering that is in vain, but if he succeeds he will be justified by the outcome. I do not mean that any action can be retroactively justified by history. Certain things are so bad in themselves, or so risky, that no results can make them all right. Nevertheless, when moral judgment does depend on the outcome, it is objective and timeless and not dependent on a change of standpoint produced by success or failure. The judgment after the fact follows from an hypothetical judgment that can be made beforehand, and it can be made as easily by someone else as by the Agent.

From the point of view which makes responsibility dependent on control, all this seems absurd. How is it possible to be more or less culpable depending on whether a child gets into the path of one’s car, or a bird into the path of one’s bullet? Perhaps it is true that what is done depends on more than the agent’s state of mind or intention. The problem then is, why is it not irrational to base moral assessment on what people do, in this broad sense? It amounts to holding them responsible for the contributions of fate as well as for their own – provided they have made some contribution to begin with. If we look at cases of negligence or attempt, the pattern seems to be that overall culpability corresponds to the product of mental or intentional fault and the seriousness of the outcome. Cases of decision under uncertainty are less easily explained in this way, for it seems that the overall judgment can even shift from positive to negative depending on the outcome. But here too it seems rational to subtract the effects of occurrences subsequent to the choice, that were merely possible at the time, and concentrate moral assessment on the actual decision in light of the probabilities. If the object of moral judgment is the person, then to hold him accountable for what he has done in the broader sense is akin to strict liability, which may have its legal uses but seems irrational as a moral position.

The result of such a line of thought is to pare down each act to its morally essential core, an inner act of pure will assessed by motive and intention. Adam Smith advocates such a position in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but notes that it runs contrary to our actual judgments.

But how well soever we may seem to be persuaded of the truth of this equitable maxim, when we consider it after this manner, in abstract, yet when we come to particular cases, the actual consequences which happen to proceed from any action, have a very great effect upon our sentiments concerning its merit or demerit, and almost always either enhance or diminish our sense of both. Scarce, in any one instance, perhaps, will our sentiments be found, after examination, to be entirely regulated by this rule, which we all acknowledge ought entirely to regulate them.

Joel Feinberg points out further that restricting the domain of moral responsibility to the inner world will not immunize it to luck. Factors beyond the agent’s control, like a coughing fit, can interfere with his decisions as surely as they can with the path of a bullet from his gun. Nevertheless the tendency to cut down the scope of moral assessment is pervasive, and does not limit itself to the influence of effects. It attempts to isolate the will from the other direction, so to speak, by separating out constitutive luck. Let us consider that next.

Kant was particularly insistent on the moral irrelevance of qualities of temperament and personality that are not under the control of the will. Such qualities as sympathy or coldness might provide the background against which obedience to moral requirements is more or less difficult, but they could not be objects of moral assessment themselves, and might well interfere with confident assessment of its proper object – the determination of the will by the motive of duty. This rules out moral judgment of many of the virtues and vices, which are states of character that influence choice but are certainly not exhausted by dispositions to act deliberately in certain ways. A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental effort of will. To possess these vices is to be unable to help having certain feelings under certain circumstances, and to have strong spontaneous impulses to act badly. Even if one controls the impulses one still has the vice. An envious person hates the greater success of others. He can be morally condemned as envious even if he congratulates them cordially and does nothing to denigrate or spoil their success. Conceit, likewise, need not be displayed. It is fully present in someone who cannot help dwelling with secret satisfaction on the superiority of his own achievements, talents, beauty, intelligence, or virtue. To some extent such a quality may be the product of earlier choices; to some extent it may be amenable to change by current actions. But it is largely a matter of constitutive bad fortune. Yet people are morally condemned for such qualities, and esteemed for others equally beyond control of the will: they are assessed for what they are like. To Kant this seems incoherent because virtue is enjoined on everyone and therefore must in principle be possible for everyone. It may be easier for some than for others, but it must be possible to achieve it by making the right choices, against whatever temperamental background. One may want to have a generous spirit, or regret not having one, but it makes no sense to condemn oneself or anyone else for a quality which is not within the control of the  will. Condemnation implies that you should not be like that, not that it is unfortunate that you are.

Nevertheless, Kant’s conclusion remains intuitively unacceptable. We may be persuaded that these moral judgments are irrational, but they reappear involuntarily as soon as the argument is over. This is the pattern throughout the subject.

The third category to consider is luck in one’s circumstances, and I shall mention it briefly. The things we are called upon to do, the moral tests we face, are importantly determined by factors beyond our control. It may be true of someone that in a dangerous situation he would behave in a cowardly or heroic fashion, but if the situation never arises, he will never have the chance to distinguish or disgrace himself in this way, and his moral record will be different.

A conspicuous example of this is political. Ordinary citizens of Nazi Germany had an opportunity to behave heroically by opposing the regime. They also had an opportunity to behave badly, and most of them are culpable for having failed this test. But it is a test to which the citizens of other countries were not subjected, with the result that even if they, or some of them, would have behaved as badly as the Germans in like circumstances, they simply did not and therefore are not similarly culpable. Here again one is morally at the mercy of fate, and it may seem irrational upon reflection, but our ordinary moral attitudes would be unrecognizable without it. We judge people for  what they actually do or fail to do, not just for what they would have done if circumstances had been different.

