Strokes of Luck
A Study in Moral and Political Philosophy
GERALD LANG
1
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In memory of Shepley Orr
Preface and Acknowledgements
As an undergraduate student, I was assigned, and duly read, the two classic articles on moral luck by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. I was gripped, but puzzled. I could grasp Nagel’s worries about the ramifications of luck in our moral lives, and I agreed with him that those ramifications surely needed to be controlled in some way. But how? That was much less clear to me. Once Pandora’s Box has been opened, the damage has already been done. It cannot be undone merely through the effort to close it again, or by pretending that it had never been opened in the first place. Despite a number of readings of it, I was even more puzzled by Williams’s article. Its connection to Nagel’s concerns seemed opaque to me, and I struggled to see how exactly the killer blow to ordinary morality had been administered, though I was also intrigued and stimulated, as many others have been, by Williams’s charismatic opposition to morality’s more claustrophobic aspects.
The years passed, and I became interested in, and puzzled by, other matters. At some point, I began to do sustained work on distributive justice, and on luck egalitarianism in particular. It occurred to me that some of the central cases one encountered in the justice literature had a similar structure to the cases often encountered in the moral luck debate: pairs of agents, doing similar things which turn out differently, and being blamed or rewarded to different degrees. Meanwhile, something about the way in which luck egalitarians had set up their basic case was leaving me dissatisfied. The interpersonal pairwise comparisons standardly prioritized by luck egalitarians may reveal the presence of luck, but this form of luck did not strike me as one which manages to track anything worth tracking. It does not, therefore, require correction, or annulment. It is a source of distortion, not the basis for a serious complaint. I began to wonder whether there were common lessons, or else interestingly contrasted lessons, to be recovered for both debates: the debate about blameworthiness in normative ethics, and the debate about just distributions in political philosophy. The eventual result, leaving aside some other twists and turns, is the book before you.
Because luck intrudes in our lives in various ways, it raises a large number of philosophical issues connected to our practical existence. Not all of them will be tackled in this book. With the exception of some strands of discussion towards the end of Chapter 1, I will be largely abstaining, for example, from examining the role of luck in moral epistemology, though this is an important topic which has been intensively studied in recent years, especially in the light of reflection on our Darwinian inheritance. I will be similarly sparing about my attention to the role
of luck in epistemology more generally, aside from some modest stage-setting and a small number of policy announcements in the Introduction. More seriously, and except for some brief skirmishes in the Introduction, Chapter 4, and Appendix II, this book omits any concentrated and detailed discussion of luck, agency, and free will and responsibility. Other writers interested in moral luck have had a great deal to say about luck and free will, and I am not claiming that they strayed beyond their brief, or misidentified what can be fruitfully discussed under this remit. So this particular omission does call for more concerted defence; I will try to explain myself in the Introduction.
I have been thinking about these issues for a number of years, on and off, and I have accumulated many debts, both institutional and personal.
First and foremost, I thank the Mind Association, which was kind enough to award me a fellowship relieving me of normal teaching and administrative duties for one semester in the 2016–17 academic year, and which therefore allowed me to complete a working draft of a decent chunk of it within that year. Without that period of leave, completion of this project would have been severely delayed. In association with this award, I was invited, in July 2017, to present some of this work at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association in Edinburgh. I thank those who were there for their good advice and heartwarming encouragement.
The Mind Association period of leave was conjoined with a standard sabbatical period of leave provided by the School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science at the University of Leeds, which has been an enjoyable and stimulating environment for doing philosophy over the last fifteen years or so. I am very grateful to my colleagues, and ex-colleagues, for their intellectual camaraderie, good advice, and friendship, and for having sat, kindly and patiently, through early-doors efforts to articulate my various philosophical hunches about these and many other issues. I have learned, and continue to learn, a huge amount from them. I am also grateful to philosophical and philosophically interested friends elsewhere, many of them encountered every now and then at conferences, seminars, and workshops. I do not want to risk offence by mentioning some only to fail to mention others, but I do wish to thank on this score Lucy Allais, Gustaf Arrhenius, Elizabeth Barnes, Jessica Begon, Corine Besson, Thomas Brouwer, Krister Bykvist, Ross Cameron, Jennifer Carr, Sophie-Grace Chappell, Pei-Lung Cheng, Alix Cohen, Bill Cooper, John Divers, Jamie Dow, Ed Elliot, Daniel Elstein, Carl Fox, Helen Frowe, Mollie Gerver, Rachel Goodman, James Harris, Antony Hatzistavrou, Greville Healey, Tom Hancocks, Ulrike Heuer, Iwao Hirose, Kent Hurtig, Ward Jones, Matthew Kieran, Rob Lawlor, Gail Leckie, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Heather Logue, Brian McElwee, Andy McGonigal, Chris Megone, Aaron Meskin, Margaret Moore, Daniel Morgan, Gary Mullen, Morten Nielsen, Martin O’Neill, Alex Pelling, Oliver Pooley, Adina Preda, Massimo Renzo, Simon Robertson, Léa Salje, Paolo Santorio, Joe Saunders, Daniel Schwartz, Tasia Scrutton, Shlomi Segall, Scott Shalkowski, Matt Smith, Helen
Steward, Adam Swift, Victor Tadros, Georgia Testa, Cain Todd, Patrick Tomlin, Jason Turner, Pekka Väyrynen, Kristin Voigt, Alex Voorhoeve, Robbie Williams, Nicole Woodford, Richard Woodward, and Nick Zangwill.
I have bent the ears of Jess Isserow and Jack Woods, in particular, about these issues a number of times over the last few years, and Jack also went to the trouble of providing helpful and instructive comments on a number of the early chapters. I am very grateful to them.
