In this paper I argue against the idea that the existence of moral luck is an illusion. First of all, I briefly sketch what the phenomenon of moral luck is about, and then I present and discuss the main arguments that intend to show that such a phenomenon i s just an illusion that we must unmask after reflection. Next, I argue against those positions as a whole by making a general point, which I think they need to address, but which, I will try to show, they cannot. What all those arguments necessarily presuppose is a notion of a person's true desert, as actual-enactment independent, which is indeed unintelligible. Hence, my ambitious conclusion is that no general argument against moral luck can ultimately work-unless an intelligible notion of ultimate true desert can be presented. Consider a classic example by Thomas Nagel (I will refer to it as E1). There are two drunk drivers and, as a consequence, Driver A loses control of her car, comes off the road, hits a pedestrian and runs him over. Driver B also loses control of her car, comes off the road, but doesn't hit a pedestrian and therefore doesn't run anyone over because there was no pedestrian. It appears from these cases that depending on something that is beyond the control of both agents, just one of them will be responsible for a death and will putatively deserve more blame; whereas the other, even though being equally at fault or making the same mistake, will be judged with more leniency and will not be responsible for killing anybody. So then, one driver will be morally luckier than the other one. The moral luck phenomenon would be the result of a certain tension between the belief that we ought not to blame someone for those of her action's outcomes which are beyond her control and the fact that we judge people for such things that are simply a consequence of their actions. It seems, prima facie, that the Control Condition is a necessary condition for moral responsibility attributions: (1) An agent A is to be morally responsible for x only if she has (an appropriate) control on x.
1 All these examples (with some minimal variants) comes from
It is important to stress that, in this context, what we mean by “luck”—good or bad luck, lucky or unlucky— is whatever is beyond or out of an agent’s control. Moreover, it is part of the issue whether something that is a matter of luck for an agent is, automatically, something which this agent is not morally responsible for.
My overall purpose in this article is to argue that the case against moral luck is not convincing, and indeed cannot be convincingly established. Then, my answer to the title question is “No”. I do not offer a positive account of how to embed moral luck in a coherent conception of morality; my only aim is to criticize the reluctance to acknowledge moral luck.
In the next section, I present the main arguments against moral luck, the supposed conclusion of which is that moral luck is an illusion, i.e. there is not such a phenomenon. Actually, there is basically one main argument, with multiple variations. I will defend that no variation is sound, because the whole argument’s strategy is wrong. First, I will reply to some particular details of this position, and in section III I will argue against the possibility itself that an argument of this sort may be successful. My reason: because it depends on a very dubious notion of true desert or real moral worth. The kind of notion of true desert I have in mind is a strong one, usually attributed to Kant: ultimate / true / real desert (or moral worth) is a strict function of (or proportional to) agent’s control. 2
As I advanced, the anti-moral-luck theorists claim that the phenomenon of moral luck is an illusion. By the so-called epistemic argument they claim that what luck really does is not only to interfere with someone’s moral status, but to interfere with our knowledge of her/him, given that we are not omniscient beings and our knowledge is mediated by the available evidence. A person can be lucky or unlucky regarding what we have evidence to believe that she/he deserves, but it does not mean that luck can the original cases for the subsequent discussion and renounce to propose my own ones in order to avoid the danger of changing the point. In my opinion, the actual examples used in a discussion (or, especially, in this discussion) are crucial, since different examples often work in different ways. Therefore, I prefer to assess the debate on the commonplace cases. On the other hand, we can wonder whether the accounts given could be generalized in other cases. Of course, my hope, like that of all other philosophers, is that generalization from considered examples is clear, or at least possible. make a moral difference, i.e., can affect what she/he really or ultimately deserves.2 Let us see some ways of making this argument more explicit.
Regarding E1, Norvin Richards maintains that if we must treat the two drivers differently, it is because their behaviour does not show clearly that they deserve the same, and our treatment of them would have to reflect our judgement of what they deserve, and of the way we ought to treat them. Then, we can go on, at the same time, with our intuition or principle of control and our ordinary practices of judgment. However, an immediate problem with this sort of argument arises: it identifies with no justification real desert and situations that we can call (putatively) epistemically clear, that is, the successful situations or situations in which the agent carries out her intentions and plans (or obtains the expected results): the man who commits murder, the driver who runs someone over, etc.3 No doubt, it is not always clear what the intentions of an agent were when she acted, or what she was committed to for the following course of action; but it is unjustified to identify successful situations with the situations that shows us the true desert of an agent, more than unsuccessful ones. Why cannot they be equally fallible? Causing harm can be as accidental in relation to an agent’s intentions (a person who does not intend to cause harm but actually, through bad luck, causes harm) as it can be for another who doesn’t cause harm (a person intending to cause harm and isn’t successful due to factors beyond her control).