This form of moral determination by the actual is also paradoxical, but we can begin to see how deep in the concept of responsibility the paradox is embedded. A person can be morally responsible only for what he does; but what he does results from a great deal that he does not do; therefore he is not morally responsible for what he is and is not responsible for. (This is not a contradiction, but it is a paradox.)

It should be obvious that there is a connection between these problems about responsibility and control and an even more familiar problem, that of freedom of the will. This is the last type of moral luck I want to take up, though I can do no more within the scope of this essay than indicate its connection with the other types.

If one cannot be responsible for consequences of one’s acts due to factors beyond one’s control, or for antecedents of one’s acts that are properties of temperament not subject to one’s will, or for the circumstances that pose one’s moral choices, then how can one be responsible even for the stripped-down acts of the will itself, if they are the product of antecedent circumstances outside of the will’s control?

The area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point. Everything seems to result from the combined influence of factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not within the agent’s control. Since he cannot be responsible for them, he cannot be responsible for their results – though it may remain possible to take up the aesthetic or other evaluative analogues of the moral attitudes that are thus displaced.

It is also possible, of course, to brazen it out and refuse to accept the results, which indeed seem unacceptable as soon as we stop thinking about the arguments. Admittedly, if certain surrounding circumstances had been different, then no unfortunate consequences would have followed from a wicked intention, and no seriously culpable act would have been performed; but since the circumstances were not different, and the agent in fact succeeded in perpetrating a particularly cruel murder, that is what he did, and that is what he is responsible for. Similarly, we may admit that if certain antecedent circumstances had been different, the agent would never have developed into the sort of person who would do such a thing; but since he did develop (as the inevitable result of those antecedent circumstances) into the sort of swine he is, and into the person who committed such a murder, that is what he is blameable for. In both cases one is responsible for what one actually does – even if what one actually does depends in important ways on what is not within one’s control. This compatibilist account of our moral judgments would leave room for the ordinary conditions of responsibility – the absence of coercion, ignorance, or involuntary movement – as part of the determination of what someone has done – but it is understood not to exclude the influence of a great deal that he has not done.

The only thing wrong with this solution is its failure to explain how skeptical problems arise. For they arise not from the imposition of an arbitrary external requirement, but from the nature of moral judgment itself. Something in the ordinary idea of what someone does must explain how it can seem necessary to subtract from it anything that merely happens – even though the ultimate consequence of such subtraction is that nothing remains. And something in the ordinary idea of knowledge must explain why it seems to be undermined by any influences on belief not within the control of the subject – so that knowledge seems impossible without an impossible foundation in autonomous reason. But let us leave epistemology aside and concentrate on action, character, and moral assessment.

The problem arises, I believe, because the self which acts and is the object of moral judgment is threatened with dissolution by the absorption of its acts and impulses into the class of events. Moral judgment of a person is judgment not of what happens to him, but of him. It does not say merely that a certain event or state of affairs is fortunate or unfortunate or even terrible. It is not an evaluation of a state of the world, or of an individual as part of the world. We are not thinking just that it would be better if he were different, or did not exist, or had not done some of the things he has done. We are judging him, rather than his existence or characteristics. The effect of concentrating on the influence of what is not under his control is to make this responsible self seem to disappear, swallowed up by the order of mere events. What, however, do we have in mind that a person must be to be the object of these moral attitudes? While the concept of agency is easily undermined, it is very difficult to give it a positive characterization. That is familiar from the literature on Free Will.

I believe that in a sense the problem has no solution, because something in the idea of agency is incompatible with actions being events, or people being things. But as the external determinants of what someone has done are gradually exposed, in their effect on consequences, character, and choice itself, it becomes gradually clear that actions are events and people things. Eventually nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised.

Though I cannot define the idea of the active self that is thus undermined, it is possible to say something about its sources. There is a close connexion between our feelings about ourselves and our feelings about others. Guilt and indignation, shame and contempt, pride and admiration are internal and external sides of the same moral attitudes. We are unable to view ourselves simply as portions of the world, and from inside we have a rough idea of the boundary between what is us and what is not, what we do and what happens to us, what is our personality and what is an accidental handicap. We apply the same essentially internal conception of the self to others. About ourselves we feel pride, shame, guilt, remorse – and agent-regret. We do not regard our actions and our characters merely as fortunate or unfortunate episodes – though they may also be that. We cannot simply take an external evaluative view of ourselves – of what we most essentially are and what we do. And this remains true even when we have seen that we are not responsible for our own existence, or our nature, or the choices we have to make, or the circumstances that give our acts the consequences they have. Those acts remain ours and we remain ourselves, despite the persuasiveness of the reasons that seem to argue us out of existence.

It is this internal view that we extend to others in moral judgment – when we judge them rather than their desirability or utility. We extend to others the refusal to limit ourselves to external evaluation, and we accord to them selves like our own. But in both cases this comes up against the brutal inclusion of humans and everything about them in a world from which they cannot be separated and of which they are nothing but contents. The external view forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens.