A manuscript workshop was held on an earlier complete draft of this book in November 2018 in Dublin, under the auspices of the Political Studies Association of Ireland. I am very grateful to Adina Preda and Peter Stone for the invitation, and the PSAI for the financial support. In addition to Adina and Peter, I also thank John Baker, Brian Carey, Christopher Cowley, Katherine Furman, and Brian O’Connor for going to the trouble of reading and commentating on the various chapters. I learned a huge amount from them, though I worry that they will not be completely satisfied with my attempts to accommodate their concerns.
For many years now, Roger Crisp and Brad Hooker have been encouraging and supportive presences in my career. I thank them warmly for everything they have done for me.
In May 2015, I organized a workshop on the Dimensions of Luck, held in Leeds, where the speakers were Roger Crisp, Duncan Pritchard, Katie Steele, Daniel Statman, and Zofia Stemplowska. I enjoyed it so much that I finally talked myself into writing a book about at least some aspects of luck. I thank them all. Thanks also to the Faculty of Arts in Leeds for the funds enabling me to hold this workshop.
There are also substantial and more specific debts on the various chapters here. The arguments presented here in Chapters 1 to 3 were presented, in slightly different and sometimes over-compressed formats, at seminars in Cape Town, Leeds, Oxford (at the Moral Philosophy Seminar), St Andrews (at the Philosophy Club), Sussex, and Warwick (at the Centre for Ethics, Law, and Public Affairs). I also ran an enjoyable class as a visiting lecturer at Rhodes University in Grahamstown in 2012, in which some of the early moves were written up and tested out. I thank everyone at these events for their valuable advice and criticism.
The argument now distributed between Chapter 4 and Appendix II was much benefited by the discussion of a shorter version of it in a meeting of the White Rose Early Career Ethics Researchers in 2016, organized by Richard Chappell. I thank, in addition to Richard, Jessica Begon, Daniel Elstein, Carl Fox, and Johan Gustafsson for their insightful comments.
An earlier version of Chapter 5 was presented at a conference on the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy in Oxford, organized by Sophie-Grace Chappell. I thank Sophie-Grace for the invitation, and I am grateful to the informed and enthusiastic audience for the many extremely useful comments I received on that happy occasion. A revised version of it was then presented in Leeds; thanks to everyone for comments I
received there and then. For further useful exchanges and comments, I thank Victor Durà-Villà and Jake Wojtowicz. Some of the material in this chapter has already appeared in ‘Gauguin’s Lucky Escape: Moral Luck and the Morality System’, published in Ethics Beyond the Limits: Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, edited by Sophie-Grace Chappell and Marcel van Ackaren, and published by Routledge in 2019.
Chapter 6 is partly constructed out of already published work on luck egalitarianism, notably ‘How Interesting is the “Boring Problem” for Luck Egalitarianism’, published by Wiley in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 2015. An early version of some of that material was presented at the Society of Applied Philosophy Conference in Zurich in 2013. The comments I received there were extremely useful as I worked further on this material. In addition, I thank Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Adina Preda, Daniel Schwartz, Shlomi Segall, Saul Smilansky, and Kristin Voigt for vital further exchanges about these topics, and Nicola Mulkeen for detailed and instructive comments on a later draft of the chapter.
An embryonic version of Chapter 7 was presented at the AHRC Workshop on Equality at the University of Exeter, organized by Keith Hyams and Robert Lamb in 2009; a couple of later versions were presented, to different audiences on different occasions, in Leeds. I am grateful for the many helpful comments I received on those occasions, and am particularly grateful to Jerry Cohen, in what sadly turned out to be the last time I saw him, for a very useful suggestion about what exactly I should be looking for in his Rescuing Justice and Equality. A yet more recent and refocused version of some of the material on Rawls was presented at the IDEA Seminar in Leeds, at the Society of Applied Philosophy conference in 2018, where I had helpful exchanges with Miranda Fricker, Kasper LippertRasmussen, Serena Olsaretti, and Shlomi Segall, and most recently at a MANCEPT seminar in Manchester, where I received helpful insights from Steve de Wijze, Nicola Mulkeen, Miriam Ronzoni, Hillel Steiner, and others. Thanks also to Adina Preda for useful early discussion and to Pei-Lung Cheng for comments on a later draft of the chapter.
Chapter 8 draws upon a number of sources. One of them is a talk on international justice which was presented in rather different versions at the Conference on the Demandingness of Morality, the AHRC Scottish Ethics Network, at the University of Stirling, and also in Leeds, Stockholm, Sheffield, and at the Conference on Poverty, Charity, and Justice, held at the University of Witwatersrand. I offer my thanks to, respectively, Kent Hurtig, Gustaf Arrhenius, Helen Frowe, and Lucy Allais for these various invitations, and I am grateful to these different audiences for their challenging, constructive, and insightful comments. This chapter also embodies ideas and passages from some work on animal ethics and discrimination which was published in the Oxford University Press collection Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard
Williams, which I co-edited with Ulrike Heuer. Those whom I thanked there are duly thanked again. Finally, this chapter draws upon some ideas about basic equality which were put to work in my review of Jeremy Waldron’s One Another’s Equals, published by Oxford University Press in Mind in 2019. My early ideas on basic equality were presented at the Workshop on Equality: Grounds, Scope, and Value, organized by Adina Preda in Oxford in 2015. A subsequent version of that paper was presented in a panel at the Society of Applied Philosophy in Belfast in 2016, with Adina Preda, Kristin Voigt, and Ian Carter as my co-panellists, and then at seminars in Birmingham, Leeds, the London School of Economics, and York. I am very grateful to everyone involved for their comments and insights. Adina Preda, in particular, has been an active and important interlocutor for most of these chapters, as these acknowledgements attest. I am especially grateful to her.