In addition, it is also assumed, without argument, that desert depends on reckless action, i.e. on negligence. However, in the case of a driver who runs a person over, the phenomenon of moral luck is due to the important fact that our judgement of (negative) desert seems to arise from his having killed someone, and not from the driver’s recklessness. In a lot of cases, it seems that blameworthiness is mainly located in the harm done. Moreover, in some cases it seems that the very negligence (or reckless action) only exists when the outcome is a harmful one. Consider the following example (E4). A mother is bathing her baby. Then, someone rings the door bell. She is waiting for her elderly father. She is alone in the house, and chooses to leave the baby for a moment splashing in the water in order to open the door. She runs to the door, lets her father in and immediately comes back to the bath. Two end scenarios are possible. In the first one the baby is still splashing in the water. In the second one—the tragic one—the baby has slipped under the water and drowned. It seems to me that in these scenarios the negligence or reckless action appears to exist only when the result is harmful; in the case where the mother comes back immediately and her baby is playing in the bath it appears that there is no negligence on her part. Only in the case where the baby is injured or even dead, does she becomes a negligent mother and deserves severe blame. Ordinarily we all take risks, indeed moral risks, but it would be a too hard a view of morality and life to equate blame in both scenarios regardless of the actual outcome.
Of course, I do not deny that an agent’s intentions or will have an important role to play in assignation of moral responsibility. But intentions and will are neither the only relevant thing to consider nor always the most important. Then, in case E2 intention (and trying) seems to have a strong weight, more relevant than in E1 (regarding drivers, perhaps recklessness is more important), or in other more controversial cases, when a harmful outcome due to an agent’s action takes place but no intention of bringing about this state of affairs is present in her.
But things are more difficult when we move on to consider situational and antecedent luck and look at the role luck also plays in the very formation of an agent’s intentions.
Here, anti-moral-luck theorists cite cases that point to the fact that a person can deserve being morally treated in a way that it is not the result of what she has done, but of what is plausible for us to think she would have done if she had had the chance. Maybe this move is prima facie intuitively appealing. But once we separate too much counterfactual situations from actual ones, this intuitive character definitively disappears.
Michael J. Zimmerman has significantly argued in this way. His strategy follows this schema:
If (i) P made decision d in what he believed to be situation s,
(ii) P* would have made d if he had been in a situation that he believed to
be s, and
(iii) P*’s being in a situation that he believed to be s was not in his
(restricted) control,4
whatever moral credit or discredit accrues to P for making d accrues also to
P*.5
This principle appears to support Zimmerman’s position that both are equally
praiseworthy or blameworthy. Regarding situational luck, Zimmerman claims that even
4 He employs a preliminary breaking down of the puzzle by distinguishing two types
of control. Restricted control: “One may be said to enjoy restricted control with respect t o
some event just in case one can bring about its occurrence and can also prevent its
occurrence.” Unrestricted control: “One may be said to enjoy unrestricted control with respect
to some event just in case one enjoys or enjoyed restricted control with respect both to i t
and to all those events on which its occurrence is contingent.” Zimmerman (1987) ‘Luck
and Moral Responsibility’, Ethics 97: 374-386, at p. 376; reprinted in
However, by arguing in such a way one ignores the very rationale of what makes situational moral luck especially puzzling, i.e. the fact that our having to face some situations and not others normally has a repercussion in the specific intentions we actually develop. Although in a case of situational moral luck both agents share, in a sense, their intentions or will, their being in relevantly different contexts makes a difference in the determinate intentions each of them have. So, although in E3 the Nazi sympathizer and the émigré share the will of working in favour of the Hitlerian regime, even so the different circumstances they live in make it so that the particular intentions and actions they carry out are relevantly distinct to the extent of making a difference to the moral assessment that each one deserves. And, moreover, there is also the issue that, in several aspects, it is obvious that performing or acting out of some bad character traits or intentions is worse than just possessing them but not acting out of them. That is, it is not only the fact of being one way or having some dispositions that is morally relevant, but also the actions caused by these dispositions. Thinks, for instance, of your grandfather, who sincerely hates immigrants and claims that all of them should be expelled from the country, but when he meets one of them in the queue of a government office he treats him with all due respect. Here, the fact of meeting an immigrant on the queue is what makes the difference in the judgment he deserves. Of course, one can reply that such behaviour shows he does not really hate immigrants; instead, he would be victim of a kind of self-deception. But it is just this test (to act or not to act on the disposition) what discloses the situation.