The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgment that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgment shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be. The same thing is revealed in the appearance that determinism obliterates responsibility. Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening. This explains why the absence of determinism is no more hospitable to the concept of agency than is its presence – a point that has been noticed often. Either way the act is viewed externally, as part of the course of events.

The problem of moral luck cannot be understood without an account of  the internal conception of agency and its special connection with the moral attitudes as opposed to other types of value. I do not have such an account. The degree to which the problem has a solution can be determined only by seeing whether in some degree the incompatibility between this conception and the various ways in which we do not control what we do is only apparent. I have nothing to offer on that topic either. But it is not enough to say merely that our basic moral attitudes toward ourselves and others are determined by what is actual; for they are also threatened by the sources of that actuality, and by the external view of action which forces itself on us when we see how everything we do belongs to a world that we have not created.

2. Margaret Urban Walker — “Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure Agency”

One’s history as an agent is a web in which anything that is the product of the will is surrounded and held up and partly formed by things that are not, in such a way that reflection can go only in one of two directions: either in the direction of saying that responsible agency is a fairly superficial concept, which has a limited use in harmonizing what happens, or else that it is not a superficial concept, but that it cannot ultimately be purified – if one attaches importance to the sense of what one is in terms of what one has done and what in the world one is responsible for, one must accept much that makes its claim on that sense solely in virtue of its being actual.

– Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck” (1983, pp. 29-30)

Moral luck consists in the apparent and allegedly problematic or even paradoxical fact that factors decisive for the moral standing of an agent are factors subject to luck. While several variants have been noted (footnote 1), the ones commanding most attention are luck in the ways our actions and projects turn out (sometimes called resultant luck), and luck in those circumstances we happen to encounter which provide opportunities for excellence or disgrace (circumstantial or situational luck). Favoured examples of the former include the negligent driver who is unlucky enough to strike and kill a pedestrian, as opposed to the equally negligent driver who is lucky enough not to. In the latter category, we may consider the bad fortune of someone who has the opportunity to become a Nazi collaborator and the character that prompts her to do so; for one fit for heroic resistance, this same opportunity amounts to being luckily in just the spot for admirable moral achievement. In such cases someone winds up a killer or collaborator, someone else merely negligent or a moral heroine, and the substantial, even vast differences in the moral standings of such agents is due as much to luck as to anything these agents do. Three positions on moral luck are recognizable in the contemporary literature: that moral luck is real, but constitutes a paradox in the context of other ordinary and central assumptions about morality; that moral luck is illusory, a misleading impression based on insufficiently fine analysis of belief and practice; and that moral luck is real and not paradoxical, even if wishfully distorted or simply inadequate views of the human condition make it appear so. In what follows I argue for the reality and deep importance of (resultant and circumstantial) moral luck in human life, and against the view that assumptions which render moral luck paradoxical are truly ordinary or central to conceiving or conducting moral life. My view is thus a variant of the third sort of position. In Section I, I overview the terrain of the discussion to date, identifying what is thought to constitute the problem. In Sections II and III, I defend the ways in which moral luck is in fact and indeed ought to be central to our conceptions of agency, responsibility, and our common good.

1

The “problem” of moral luck resides in a sense that persuasive general beliefs about the conditions for moral responsibility are at odds with our actual common practices of moral assessment in cases involving an element of luck. Common belief is said to endorse the principle – a “control condition” – that factors due to luck are “no proper object of moral assessment and no proper determinant of it, either” (Williams 1981, p. 20) or, more simply, that people cannot be morally assessed for what is due to factors beyond their control (Nagel 1979, p. 25). Yet common practice shows that uncontrolled happenstance indeed figures in the assessment of particular sorts of cases. For example, the negligent driver who cannot control the unlucky, untimely emergence of the child whom he strikes and kills is perceived as committing a greater offense than a merely but equally negligent, non-killing driver, and is held to be worthy of greater blame. What is to be said about the differential moral assessment of cases where the difference is an element due to luck? What is to be done about the apparent persistent slip between persuasive principle and common practice?

Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, who introduced the problem into contemporary literature and baptised it so disconcertingly, held that moral luck, the determination of moral assessment in some cases by happy or unhappy contingency, is altogether real but constitutes a full blown paradox in “our conception” of morality (Williams 1981, p. 22, 39) or “the ordinary idea of moral assessment” (Nagel 1979, p. 27) when viewed in light of intuitive notions linking moral responsibility to the agent’s control. A paradox requires a remedy which restores consistency but neither Williams nor Nagel proposed one. Instead they suggested darkly that the reconstruction of principle required by practice might alter our understanding of ourselves or of the role of morality in our lives beyond recognition. Others have argued, contrary to Williams and Nagel, that moral luck surely cannot be real; they find it deeply unfair, if not incoherent. The “control Condition”, the intuitive principle limiting moral assessment to just such factors as an agent controls, is held to be virtually self-evident. Further, its corollary that “one cannot be more culpable or estimable for anything than one is for that fraction of it which is under one’s control,” (Nagel 1979, p. 28) shows that differential assessments where the sole difference in cases is a factor due to luck cannot be correct. Hence, for example, the lucky and unlucky negligent drivers we both blameworthy, but can only be equally so; that one case resulted in a killing is a matter due to luck. Assuming that practice just can’t be so wildly at variance with self-evident truth, these critics adopt the strategy of explaining away the appearance of moral luck in order to restore consistency.