As ever, I am grateful to Peter Momtchiloff at Oxford University Press for his patience, professionalism, and friendly encouragement. It is always a pleasure to work with him. Two anonymous reviewers for OUP made a number of very shrewd suggestions on an advanced draft that I have tried my best to incorporate, and a number of telling objections that I have tried my best, in various ways, to disarm. They may be within their rights to have expected even more, but the final version of the text is, I hope, considerably better for the attention they have paid to it, and they have my earnest gratitude.
There is something about writing a monograph that can make you think you are doing philosophy for the first time. Presumably that has to do with the concentrated collection of intellectual demands, and feelings of exposure and vulnerability over the longer distances. In any case, I want to acknowledge some other, more personal debts. I thank Ronan McDonald and Sarah Montgomery for their friendship, and for always being there, at least via social media. I also thank my brother, Jim, for his friendship and company. My educational path was nourished and supported, generously and uncomplainingly, at every point by my mother, Ann Lang, and my late father, William Lang. I am forever grateful to them.
My final acknowledgement combines intellectual and personal debts. My old friend Shepley Orr passed away as the first draft of this book was nearing completion. I regret that we never found the opportunity to discuss many of the arguments that would have been deepened and sharpened had he laid eyes on them, and I remember with affection all the hours, from years past, of enlightening and often hilarious conversations about philosophy and just about every other topic under the sun. I miss him keenly. This book is dedicated to his memory.
Gerald
Lang
Leeds July 2020
Introduction
1. Moral Luck: Old and New
Philosophy still has the capacity to surprise, but the issues it investigates tend to have been on the books for a long time. The problem of moral luck was strongly anticipated by Adam Smith:
Had Caesar, instead of gaining, lost the battle of Pharsalia, his character would, at this hour, have ranked a little above that of Cataline, and the weakest man would have viewed his enterprise against the laws of his country in blacker colours, than, perhaps, even Cato, with all the animosity of a party-man, ever viewed it at the time. His real merit . . . would have been acknowledged . . . But the insolence and injustice of his all-grasping ambition would have darkened and extinguished the glory of all that real merit Fortune has in this great influence over the moral sentiments of mankind, and, according as she is either favourable or adverse, can render the same character the object, either of general love and admiration, or of universal hatred and contempt.1
It is beyond reasonable doubt, however, that the specific impetus behind contemporary discussions of moral luck was a symposium on moral luck by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, published by the Aristotelian Society in 1976.2 The phrase ‘moral luck’ is also owed to Williams. Most of the recognizable contributions to that particular debate that have been made in the intervening period in Anglo-American philosophy have proceeded, in one way or another, from the stage-setting originally assembled by Nagel or Williams.
What is perhaps less obvious, but still strongly arguable, is that the debate on moral luck that has emerged since then owes rather more to Nagel than to Williams. Though bits and pieces of Williams’s article are routinely referred to, and sometimes receive substantive discussion—one thinks here, in particular, of the Gauguin case, or the ‘agent-regret’ experienced by the lorry-driver in one of
1 See Smith (1759/1976), II.iii.2; for a recent useful discussion, see Hankins (2016). Nagel (1979), pp. 31–2, acknowledges Smith’s important path-finding work in this area, and Crisp (2017) examines Smith’s views in some detail. See also Section 5.
2 See Williams (1976), and Nagel (1976). Both essays were subsequently revised and reprinted, and the literature on moral luck usually deals with these later versions: I will, accordingly, be referring mostly to Williams (1981a) and Nagel (1979). Another precursor for the contemporary moral luck debate is Feinberg (1962), as Hartman (2017), p. 2, also notes.
Strokes of Luck: A Study in Moral and Political Philosophy. Gerald Lang, Oxford University Press (2021). © Gerald Lang. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868507.003.0001
Williams’s imaginary examples—there is something elusive about Williams’s treatment of moral luck which has obstructed its comfortable or wholesale incorporation into the moral luck literature. This is because, when examined more deeply, Nagel and Williams are chasing different philosophical scents; their quarries are different. Williams’s distinctive concerns will be revisited in detail in the course of the book. In the preliminary orientation for the moral luck debate that I provide in this Introduction, I will be chiefly concerned with Nagel. But it is not a bad idea to start even further back.
2. What is Luck?
In his article, Williams does not provide any analysis of the concept of luck, and simply adopts the policy of using the notion of luck ‘generously, undefinedly, but, I think, comprehensively’.3 Might we properly expect a greater degree of analytical candour than this?
Resistant to analysis though he might be, Williams’s rough working idea seems to be that the presence of luck denotes an absence of control over the outcomes of acts and plans. The same basic characterization of luck is also employed by Nagel:
Where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral luck.4
But Nagel himself encourages connections to be made between ethics and epistemology.5 And, if moral luck is definitely a species of luck, then our characterization of luck might properly require more critical detail, because we will need to know what luck amounts to, across both moral and epistemological contexts, if we are going to successfully identify what a particular sub-species of luck—moral luck—amounts to.
This approach is upheld by at least some contributors to the moral luck debate.6 On such views, there are both opportunities to get ahead, and dangers to avoid. Rik Peels, for example, is convinced that ‘we need to get a firm grip on the notion of luck before we can solve the problem of moral luck’.7 And Steven Hales warns us that ‘moral luck is possible only if one assumes a specific theory of luck, one that is not a suitable account of epistemic luck’.8 In fact, because Hales thinks that all the major theories of luck face serious critical problems, and because he assumes that moral luck must be a genuine species of luck, he doubts whether
3 Williams (1981a), p. 22. 4 Nagel (1979), p. 26. 5 Nagel (1979), pp. 27, 36.
6 See, for example, Peels (2015), Hales (2015), Pritchard (2005), ch. 10, and Brogaard (2003).
7 Peels (2015), p. 77.
8 Hales (2015), p. 2385.
there is any interestingly unified phenomenon of ‘moral luck’.9 If Hales is right, the debate on moral luck will have been floundering all this time under mistaken assumptions. So the stakes are high. Is moral luck a species of luck that can be generally applied across both moral and epistemological contexts?
