Moral Luck · Anthony Nuñez

Filed with Ethics & Metaethics (MOC) · Related: 60.9 Philosophy · 60.10 Argumentation

The video “Moral Luck: Crash Course Philosophy #39” discusses the concept of moral luck and how it affects our judgments of praise and blame. The main points are:

Moral luck occurs when external factors outside someone’s control influence the moral assessment of their actions. The video illustrates this with an example of two equally drunk drivers, A and B, where only B kills a child who runs into the road. [1]
Philosophers distinguish between causal responsibility (being part of the chain of events) and moral responsibility (deserving praise or blame). Moral responsibility applies only to moral agents capable of making decisions based on right and wrong. [1]
The principle of “ought implies can” suggests we are only morally responsible for what is in our control. By this logic, the two drunk drivers seem equally blameworthy since the differential outcomes were due to luck. [1]
However, most people intuitively assign more blame to driver B, whose actions resulted in a death. This illustrates how outcomes often affect moral judgments even when the intent and decision-making were identical. [1][11]
Philosopher Thomas Nagel identified four types of moral luck that can influence praise and blame:

Resultant luck (the consequences of our actions)
Circumstantial luck (the situations we face)
Constitutive luck (our personality and dispositions)
Causal luck (the role of antecedent circumstances in shaping who we are) [1][11]

Given the pervasive role of uncontrolled factors, Nagel questions whether moral responsibility is coherent and suggests praise and blame should perhaps be assigned more sparingly, if at all. [1]
An alternative view is that unequal moral luck shouldn’t affect blame, but praiseworthiness and blameworthiness can still serve a social function to encourage good behavior and discourage bad actions, even if luck is involved. This could explain the common intuition to blame driver B more. [1]

In summary, moral luck presents a challenge to simplistic notions of moral responsibility by showing how outcomes beyond our control influence praise and blame. While troubling for moral theory, moral luck may be inescapable in practice as we make moral assessments.