Henning Jensen (1984) and Norvin Richards (1986), in such recent attempts to show moral luck illusory, allow that we do seem often enough to allow matters of luck to figure in our moral assessments, but aim to show through closer scrutiny and additional distinctions that the control condition is not in fact violated. Unfortunately, the assumptions at work in their accounts are at least as counter-intuitive as they take moral luck to be. Richards’s account rests on the dubious assumption that we in fact consider only a person’s character, and never acts or their results, worthy of praise or blame. Jensen’s account requires us to accept the troubling assumption that actually causing the harm one risks merits no more blame than merely risking that harm without causing it. (footnotes 2, 3)

A third avenue is to take moral luck seriously enough to call into question theoretical principles that won’t cohere with it. Martha Nussbaum’s extensive and vivid study of moral luck as a defining theme of classical Greek thought demonstrates how long its recognition has been with us and how the wish to deny or contain moral vulnerability is a philosophical quest as old as the western tradition (Nussbaum 1986).

Judith Andre (1983) reminds us that our long tradition of ethical thought makes for “hybrid” concepts, partaking of different (though not necessarily contradictory) strains; moral responsibility, for example, has more or less Kantian as well as rather Aristotelian applications and connections, the latter of which allow for the impact of luck in the sphere of moral value. If the recognition of moral luck is so deeply rooted, our theoretical pictures of moral value and responsibility should accommodate it. If they do not, the acceptability of those pictures needs defending. From Nagel and Williams through Richards and Jensen, however, the control condition stands curiously undefended (footnote 4). Yet the principle is not self-evident (and certainly not a tautology). It expresses a substantive view about the conditions under which we should see ourselves and others as responsible for actions and their outcomes. By consequence, it marks out the area in which various responses (owning up; assuming or accepting blame or liability; experiencing sorrow, anguish, shame or guilt; offering reparative gestures) are appropriate for the actor, and various others (imputing responsibility or holding blameworthy; experiencing indignation, outrage, disgust or disappointment; expecting or demanding reparation, apology, or other fitting acknowledgement; developing or losing trust) are appropriate for others. The moral assessments at issue, then, in the contest between moral luck and the control condition are not only bare imputations of responsibility but evaluations of a full repertoire of perceptions, judgements, expectations, responses, attitudes and demands with respect to ourselves and to others in the matter of our conduct, its meaning, and its impact.

It is in light of this that I propose to defend the reality of moral luck and to reject the view that it generates an insoluble problem. Elsewhere I have argued that moral luck threatens paradox only in the context of a view of moral agents as noumenal, or virtually so (Coyne 1985). But we are human agents and as such are hopelessly “impure” in Williams’s sense – agents of, rather than outside, the world of space, time and causality, agents whose histories and actions belong to it. The beautifully simple regimentation of responsibility embodied in the control condition represents an alteration of our common life far more drastic than may at first be supposed. To accept it, I will argue, would rid us of far more than an alleged kink in our philosophical thinking. In the following section I explore, albeit very briefly, some deep and extensive connections between our causal inextricability, which combines limited control with significant efficacy, and the moral significance of our response to it. I claim that the reality of moral luck alone makes sense of an important arena of assessment in which agents are found satisfactory or deficient, even admirable or base, to the extent that they understand their causal position and the appropriate responses to it. Judgements in this area center around the matter of an agent’s integrity. In section 111 1 consider why certain responses are so widely considered appropriate: they are too valuable to us in our vulnerability and interdependence to dispense with. To show this I explore the disparity between an understanding of human agency which accommodates moral luck and one which refuses to accommodate it. Considering two pictures of agency polarized along the dimension central to the moral luck problem, the relation of control to accountability, I propose that the stakes in affirming one or the other of these pictures are high ones, and that we have good reason to go with our luck.

2

How do we commonly regard and what do we expect of agents in actual situations of having “unluckily” caused serious harms or having “unluckily” confronted moral tests which their characters did not prevent them from failing miserably? Here only vivid and closely described cases could generate precise and specific results. It will matter whether a negligent killing driver drove knowingly with faulty brakes, drove 105 m.p.h. in a residential area, drove home in exhaustion to get to a dying parent’s bedside, or refused friends’ assistance and drove himself home very drunk. It will matter whether a woman with hungry children keeps a lost, money-filled wallet which contains identification, whether a child is caught up in a Nazi youth group at school or an adult informs on his Jewish neighbour for political advantage, whether someone lied out of humiliation or greed. These differences will matter for our judgements on the degree and type of wrong, and on the appropriateness of blame, its amount, and its nature. Yet in most, if not all, such cases of uncontrolled upshots or unchosen circumstances, there is one thing I think we will find at least faulty if not completely unacceptable: that the agent should shrug if off.