Before we continue, it might be noted that it is not just the areas of moral and political philosophy which have been slow to open up the concept of luck to analytical inspection. As noted by Duncan Pritchard, a notable proponent of antiluck epistemology:
The difficulty that faced anti-luck epistemology when I first tried to develop it . . . was that I found to my surprise that there was next to nothing in the philosophical literature on the nature of luck. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that luck was at this time largely treated as an undefined primitive.10
Pritchard and others have attempted, accordingly, to make good on these lacunae.11
The notion of luck seems to belong to the same conceptual neighbourhood as the notion of the accidental, or the unforeseen, or the uncontrollable, or the unchosen. But these notions do not always go together, thus necessitating a more fine-tuned approach. Williams and Nagel propound what might be referred to as the Lack of Control Account of luck. The Lack of Control Account may have deficiencies as a general account of luck. One counterexample that has emerged in the literature is provided by the humdrum daily event of the sun’s rising. This is an event over which we lack control. It is also an event which is significant to us. We cannot dismiss it as not being a matter of luck because it has no implications for our lives and interests.12 Be that as it may, we would not normally describe the sun’s rising as a matter of luck.13
Pritchard advances an account which neatly provides for the sunrise case.14 This Modal Account analyses luck in terms of outcomes in the nearest possible worlds with the same initial conditions as the actual world. More precisely, and as Pritchard originally presented it, the Modal Account holds that an event is lucky if it satisfies two conditions: first, it is an event that occurs in the actual world but
9 See also Hales (2016).
10 Pritchard (2014), p. 595; cf. Pritchard (2005), p. 125.
11 It is a large and growing literature. For just a small sample of it, see, for example, Pritchard (2005), (2014), Lackey (2008), Coffman (2014), (2015), and Hales (2016). (I should add here that the ‘strokes of luck’ account advanced by Coffman has essentially nothing to do with the commitments defended in this book, its title notwithstanding.)
12 For the addition of this significance condition, see Pritchard (2005), p. 126. The significance condition is opposed to any simple account of luck which explicates it merely in terms of the low probability of an event’s occurrence.
13 See Latus (2000), p. 167, and Pritchard (2005), p. 127.
14 See Pritchard (2005), pp. 128–33.
not in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant initial conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world; and second, it satisfies the significance condition.15 The sunrise does not count for us as lucky, because it would not fail to rise in any of the nearby possible worlds. A huge amount about our world, and about the physical laws applying to it, would need to be altered for tomorrow’s sunrise not to take place.
The Modal Account also provides a decent accommodation of other common cases. If I buy a winning lottery ticket, I am considered lucky. Why am I lucky in this case, but not lucky in the sunrise case? Both of them lie beyond my control. It is because, in nearby possible worlds, I would very easily not have been in possession of a winning lottery ticket: all it would take for me to have a losing ticket, rather than a winning ticket, is for me to have purchased another ticket, or for a slightly different combination of numbers to have been chosen. By contrast, the sun would not stop rising in nearby possible worlds.
Finally, and in any case, the Modal Account makes a decent fist of the central cases that engage with the particular concerns of the Control Account. It may be a matter of good luck that my negligence produces no harmful consequences, and a matter of bad luck that my negligence leads to disaster. Though I may be negligent and experience good luck, I could so easily have experienced bad luck. Similarly, I may be negligent and experience bad luck, but I might just as easily have experienced good luck. I may make a malicious attempt on someone’s life: even if this attempt is successful, I might easily have produced only an unsuccessful attempt, and if my attempt is unsuccessful, it might just as easily have been successful.
As a generally serviceable notion of luck, the Modal Account may score more highly than the Lack of Control Account. But that does not reveal the Lack of Control Account to be an inadequate basis for the problem of moral luck.16 As I see it, Williams’s insouciance was justified; the various wrinkles in the current lively debate on the analysis of luck will not pay dividends if our particular aim is to understand the significance of luck in moral and political philosophy. The most salient pressures favouring the Modal Account over the Lack of Control Account of luck simply do not apply to the debate on moral luck.
Why is this? The very restriction to the moral domain ensures that we will be talking about items that relate to moral appraisability, in either its evaluative or deontic guise. This means that we will be concerned with moral agents, their acts,
15 Pritchard (2005), pp. 128, 132. It should be noted that Pritchard (2014) withdraws his former commitment to the significance condition; I will not pursue the details here.
16 There are denials to consider here: see Pritchard (2005), ch. 10, and Peels (2015). Some of these will be considered as we go along: see, for example, Chapter 2, n. 29. See also Hartman (2017), pp. 25–7, for some sensible reservations about the ostensible advantages of the Modal Account for theorizing about moral luck.
their dispositions, their thoughts, and the practices in which they participate and the institutions they create. Counter-examples to the Lack of Control Account such as the sunrise case do not damage the application of the Lack of Control Account to moral luck. This is because the very restriction to the moral domain ensures that we will be talking about morally appraisable items—acts, intentions, and so forth—that relate to moral agents, and what matters here is the degree of control that agents enjoy over these items.
These ideas can be further enriched if we take a more detailed look at the particular problems associated with moral luck.
