Reflections on Moral Luck

This is a follow up to Moral Luck

I find the idea of Moral Luck both compelling and flawed. It is a central to our moral system that people are accountable for intents and not results. It is oft said that the difference between attempted murder and murder is ‘bad aim.’ The moral value of an action (say, throwing a penny off the empire state building) is equal regardless of whether the penny hits just concrete or kills a person. For unintended harms like this, it helps to consider the moral value of the action as a statistical average of possible outcomes.

It is necessary to separate one’s moral standing form the public perception of one’s moral standing. The difference between the penny dropper who kills someone and the one who doesn’t is the same as the murderer who gets caught and the one who doesn't—both their moral standings are tarnished. Likewise the attempted murderer, the successful murderer and the murderer who go undetected are all equally culpable. Man’s limited powers of observation means that our perceptions of others’ culpabilities will never fully capture a God’s eye view.

But the problem of Moral Luck goes deeper than this. David Enoch writes, “While we should all feel bad for the fate of the injured pedestrian, you [as an agent of the accident], it seems, should feel that extra bit of agent-regret.” If I hit someone with the penny, I now have an obligation to apologize, compensate them, etc. or I am immoral whereas the man who didn’t hit anyone can do nothing and be no more morally culpable.

In writing on moral luck, Thomas Nagel identified three varieties of it: (1) resultant moral luck, (2) circumstantial moral luck and (3) constitutive moral luck. Resultant moral luck concerns the consequences of actions. Both penny droppers were affected by resultant moral luck in that a particular action turned out two different ways: in one situation, a person appeared below; in the other, one did not. Circumstantial moral luck concerns the surroundings of the moral agent. Consider Nazi followers in Hitler's Germany. They are worthy of moral blame for committing morally reprehensible deeds or failing to oppose them. But, if those people had been moved to another country in 1929, away from the coming hostilities, it is quite possible that they would have led very different lives, and we could not assign the same amount of moral blame to them. Constitutive moral luck concerns the personal character of a moral agent. It refers to the role that education, upbringing, genes and other largely uncontrollable influences shape personality. For example, moral blame is assigned to an individual for being extremely selfish, even though that selfishness is due at least in part to external environmental effects.

In my mind, Enoch’s account of agent-regret can simply be seen as an example of circumstantial moral luck. Enoch himself provided an example of circumstantial moral luck creating different obligations for otherwise similar situated people: consider two people who would not give a dime to charity, one lives in a poor community, the other lives in an affluent one. One has a duty to give and fails; the other never encounters such a duty. You could also say that whether someone was or wasn't under the penny is circumstantial. If we are to vanquish moral luck, our theory must be durable enough to explain all three varieties of the phenomenon.

Circumstance plays a large role in assessing culpability. Consider two judges who would both accept a bribe: one is never offered a bribe and retires 'uncorrupt' whereas the other constantly accepts bribes. To push ‘luck’ out of our moral system, we must say both are equally culpable. But for this to be so, culpability cannot be based on their actions or even their results—it's must be because of their underlying predisposition. There is a special significance to bad decisions produced by underlying character flaws. There's an important temporal element here: one cannot look at predispositions over a lifetime, you can only consider a snapshot and determine what moral failings it demonstrates. Theoretically, anyone who "if they were a judge, would accept a bribe" is as guilty as the judge who actually does.

However, whenever we push moral luck out of one part of the system, it just seems to pop up somewhere else. Once we're looking at snapshots of predispositions, we must consider constitutive moral luck. Whatever predisposition one has is just luck of the draw. Their predisposition is just a single point on a distribution of possible moral attitudes. I could say that people are responsible for their predispositions; certainly the law asks people to change their predispositions on occasion . However this feel unsatisfactory, as holding one accountable for their predisposition is tantamount to holding them liable for being born a certain way or to certain parents.

Since we've already established that predispositions change over time, perhaps morality lays in guiding how one’s predisposition changes. However, by the same token, isn’t that 'guidance' guided by one’s predisposition? We are treading close to a nature/nurture debate, which is a debate that morality doesn’t exist in, because one is not 'responsible' for either their nature or their nurture. For now, let us just say that it is possible that there is enough ‘wiggle room’ in the process of shaping our evolving predispositions that classical, luck-free morality might continue to exist.