Suppose the agent says, in effect, “It’s really too bad about what happened and the damage that’s been done, but my involvement was just a happenstance that it was my bad luck to suffer. I admit my negligence (dishonesty, cowardice, opportunism, etc.) and accept such blame as is due these common faults. But it would be totally unfair of you to judge, let alone blame me for unlucky results and situations I didn’t totally control, and stupid or masochistic of me to let you.” It is hard to imagine any variation on this sort of agent response not striking us as untoward. Given the nature of the case, it could be disappointing or irritating, shameful or indecent, shocking or outrageous. Even where we as third parties are disposed to be compassionate, fair-minded, and humane, we would be taken aback, and perhaps indignant. If our indignation were met by the agent with a cool reminder that we were conceptually befuddled about assessment and control, our estrangement would, suggest, be aggravated rather than relieved. We would think there was something wrong with that agent that went deeper than the initial offense. What the agent’s stance puts in question is how responsible or responsive he or she is. We might say that he is cavalier, or that she is kidding herself, or more simply and strongly, that this person lacks integrity. We might just experience the equivalents of these by feeling disgust, resentment, indignation, loss of trust.

Such responses are common phenomena of our moral lives together when we do not simply imagine ourselves as the ideal moral judiciary, or as officers of the moral police armed with sharp instruments of blame. When we do not restrict ourselves to thinking about this problem in the “juridical” mode – that of sitting in judgement and levying blame – we are more apt to remember the variety of assessments and considerations that will concern us, including ones about trust, confidence, and reliability, and the responses that will express our grasp of these. The reality of moral luck renders these more varied phenomena intelligible, if we take moral luck for what it appears to be: a fact of our moral situation and our human kind of agency. The fact is our perfectly predictable entanglement in a causally complex world, with imperfectly predictable results. Part of the normal and required self-understanding of human agents is a grasp of that fact, of the loose and chancy fit between undertakings and impacts, and between where we’d choose to find ourselves, and where we actually do. This fact requires us to understand and respond to our actual situation of being at moral risk, i.e. of being subject to assessment both for results of what we have (uncontroversially) done and for our actions under circumstances morally fraught, where these results and circumstances are determined in important part by luck. The truth of moral luck which the rational, responsive moral agent is expected to grasp is that responsibilities outrun control, although not in one single or simple way.

This truth in turn renders intelligible a distinctive field of assessments of ourselves and others, in terms of how we regard and respond to just this interplay between what we control and what befalls us; to, as Williams might say, the “impurity” of our agency. Here we expect ourselves and others to muster certain resources of character to meet the synergy of choice and fortune which is especially burdensome in the case of bad moral luck. Here agents are found to have or lack such qualities as integrity, grace or lucidity. These qualities might well be called “virtues of impure agency.” As is said of dispositions which are virtues, they issue in acceptable or even meritorious behaviour which contributes “in extensive and fundamental ways” (Wallace 1978, p. 153) to our living well in concert with others a distinctively human life. They are corrective of temptations and deficiencies of sorts to which human beings are commonly susceptible with typically or overall undesirable results (Foot 1978, p. 8). They are constituted in important part by a reliable capacity to see things clearly, to take the proper moral measure of situations, so that a fitting response may be fashioned (MacDowell 1979; Mackie 1977; Murdoch 1971) (footnote 5). While acceptance of responsibility, whether in excess of control or not, will often prompt reparative attempts which enlist various of the familiar virtues – courage, justice, benevolence – bad moral luck taxes agents in distinctive ways to which the qualities mentioned distinctively respond.

Integrity is a quality of character hard enough to describe in any case, but impossible to capture fully without reference to the vicissitudes of moral luck. The “intactness” or “wholeness” which are its core meanings imply freedom from corruption, spoilage, shattering, or decay. What integrity so protects, however, is not one’s goals or goods or social standing, but one’s moral self, that center of moral commitments in oneself from which morally fitting and valuable responses flow in a sure and steady way. From the viewpoint of others, the agent’s firm moral center guarantees dependability in the matter of morally responsible conduct not just in the long run or in the sphere of the everyday, but more especially in trying times where unwanted circumstance proposes more severe tests. What integrity is a bulwark against is not just lapses or simple wrongdoing, which are always possible, but a deeper or more catastrophic loss or lack of moral center.

The conditions which most threaten us with this kind of loss or most unequivocally reveal this lack are just those constituting moral luck: the decisive moral tests one did not invite, and which may reveal one’s moral competence or commitments as a pretense; the faulty or horrifying results that one invited but did not control, and which one is expected to find resources to address or redress without taking refuge in denial, demoralization, or paralysis. People we know to have integrity are those who have been challenged in just such ways; their integrity consists in the fact that they are able to stand and respond in terms that embody ongoing moral commitments or such new ones as may be required. They keep or make whole and well what might otherwise suffer deformity, collapse, or desertion: a coherent and responsible moral posture. Temptations to avoidance and denial are successfully countered (footnote 6).

It is also true that integrity can be caricatured in an unseemly and narcissistic “heroism” or self-glorifying but ineffective martyrdom (literal or symbolic). There are morally unlucky cases, for example where a life is lost or a deep human bond severed, where there remains little place for meaningful reparation to others, and where the selfreparative work of integrity seems small even if necessary response to an inexpungeable loss. Acceptance, non-aggrandized daily “living with” unsupported by fantasies of overcoming or restitution, may in its quiet way be as profoundly admirable as integrity in those situations which permit no reconstructive address. I would call this, simply, grace; it also has its place in far less grievous situations, where it is one’s good moral luck to have received forgiveness or mercy and where one should not succumb to self-absorbed or exhibitionistic contrition.