3. Types of Moral Luck
The problem of moral luck arises out of a tension between two deep facts about moral thought and practice. On the one hand, we are reflectively inclined to affirm that the objects of moral appraisal—agents, actions, practices, institutions, political policies, and so on—should not be the product of luck, or due to the operation of factors which lie beyond agents’ control. On the other hand, we also find upon reflection that our moral appraisals are saturated with luck-dependent content, and that they could not be easily revised to eliminate the operation of luck without leaving those appraisals with indeterminate content, or no content at all.
Nagel outlines a number of different areas of moral luck, and it is customary to enumerate them in preliminary discussions of the subject. I have no innovations to offer in this respect. These are recognizable landmarks in the moral luck landscape, and they provide helpful orientation.
One of these—and still the most actively discussed in the literature—is ‘resultant’, ‘outcome’, or ‘consequential’ luck: luck in the results, outcomes, or consequences of the acts agents perform, or attempt to perform. Acts have worldly consequences which are not determined purely by the agent, even if these consequences conform to the agent’s intentions. To take a mundane and morally innocuous example, if my intention is make a cup of coffee for myself, then I may succeed in doing that—I usually do—but the world has to cooperate with me in certain ways, and I lack at any particular moment complete control over how the world is. The kettle has to be working; the tap water must be flowing; someone else must have seen to it that coffee beans, rather than something that merely looks like coffee beans, have been deposited in the packet of coffee; it must be the case that no one has stolen all my coffee cups overnight, and so on. If the world does not cooperate with me, then my intention will be frustrated, and my coffeemaking exercise will not turn out as planned. This will be true of any acts, including acts which are much more morally consequential.
One familiar example of morally consequential acts concerns a pair of drunken, reckless drivers.17 One of these drivers has an unsteady but uneventful journey home, harming no one. The second drunken driver hits and kills a pedestrian. It was just a matter of luck that this pedestrian was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The results of the drunk drivers’ acts are very different, but this difference is a matter of luck. Similarly, consider two assassins: one of them succeeds in his attempt to assassinate his target, whereas the other fires a bullet which ends up in a passing pigeon. The difference between them, once again, is just a matter of luck.
‘Circumstantial luck’ is luck in respect of the degree of morally revealing or challenging circumstances which an agent encounters. Nagel gives the example of German citizens who were exposed to the emergence of the Third Reich in the 1930s.18 Though it may have fallen on each of them, morally speaking, to do their bit in resisting and subverting this political regime, and though we may blame them for failing in large measure to do that, it cannot be denied that they were placed in much more morally exposed circumstances than, say, the citizens of the typical South American country at the time. The same person who became an officer in a concentration camp in the Third Reich might have led a relatively blameless life as an émigré businessman in Argentina, if only his background circumstances had been different. Those German citizens who now, as we see it, failed that moral test, are considered blameworthy, but it was a matter of circumstantial luck that they were in those circumstances, rather than in more peaceful political conditions in which their frailties would not have been exposed and their strengths had been given a proper outlet of expression.
As another example of circumstantial luck, Judith Thomson invites us to consider two judges.19 Judge Actual accepts a bribe, thus corrupting the course of justice, whereas Judge Counterfactual, who shares Judge Actual’s dispositions, does not accept a bribe, simply because he was not given the relevant opportunity. The difference between them is simply a matter of luck. Can it be correct, then, to deem Judge Actual more blameworthy than Judge Counterfactual?
We need to be precise about the difference between resultant luck and circumstantial luck, because resultant luck can undeniably be described as a species of circumstantial luck. Differences in the actual outcomes of agents’ acts may be truthfully described as being due to circumstances beyond these agents’ control. Reconsider the case of the drunken drivers: the driver who collides with the pedestrian does so because his journey unfolds in circumstances where there is a pedestrian in the wrong place at the wrong time. The luck of the luckier drunken driver, by contrast, can also be described as circumstantial: it consists in the absence of any such pedestrian.
17 We will be spending a great deal of time with this case, as well as the second case about assassins, in the early chapters of this book.
18 Nagel (1979), pp. 26, 28. 19 Thomson (1993), pp. 206–7.
Collapse can be avoided. Although facts about resultant luck can be re-described in the language of circumstantial luck, the converse does not hold. Nagel was therefore not over-counting the relevant sources of luck; there is a distinctive hue in this further category of luck which certifies it as a genuinely distinct form of moral luck from resultant luck. On this more precise articulation of it, circumstantial luck should be understood as the luck of being exposed to circumstances in which intentions are formed, acts are performed or at least attempted, and dispositions are developed or actualized.20
‘Constitutive luck’ is luck in respect of an agent’s character traits, constitution, dispositions, skills, and background. It is luck in respect of an agent’s ‘natural endowments’ and ‘social endowments’, as John Rawls routinely referred to them.21 We can claim no credit for these endowments; we just have them. Even if we are capable of shaping ourselves by willed effort and reflection, we have no control over our starting points, which may themselves constrain or influence the willed effort and reflection we can actually expend, and which are likely at least in part to determine how we act, and where we end up. There is no very sharp distinction between circumstantial luck and constitutive luck.
Finally, there is ‘causal luck’, or luck in respect of the causal antecedents of an agent’s acts. Causal luck is a type of circumstantial luck which is concerned with the immediate causal antecedents into our acts and decision-making. Nagel plainly has in mind the global determinism thesis, according to which everything we do, and everything that happens to us, is subsumable under the laws of nature. We do not get to choose those laws of nature, and we do not get to choose those immediate causal antecedents. To make this plain, think of an arbitrary point in time before you were born. Everything that happens afterwards—every event and action—supposedly conforms to, and falls under, those laws of nature as they proceeded from that pre-mortem collection of factual circumstances.22 We are blamed and praised for what we do, or omit to do, but what we do or omit to do, on this way of looking at it, is downstream from deterministic currents that we had no control over.