Finally, consistent application of the idea of responsibility tout court —a consequence of “taking the control condition seriously”—, involves that all those who, in certain given circumstances, would freely have acted in the way the Nazi collaborator did, are indeed as equally blameworthy as he is. Then, the conclusion is that we all are to blame (and to be praised) for countless things “we do not even imagine” (1987, 226), given that we have different counterparts in possible situations in which we would have acted wrongly, and that a differential judgement in virtue of factual considerations is not justified. But this yields an exaggerated revisionist position that widens unlimitedly the range of what we all are responsible for. Were it actually the case, the result would be an unacceptable increase or mitigation—indeed, a neutralization—of the very concept of moral responsibility, ultimately making illegitimate most, if not all, of our ordinary judgments—a result already anticipated by Nagel.7 4
An important difficulty, in trying to understand what the real problem that arises from the moral luck phenomenon is, is the diversity of practices of moral valuation and assessment we are involved in, as well as the opacity of the distinction among their different kinds. The broad sort of moral judgments which we are concerned with here is the moral assessment of agents or persons. And it is within this category where the relevant distinction must be drawn. It seems that opponents of moral luck must offer a successful taxonomy of the kinds of judgments which fits our ordinary practices —or show why we need to change them—, and also shows that there is one privileged kind, which is fundamental and luck-free.
A straightforward move has been to distinguish between different kinds of blame or judgment guided by different purposes. We ordinarily blame people for bringing about negative events with the pretension of changing their behaviour, regardless of whether they really deserve blame. Overt blame over a person is one thing, and real blameworthiness a very different one.8 In other words, there are here at play two distinct sorts of assertion with divergent purposes: acts of blame consisting of subjecting someone to overt blame, typical of reproaches, reprimands, etc.; and the verdictive judgments of moral blameworthiness, where the speaker’s primary intention is to give an impersonal verdict applicable to anyone whose actions are akin in the relevant aspects, and with the purpose of judging someone as a morally deserving blame.9 In this scenario, just the driver who runs over a pedestrian is overtly to blame—not the driver who runs over nobody. But both will be equally blameworthy. Then, luck could make a difference just in the amount of overt blame someone receives, but not in her blameworthiness or genuine moral judgment one deserves.10
Certainly, this is strategy makes use of the classical controversy about whether praise and blame are a function of desert or whether they can be appropriate in order to achieve a desired consequence, say, changing an agent’s behaviour or making a social benefit. But, in addition, we can distinguish different kinds of moral assessment regarding different aspects of the agent. We can say that someone is praiseworthy or blameworthy, but also that is virtuous or vicious, that her character is good or bad, that she made a good or bad action.
In Zimmerman’s account, three kinds of agent’s moral assessment are distinguished, i.e. aretaic, deontic and moral responsibility judgements, but only the last is the fundamental regarding desert. To him, the successful murderer and the unsuccessful one must be morally assessed exactly in the same way; although one is responsible for more things than the other, both men are responsible to the same degree, and this is the kind of moral assessment to which the Control Condition applies. “Degree of responsibility counts for everything, scope for nothing, when it comes to such moral evaluation of agents.”11 Hence, luck becomes irrelevant: both men are equally responsible tout court and have the same moral worth. If the amount of things one is responsible for, had any relevance, it would be to deontic judgments, or also to judgements about vice and virtue, which are open to luck.
I acknowledge that those strategies employ the distinction among different sorts of moral assessment that partly pairs with the plurality of our ordinary practices, their different purposes, or even to deny their different connexion with desert. However, the case against moral luck depends crucially on making a real distinction between a fundamental kind and the other ones. This idea is linked with the notion of a person’s true desert which refers to what essentially a person morally deserves, to her essential moral core.12
In particular, my claim is that, in order to work, this strategy must show (i) that there is a privileged (fundamental) kind of moral assessment, and (ii) that this kind is luck-free. This sort of fundamental moral evaluation would reflect the agent’s unconditioned true desert, which need to be characterize as action-independent, and even actual-character-independent (or actual-will-independent), as we will see. My objection to this strategy is, on one hand, that there is no unique privileged kind of moral assessment, but this a claim that I will not follow here. Instead, I will assume that there is such a kind of moral assessment which is a function of the agent’s true desert and, by pursuing it to its logical conclusion, I will conclude that it finally collapses.
Then, my argument works as a reductio, in this way: 1. There is a kind of (moral) assessment that is luck-free. 2. Necessary condition: this kind of assessment is necessarily a function of a person’s true desert. 3. Conditioned true desert is insufficient (luck is not finally ruled out). 4. But the idea of an unconditioned true desert is unintelligible. 5. Then, no true desert (3-4).