Further, integrity and grace depend critically on lucidity, a reasonable grasp of the nature and seriousness of one’s morally unlucky plight and a cogent and sensitive estimate of repairs and self-correction in point. Temptations to self-deception , self-indulgence, and wishful thinking here require overcoming. As in the other cases, the capacities in question can be virtues only if they are relatively fixed dispositions; but their fixity may indeed be relative, varying concretely by degree or even, perhaps, with respect to contexts.

Perhaps ‘lucidity’ is just a name for the reliable perceptual capacity that grounds integrity, as ‘grace’ may refer to integrity’s understanding of the limits of its own effectiveness. But whether these virtues are distinct or aspects of one thing, they are possible and necessary only for agents whose natural situation involves vulnerability to luck, and so part of whose distinctive achievement will rest on how well and truly they reckon with that. Virtue, James Wallace has said, “must tend to foster good human life in extensive and fundamental ways. It must be the perfection of a tendency or capacity that connects or interlocks with a variety of human goods in such a way that its removal from our lives would endanger the whole structure” (Wallace 1978, p. 153). If integrity is the capacity required to deal morally with the impurity of luck-ridden human agency, its general absence should be disfiguring of human life in ways broad and deep. For the same reason, a way of conceiving agency that attempts to banish the impurity which gives integrity its point should produce under examination an alien and disturbing picture of moral life. And so it does. I turn to this now.

3

The “moral luck problem” is one about conceptions of agency and responsibility of the sort that morality requires. Moral luck is part of a picture of impure agency: agency situated within the causal order in such ways as to be variably conditioned by and conditioning parts of that order, without our being able to draw for all purposes a unitary boundary to its exercise at either end, nor always for particular purposes a sharp one. Such agents’ accountabilities don’t align precisely with their conscious or deliberate choices or undertakings, and are not necessarily limited by them. Rather, the match between choice and action on the one hand, and accountability and desert on the other, is inexact and conditional, and is mediated by complex social understandings which these agents are expected to appreciate and to share (footnote 7). To be sure, matters of control and faulty intention will be elements in these understandings; but so will matters of foreseenness, foreseeability, magnitude of adverse impacts, significance or conspicuousness of causal contribution, as well as (loose or precise) appreciation of probabilities of different sorts. Part of the complexity of these understandings consists in the fact that there appears to be no single equation of responsibility in which each or all of the elements play fixed roles. Still, an underlying assumption of these understandings is that responsibilities are apt to outrun deliberate commitments, intentional choices, and even their foreseen or foreseeable entailments. On this picture, we are players within the complex causal set-up, where the price of our often decisive participation is exposure to risk.

The view against which moral luck offends is that of pure agency: agency neither diluted by nor implicated in the vagaries of causality at all, or at least not by causality external to the agent’s will, itself understood as a causal power. This view is epitomized by Kant’s conception of the moral agent as noumenally free, so outside space, time, and causality entirely. But it also comprehends non-transcendental pictures of agency which share with Kant’s just the feature of immunity to luck. Such views do not need to withdraw agency entirely from the realm of causality in order to secure this (footnote 8). It is sufficient that the possibility of assessment be allowed to stretch only so far as does that causality which may be identified with the agent itself, e.g. the causality of character or of intention. Nagel has recently given striking expression to the ideal aspiration of pure agency:

What we hope for is not only to do what we want given the circumstances, but also to be as we want to be, to as deep a level as possible, and to find ourselves faced with the choices we want to be faced with, in a world that we can want to live in (Nagel 1986, p. 136).

It is, at last, the drive “to be able to encompass ourselves completely, and thus become the absolute source of what we do” (Nagel 1986, p. 118).( footnote 9)

It is characteristic of those who view moral luck as philosophically problematic or paradoxical to claim it is so in light of “our” or “the ordinary” concept of agency, assessment, or moral responsibility. Yet no one denies that facts of the matter seem to resist. I have argued that they are indeed facts, that in some precincts especially our practice shows a grasp of our causal inextricability and some burdens we take it reasonably to impose. At the same time, I do not mean to ignore the existence of some lively, “principled” intuitions to the effect that such practices embody an unfortunate mistake. Rather than prolong indecisive proprietary disputes about intuitions, I turn instead to the question of what is at stake in the contest between the actual practices I have emphasized and some possible ones purified along lines provided by the control condition. We should ask: what is it like to live under the strict correlation of moral assessment and responsibility with control? What is it like to be, and to be among, pure agents?