Think of how pervasive these categories of luck are in our practical lives. There would seem to be no corner of them that does not betray their influence. How we act in the circumstances we face, the decisions we make, how our acts turn out, the traits and dispositions which are mobilized in the acts we perform, in the
20 Some of these items may appear to belong to the territory mapped out by Nagel’s category of constitutive luck. The boundaries between circumstantial luck and constitutive luck are in fact somewhat porous, as we shall see when Michael Zimmerman’s category of ‘situational luck’ is under scrutiny in Chapter 4.
21 This is common terminology in Rawls (1971).
22 This is a rough description of Peter Van Inwagen’s ‘Consequence Argument’: see Van Inwagen (1975).
circumstances we face: these seem utterly central to our attempts to make sense of our moral lives. But these verdicts also seem riddled with luck.
So can we attempt some form of purification of our moral appraisals? Can we purge these appraisals of luck, so that corrected versions of them make due allowance for, and attempt to discount or neutralize, the influence of luck? Given the pervasiveness of luck, Nagel’s worry is that we could not do so. If we made an honest attempt to implement this purging of luck-influenced content, Nagel fears that ‘the area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral concern, [would seem] to shrink . . . to an extensionless point’.23
There is a discernible pattern to the concerns at work as we negotiate these various categories of moral luck. Robert Hartman’s observation that ‘the moral luck debate is about not luck per se but a tension in our ordinary thinking about moral responsibility’ seems perfectly correct.24 We lack control over a number of major dimensions which matter to our moral evaluation. That is puzzling, and it calls for investigation.
4. Moral Luck and Free Will
If there is an elephant in the room in discussions of moral luck, it must be free will and moral responsibility. The categories of constitutive luck and causal luck in Nagel’s taxonomy seem particularly germane to free will and moral responsibility. One could be forgiven for assuming that the debate on moral luck, as it has developed in the literature over the last forty years, is a relatively small component in the broader debate about these issues. On this view, moral luck is a minor cog in a larger wheel. Moral luck can only expect to be engulfed in these larger debates upon closer examination of the underlying issues. The debate on moral luck cannot expect to be satisfactorily conducted, far less settled, independently of the events unfolding in the never-ending free will campaign. Moreover, if the Lack of Control Account is not being disputed as an appropriate characterization of luck in the moral domain, then the relevance of free will and responsibility to these issues will be all the more obvious.
This is a serious challenge. But I do not accept that moral luck is merely a junior partner in the broader debate about free and responsibility; the debates are not structured in that way, or at least need not be structured in that way. The
23 Nagel (1979), p. 35.
24 Hartman (2017), p. 24. It should be noted that this particular division in the debate cuts across substantive commitments with respect to moral luck itself. Similar commitments are evinced, for example, by Enoch and Marmor (2007), who are staunchly opposed to moral luck, while Hartman and I accept its existence. They are anti-luckists, and we are anti-anti-luckists.
nature of free will and responsibility is, admittedly, a large, adjacent, and sometimes threatening presence in the moral luck debate. Large-scale treatments of moral luck can be naturally partnered with discussions of free will, and I do not claim that the inclusion of causal luck in Nagel’s taxonomy was poorly judged.25 But the free will debate does not wholly engulf the moral luck debate. There are distinctive concerns in the moral luck debate which can and should be investigated independently of wider issues about free will and moral responsibility. These distinctive concerns are chiefly relevant to resultant luck and circumstantial luck, and to a certain extent constitutive luck, and these three categories of moral luck will indeed form the substance of Part I of this book.26 Consider, first, resultant luck: one assassin hits his target, while the other assassin misses hers. The difference between them, by assumption, is due to luck. Now we assume that both assassins, in making their attempts in the first place, have satisfied the normal conditions of responsibility and control. Their satisfaction of these conditions, whatever they may amount to in detail, is necessary for each of them to qualify as a candidate for moral blameworthiness. Resultant luck now presents us with a further control-related problem. If each of these agents lacks control over the differences in the outcomes of their respective attempts, then will we not have to agree that they are equally blameworthy? How else can we be in a position to insist on their individual satisfaction of the ordinary conditions of control and responsibility for their moral blameworthiness, but then deny the relevance of a further control-related difference between them as we determine what each of them is blameworthy for, and the degree to which each of them is blameworthy?
That is the essence of the problem of resultant luck. This problem does not ignore free will and responsibility, but assumes that those prior conditions are in place in respect of the normal sources of action for individual agents in order to raise another problem about control and responsibility. If we are going to insist that there are control conditions which must hold in order to make each of these agents morally appraisable in the first place, then we should surely be troubled by our lack of control over a further important dimension of our moral appraisal.
The same broad points hold for circumstantial luck. Return to Thomson’s Judge Actual and Judge Counterfactual. Neither of them would have been a candidate for moral blameworthiness in the first place were it not for their satisfaction of the normal conditions for moral responsibility. Whatever these conditions amount to, they are, in the first instance, established separately for each of these agents in turn. But the fact that Judge Actual accepts the bribe, while Judge Counterfactual does not, reflects a difference in circumstances which neither of
25 See, for example, Levy (2011), and Mele (2006).
26 Constitutive luck will also enjoy a second life in Part II, when I turn my attention to distributive justice.
them has any control over. So there would appear to be a further control-related problem which is not budgeted for within the original terms and conditions for the assignment of individual moral blameworthiness. There will be no room to investigate this further control-related problem unless we assume business as usual for the satisfaction of the individual blameworthiness conditions.