First, pure agents will have far less to account for, and will bear, in total, far less responsibility than many of us think we and others currently do. No unforeseen results will place them at risk of assessment, let alone of blame; even foreseen but uncontrolled upshots of their intentional performances will not properly place them in question. Presumably, no fewer damages, hurts, harms, deprivations, violations, cripplings, and killings will occur. Indeed, pure agents have fewer moral reasons to take care for these eventualities, even if they still have various social and practical ones. But these sufferings and misfortunes will go more often unattributed; they will be other people’s hard luck. Pure agents will not only be responsible for less, but will bear a special kind of relationship to their responsibilities: they will unilaterally control and constitute them. Each pure agent is free, on her own, to determine what and how much she may be brought to account for by determining the intentional acts and commitments she will undertake, and recognizing the limits to her control beyond these. What will no longer be true, if it ever was properly thought to be so, is that the realities, potentials, needs, vulnerabilities, and sufferings of other things and people might be part of what constitutes her responsibilities. Relationships, situations, and encounters in which emerge uncontrolled and uninvited needs, demands, and opportunities to enable or harm will not be thought to ground morally legitimate claims upon us or in our behalf, in ways we might have thought or hoped. Even if we have invited these relationships, situations or encounters, we will not have controlled all of the demanding possibilities they give rise to. I may have decided to have a child, but will probably not have decided to have a sickly and difficult one; I may have entered into a friendship, but surely will not have controlled the death of the friend’s wife, and the desperate neediness with which he turns to me. That legitimate moral claims can overreach deliberate commitments, that need or suffering can even sometimes impose responsibilities it would be indecent to ignore do not seem to be realities in the world of pure agents.

Being accountable and actually bearing responsibilities is burdensome. Being accountable means exposure to possibilities of criticism, rebuke, and punishment; to valid demands of reparation, restoration, or compensation; to proper expectations of regret, remorse, self-reproof, and self-correction. It would be nice to have to do and accept so much less of this, and pure agents enjoy such relief. Having conceptually divested themselves of much of their moral property, they have secured unusually favourable rates of moral taxation. In respect of any particular performance or default, they are rendered far less vulnerable to many burdens of these sorts that might have applied if features due to circumstantial and resultant luck had not been rendered morally unaccountable. Concomitantly, however, all other pure agents are thereby rendered a great deal more vulnerable. Their augmented burdens involve needs, pains, and frustrations deriving from various injuries and misfortunes which result from the actions of other, morally unburdened pure agents; the latter have achieved impunity in such respects, but the former can no longer rightfully propose or expect compensation or repair, nor even enjoy the mild satisfactions (or relief) of others’ appropriate regret or fitting remorse.

Pure agents, in sum, are freer on the whole from responsibility; are freer to define for themselves what and how much responsibility they will bear; and hence are freer from the varieties of burden to which responsibility renders one subject. Pure agency is a model of independence. Unlike the Stoical independence of withdrawal from worldly, bodily, or common life, however, we see here independence of a more robust and worldly sort, reserving the full field of action while paring responsibilities to fit consent, commitment, and contract – the markers of voluntary control (footnote 10). In pure agency we recognize the template of versions of the clearly bounded and rationally self-controlling agent of neo-Kantian and contractualist moral philosophies, and the socially discreet, rationally self-disposing self of liberal political theory (footnote 11).

One cannot deny that pure agents are enviably free, in certain ways, of unhappy fate and of each other. Their enviable independence, however, cannot help being at the same time a worrisome and unpleasant undependability. Their unilateral control of responsibility and their exemption from reparative demands in all areas beyond strict control make clear that such agents may not reasonably be looked to for much. In particular, pure agents may not be depended upon, much less’ morally required, to assume a share of the ongoing and massive human work of caring, healing, restoring, and cleaning-up on which each separate life and the collective one depend. That the very young and old, the weak, the sick, and the otherwise helpless – i.e. all of us at some times – depend on the sense of moral responsibility of others unlucky enough to be stuck with the circumstance of their need will not be the pure agents’ problem. It is alarming to anticipate life in a world where people routinely and with justification walk away from the harmful, cruel, or even disastrous results which their actions were critical even if not sufficient, in bringing about. In a technologically advanced society in which some people’s actions can have disproportionate impact on huge numbers of unknown others, the prospect is worse than alarming. All these prospects are real ones in a world from which moral luck has been banished and agency purified.

Impure agents are saddled with weighty responsibilities and the open-ended possibility of acquiring more due to circumstances beyond their control. Yet agents who recognize their vulnerability to fortune are primed for dependability of humanly invaluable sorts. These are agents on whom we can depend, or at least to whom the presumption of dependability applies, and so whose undependability in many cases can be duly registered as failure. To the extent that these agents are people of integrity, they won’t fail us even under the blows of bad fortune or odd turns of fate which might otherwise prompt denial or opportunism; to the extent that we ourselves are such agents and possesses integrity, we can depend, morally, on ourselves even in a bad spot.

Anyone may fail morally in the particular dimension of facing bad moral luck. There are also cases so trying as to be virtually beyond human endurance, circumstances or results so shattering that maintaining integrity would be supererogation. They are the stuff of tragedy. But the association of moral luck with tragedy should not obscure the fact that the tragic case is a rare one, while more pedestrian instances of moral luck are ubiquitous, and its common challenges are everyday matters. In a world where we need so much from each other so often, acceptance of our impurity is not the worst we can do (footnote 12).

Footnotes:

1. Nagel (1979) describes four types of moral luck: constitutive (luck in the kind of person one is); circumstantial (luck in the problems and situations one faces); luck in how the will is determined by antecedent circumstances; and luck in the way one’s actions and projects turn out (28). The first and third types are often seen, correctly, as representing the metaphysical problem of freedom and determinism, while the second and fourth have drawn most interest as representing the problem of moral luck proper. Nagel’s and Williams’s discussions (the latter’s “Gauguin problem” being of the fourth type) are the locus of the contemporary debate.
2. In a similar move, Michael Zimmerman (1987) claims that the killing driver’s being to blame for a death just means that he is “to blame for more events” but not “more to blame”. But being “to blame for a death” is here reduced to the death’s being “an indicator” that one deserves a negative evaluation, the same negative evaluation one deserves for negligent driving alone (383). This move appears to be a terminological manoeuver; what is described isn’t “being to blame for a death” but is just being to blame for negligence in light of, or in view of, or because of a death.
3. Richards admits that his position looks more like a wholesale “utilitarian” revision of common understanding than an interpretation of it (206-7). Jensen elaborates a complex and interesting account of blaming in order to show how equally blameworthy persons might be in practice differentially blamed. But Jensen, while explaining why harmless negligent acts often escape active blame entirely and why malicious acts with or without harmful results typically receive blame, never does explain the specific case at issue, our propensity to actively blame (even punish) people for negligent acts with harmful but not completely controlled results (327-28). It is not clear to me that he can get the answer he needs. See Jonathan Adler (1987) for a strong reply to Richards.
4. In fairness to Williams, I should note that he does emphasize the role of immunity to luck (secured by limiting accountability to control) in rendering acceptable the idea that morality is ubiquitous in scope and supreme in authority. Williams thus locates the control condition in an ensemble of features of a certain vision of morality he argues cannot be right.
5. See also May (1984, pp. 248-9) on the importance of viewpoint, and not only action, in facing the “perennials” of human existence: birth, death, incapacitation, generational conflict, and, I would add, moral luck.
6. This does not, of course, constitute a theory of integrity, but I believe it expresses the core of a plausible one. The central idea is that integrity is the capacity for reliably maintaining a coherent moral posture, and that this capacity is only proven under challenge. Whether the posture in play must meet some minimal standards of correctness or adequacy, and whether it must be in some way “authentic,” i.e. truly or reflectively the agent’s own, are questions a more complete discussion might address.
7. Joel Feinberg (1Y65) provides a useful discussion of the several senses of responsibility that may be distinguished in connection with human actions, and the fact that just a bit of causal contribution suffices for some kinds of responsibility, while no causal contribution is even necessary for others. Robert Audi (1974) nicely analyzes a variety of conditions, including normative ones, which constitute, diminish or cancel moral responsibility. For a probing conceptual examination of some intricacies in the legal understanding of connections among causal involvement, responsibility and liability, see Judith Jarvis Thomson (1986).
8. Richards (1986), Jensen (1984) and Zimmerman (1987) are examples.
9. For Nagel these are expressions of what moral agency requires, even though the conditions set are impossible of attainment, and so the appetite for autonomy is insatiable.
10. I thank Martha Nussbaum and Neil Delaney for suggesting to me that the Stoic approach to the neutralization of luck in human life deserves more thought. The contemporary discussion rather naturally tends to fix overmuch on Kant. A more just treatment would need to explore fundamental differences in meaning and motivation between the ideals of autarkeia and autonomy, as well as the important similarities.
11. The foregoing discussion of pure agency is not offered as a refutation of such moral or political views, but as a response to those who propose the control condition as limiting moral responsibilities. I do intend, however, to raise the question of the adequacy of an entirely constructivist or consensual view of responsibility to the role of contingency in our lives. An admirably concise and effective critique of attempts to ground all special moral responsibilities to particular persons or categories of persons on consent or agreement is found in Goodin (1985).
12. Two opportunities to present earlier versions of this paper were helpful to me: I thank the Vanderbilt University Philosophy Department Colloquium audience, especially Alasdair Maclntyre and John Post, for their comments; and those present at the University of Santa Clara conference on Agency, Causality, and Virtue (1987). Thanks to John Arthur, Robert Audi, Christopher Gowans, and Arthur Walker for helpful suggestions and criticisms. I am grateful to Fordham University for the Faculty Fellowship leave during which I wrote earlier drafts of this paper.

3. Marilyn Friedman — “Feminist Virtue Ethics, Happiness, and Moral Luck”

4. Further Reading: TBD

Discussion Questions

Thought Experiments

Further Reading

• “Moral Luck” by Dana K. Nelkin (2023) (in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Bibliography

Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. “Moral Luck” in Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. pp. 24-38. https://research-ebsco-com.ezproxy.tru.ca/linkprocessor/plink?id=9e5089a1-0b73-34c4-a212-fb83a7ad64ea.

Nelkin, Dana K. 2023. “Moral Luck.” Edited by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/moral-luck/.

Walker, Margaret U. 1991. “Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure Agency.” Metaphilosophy 22, no. 1/2 (January/April): 14–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24436913.

Baggini, Julian. 2005. The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: And 99 Other Thought Experiments. London: Granta.

How to Cite This Page

McCracken, Calum. 2024. “Moral Agency: Responsibility and Moral Luck” In Introduction to Ethics, edited by Jenna Woodrow, Hunter Aiken, and Calum McCracken. Kamloops, BC: TRU Open Press. https://introductiontoethics.pressbooks.tru.ca/chapter/moral-agency-responsibility-and-moral-luck/.