We can consider further cases along this spectrum, thereby edging into constitutive luck. Imagine that there is a third judge, Judge Possible, who does not have corrupt dispositions, but who would have developed them had her circumstances and early social conditioning been different.27 Once again, the fact that she was not placed in these early character-forming circumstances is just a matter of luck. The differences between Judge Possible, on the one hand, and Judge Actual and Judge Counterfactual, on the other hand, lie beyond the control of any of them. Intuitively, it would appear that both Judge Actual and Judge Counterfactual are blameworthy in ways that do not apply to Judge Possible. But the differences in these intuitive verdicts are due to luck; they thus disclose a further control-related problem.
To recapitulate, there are puzzles about responsibility and control in all these cases that will not even get off the ground unless we assume something like normal service when it comes to the satisfaction of the generic blameworthiness conditions for each individual. If we are convinced that no such conditions for individual blameworthiness exist, then we will not even reach those further puzzles.
We can put these points in another way. If you are a pessimist about free will and responsibility, then it may seem at first that the problem of moral luck is less interesting for you. This is because the question of whether there should be differential blameworthiness between agents whose differences are a matter of luck will be dwarfed by the worry that there can be no justified ascriptions of individual blameworthiness in the first place, due to the absence of free will. But there are two points we can make against even pessimists about free will.
First, these arguments between optimists and pessimists are complex and difficult, and we seem entitled to think in conditional terms: supposing the pessimistic arguments for free will were not correct, there would still be these further control-related puzzles to consider. So what is to stop us from considering them?
Second, even for error theorists about moral responsibility, appearances are usually maintained. Pessimists about free will tend to keep ersatz versions of our blaming practices alive, in order to redeem whatever social utility these practices can claim. If so, then an internal problem to negotiate further will be provided by these categories of moral luck. We will still want to know whether the
27 Thomson does not mention Judge Possible: this addition to the cast of agents was pioneered by Zimmerman (2002).
control-related problems associated with resultant luck, circumstantial luck, and constitutive luck can be satisfactorily dealt with. So the phenomenon of moral luck still generates a collection of problems which require investigation.
Suppose, by contrast, that you are an optimist about free will and responsibility. If you fall into this camp, then you will be committed to the existence of blameworthiness conditions that can be satisfied by individuals one at a time. But that leaves us with these further control-related problems, concerning the different types of moral luck, which have not been provided for. Again, these issues call for investigation.
In short, whether you are an optimist or a pessimist about moral responsibility, there are reasons to support an investigation—a separate investigation—into moral luck. The problem of moral luck is not engulfed by free will and responsibility, even if it is entirely understandable for philosophers who are interested in one of them to take an interest in the other.
5. Moral Luck, Blameworthiness, and Responsibility
Although my policy is to avoid direct confrontations with the free will and responsibility debate in these pages, I will be making repeated references to blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, especially in Part I. These notions still import various suppositions about moral responsibility. So it is a good idea at this point to say something more about theories of blameworthiness, even though my aim is to keep critical interventions to a minimum. I will briefly describe this territory before commenting on its connection to moral luck. As for the free will debate, I think that there is a way of maintaining a manageable distance between these debates about blameworthiness and the moral luck debate.
There are different possible types of moral appraisability or assessability, which I will use as broad umbrella terms. An important and highly visible central division in this territory has been advanced by Gary Watson.28 As Watson puts it, there are two faces of responsibility. At one end of the moral appraisability spectrum, we find aretaic or descriptive appraisals, predications, or verdicts. The flavour of this type of appraisal was expressed by John Dewey in the following way: ‘Responsibility is . . . one aspect of the identity of character and conduct. We are responsible for our conduct because that conduct is ourselves objectified in actions’.29 In recent literature, this dimension of responsibility has become known as responsibility as attributability. Other terms have also been used for it: Watson describes
28 See Watson (1996). This is complicated territory, of course, and Watson’s division does not settle all the directions one can take. See, for example, Mason (2019) for other ideas.
29 Dewey (1957), pp. 1601–1; cited at Watson (1996), p. 227; original emphases.
it as ‘responsibility as self-disclosure’, and it is roughly equivalent to what Susan Wolf calls ‘real self views’ of moral responsibility.30
Responsibility as attributability is ultimately concerned with what the agent, morally speaking, is like. In the attitudes she holds and in the acts she performs, an agent discloses or expresses herself and her values. Her character and her broad orientation towards other moral agents and patients are also revealed in the moral track record she accumulates through her practical career.31 T. M. Scanlon considers someone whose conduct betrays the fact that he ‘does not place any value on other people’s lives or interests’, and asks, rhetorically: ‘what clearer grounds could one have for saying that he is a bad person and behaves wrongly?’32 Qualities of character will be captured by the terms we use to describe those acts and attitudes. These may allow us to describe an agent at different times as cruel, or kind, or cold, or fair-minded, or generous, or sanctimonious, or vengeful, or forgiving, or lazy, or any number of other things. Her acts and attitudes embody or reflect these dispositions or traits of character.33 And, of course, we can also characterize an agent’s acts in thinner terms, and more flatly, as bad or wrong. As long as her acts and attitudes reflect what this agent is like, then she can be appraised in this aretaic way.34 If the traits are morally undesirable ones, we will, accordingly, end up with different exercises in ‘unwelcome description’.35
Attributability responsibility need not simply take an agent’s acts and attitudes at face value: acts and attitudes can, after all, be coerced, distorted, or manipulated.36 Some further tests for screening out manipulation or coercion may have to be satisfied to arrive at a relevantly undistorted view of what the agent is like, morally speaking. Yet even if these scruples are heeded—and nothing prevents more sophisticated conceptions of attributability from taking them into consideration—a number of writers are convinced that responsibility as attributability leaves out something important. Wolf has influenced much of this thinking:
. . . when we hold an agent morally responsible for some event, we are doing more than identifying her particularly crucial role in the causal series. [W]e are not
30 See Wolf (1990), esp. ch. 2. Wolf is Watson’s main critical interlocutor in his discussion. As we shall see, Wolf herself rejects real self views.
31 Zimmerman (2002) makes repeated references to the idea of a moral ‘track record’.
32 Scanlon (1998), p. 284.
33 There is a further debate, adjacent to this one, about how stable or enduring character traits are, and to what extent qualities of character should be viewed as largely a product of the circumstances we find ourselves in at the time. See Harman (1999), (2000), and (2009), Athanassoulis (2000), Doris (2002), Kupperman (2001), and Webber (2006) for instructive discussions of these particular issues.
34 See Adams (1985) for a strong defence of this form of responsibility. Scanlon (1998), esp. ch. 6, and Smith (2005) are also relevant.
35 A phrase used by Smith (2012), p. 583.
36 Wolf (1990) understands real self views to be causally structured, so these views are of course exposed to these problems. Attributability views can be less crude than this, however—a point to which we shall return.
merely judging the moral quality of the event with which the individual is so intimately associated; we are judging the moral quality of the individual herself in some focused, non-instrumental, and seemingly more serious way. We may refer to the latter sense of responsibility as deep responsibility, and we may speak in connection with this of deep praise and blame.37
What is required for ‘deep’ responsibility, in Wolf’s sense? One of her concerns in this passage is that the appeal to an agent’s ‘role in the causal series’ may not suffice for serious censure. Attributability theorists can agree. As I suggested above, they may wish to refine purely causal criteria in order to arrive at a less distorted view of what can be reasonably attributed to an agent. But the concerns with deep responsibility are likely to go beyond this consideration.
The easiest way of proceeding here may be to enumerate some considerations that do not especially engage the concerns of responsibility as attributability. As Neil Levy explains:
. . . attributability requires relatively little in the way of control. An act or omission can rightfully be attributed to me whether or not I ever exercised control over acquiring the attitude that it expresses. So long as my action is rightly taken to be expressive of my real self—so long, that is, as it is the product, in the right kind of way, of my beliefs and desires, values and commitments, and not of hypnosis, brain manipulation, mental illness or what have you—then it is properly attributable to me.38
Attributability is not especially concerned with the fair opportunity to have avoided blameworthiness. Perhaps some people really are malicious, spiteful, vindictive, or cruel: this is simply what they are like, and these qualities are faithfully expressed by the way they think and the way they act. Due to early facts about formative conditioning or upbringing, these agents may not have had any choice about the matter, and they may lack control over the expression of these personality traits in their present circumstances. And this fact may serve, in turn, to shield them from certain ascriptions of responsibility. Watson refers to this further type of responsibility as responsibility as accountability. Unless these more demanding conditions for accountability are satisfied, agents are not accountable to others for their attitudes and acts.
How does accountability differ from attributability? What interest is served by this more demanding notion of responsibility? Watson’s and Wolf’s primary
37 Wolf (1990), p. 41; passage cited by Watson (1996), p. 228.
38 Levy (2005), p. 3.
concern lies with agents’ vulnerability to hostile reactive attitudes: attitudes such as indignation and resentment.39 As Watson writes:
In one way, to blame (morally) is to attribute something to a (moral) fault in the agent; therefore, to call conduct shoddy is to blame the agent. But judgments of moral blameworthiness are also thought to involve the idea that agents deserve adverse treatment or ‘negative attitudes’ in response to their faulty conduct.40
It is generally unpleasant to be on the receiving end of these attitudes, and other sanctions, formal and informal, may ensue from them. Agents who are exposed to these reactive attitudes may be shunned or cold-shouldered by others,41 or acquire a bad reputation which frustrates their future encounters and opportunities. These reactions may form, in turn, the basis of further formal or institutional sanctions: fines, penalties, reprimands, and various forms of official censure and setbacks. And the agents on the receiving end of these attitudes may suffer feelings of guilt or shame, or a loss of self-esteem.
An important question arising immediately from these theoretical divisions is this: if we judge that attributability conditions are satisfied, then won’t negative attitudes more or less automatically ensue from them? To take an example, the description of Amy as spiteful cannot be easily combined with a commitment to moral neutrality about this aspect of her character. Spitefulness is not just another ordinary ascriptive characteristic of Amy’s, like her height or hair colour. Unlike her height or hair colour, Amy’s spitefulness is not a morally colourless fact about her. As a result, we cannot be expected to be morally indifferent to the evidence that Amy is spiteful; negative feelings towards Amy seem justified on the basis of this aretaic predication alone. In other words, exercises in aretaic predication appear to be internally connected to what Watson calls ‘reactive entitlements’.42 Our justification for reacting negatively to the evidence that Amy’s acts and attitudes have betrayed spitefulness ensues simply from her spitefulness, especially if—as Watson thinks—attributability amounts to a genuine form of responsibility
This problem threatens to scupper the division between attributability and accountability. If reactive entitlements are licensed by aretaic ascriptions alone, then it is far from clear that responsibility as accountability enjoys any distinctive domain to operate in. It can still be noted, of course, that some acts reflecting those traits were not performed in the presence of a fair opportunity to have avoided performing them, and that fact may make a difference to our responses
39 Strawson (1962) famously makes the reactive attitudes central to our understanding of moral responsibility. His discussion has generated a huge critical industry. See Todd (2016) and Hieronymi (2020) for some penetrating recent reflections on this debate.
40 Watson (1996), pp. 230–1; original emphasis.
41 Scanlon (2008), ch. 4, analyses blame in terms of the relationships-disrupting implications of wrong action.
42 Watson (1996), p. 230.