6. Therefore, no luck-free kind of moral assessment (5, 1-2).
I will focus on the notion of unconditioned true desert, since it is crucial to the argument in favour of a privileged kind of luck-free moral assessment. 5
The notion of true desert, which pairs with the idea of ultimate moral responsibility,
contrasts with more factual sorts of desert and responsibility—or simply less moral
ones. It is a kind of responsibility that is supposed to be perfectly accurate and
rational, and whose attributions are founded on the agent’s absolute control of her
11 M.
Then, actions, as external to the agent and not free of contingencies, cannot be the locus of ultimate responsibility or true desert. However, character, intentions or will cannot be better replacements. Even determining an entry in one’s ideal moral record by function of some of her dispositions, it turns out that what dispositions she has is partly a matter of luck.14 Then, if luck appears on stage we are not solving the issue, but simply postponing it—and, remember, true desert cannot be a matter of luck in anyway. A move open here to the anti-luck theorist would be to recommend (as a partial answer) the distinction between a ‘factual true desert’ and an ‘essential true desert’.15 The factual true desert is a function of what one would have freely chosen and done in a diversity of situations, given the person’s actual history. The essential moral desert is a function of what the person would have freely chosen and done in a diversity of situations, including a diversity of possible histories. The factual true desert depends on those dispositions one has, given her factual history; and the essential true desert depends on a broader set of dispositions, which includes the agent’s counterfactual possible histories. It is the latter which would keep luck free in the way required to avoid moral luck.
In this picture, we are mainly held with two main kinds of moral assessment: that which assesses an agent’s moral record, and that which assesses her true desert, a function of what the agent would have done, in all those counterfactual possible histories of hers. However, by splitting up an agent’s actual moral record from her true desert, a big gap emerges, and this is an undesirable consequence; and, what is more, it is ultimately an insuperable gap. On one hand, the notion of (essential) true desert turns out to be impossible to know and fix, even in ideal conditions. And, on the other, the link between an agent’s actual moral record and her essential true desert is irremediably broken.
Now, the anti-moral-luck theorist might acknowledge that it is really difficult to
make a judgment about true desert or essential moral worth, but this does not imply
radical scepticism about true desert. Limited judgments about true desert can be
reasonable, even though we must be very cautious about making them.16 A putatively
positive consequence can be drawn: this sort of reasonable scepticism about true
desert would undermine our righteousness when blaming others who faced situation less
13 See J.
Another reply might be like this: a person’s moral record is a sign of her true desert; circumstances in which a person indeed chooses and act are a subset of the overall range of circumstances in which that person would have chosen or acted; “a person’s moral record provides a window on that person’s moral worth”.18 But it is not very hard to see that, once we dissociate true desert from our moral record, the link between them is definitively cut, and to stop at that moderate scepticism or to talk in terms of such a magic window is just the result of a decision, or a mere act of faith.
Anyway, those kinds of moves make us to lose sight of our issue—the issue we really have to tackle. The moral luck issue refers to our ordinary moral practices of assessing agents, not to logically possible scenarios. It is not impossible to understand praise and blame as a reflex of a pure kind of desert, but that would take us into another debate, and we would lose sight of their role as guides in our interpersonal relationships. The moral luck phenomenon introduces a relevant difficulty in these practices, but we won’t find the answer outside them. Appealing to such a thing as an essential moral worth or an ultimate true desert does not solve the issue.
Moreover, if the problem has arisen in terms of a clash between two incompatible intuitions, what are our common intuitions about the distinction between a factual true desert and an essential one? I find it much more intuitive to say that the real moral status of a person is made up by a large set of actions and the development of her character and identity. And though we often distinguish between what someone has done and what she would have done, that fact does not justify the talk of an essential true desert, whatever her moral record. If it is meaningful to talk of a person’s real desert or moral worth, it will be in connection to moral record, i.e. her actions, omissions, mental states, will, character, and so on, that she actually has, and unavoidably acquired by the intervention of a lot of contingent factors.
The very dispositions of an agent depend partly on factors beyond her control. One
option is still going back and making use of the dispositions the agent would have
had given her counterfactual possible histories. But by making this move, the
proponent of an ultimate true desert takes progressive steps backwards that ultimately
reduce the agent’s identity to nothing, to a bare self with no properties. Pursued to its
logical conclusions, the anti-moral-luck position, which rests on the idea that what
ultimately matters is only what exclusively depends on the agent, becomes
meaningless, since it happens that finally nothing exclusively depends on the agent. In other
words,thereis finallyno agenton whom anythingmight depend. Certainly, it is
quite legitimate to feel that attributions of moral responsibility must be deep, must
reflect something “really belonging to the person”. And, then, it is a fair aim to try to
separate, to a certain extent, some more internal traits of an agent from external
formative and environmental factors. However, that cannot carry an image of the agent as
essentially consisting in a fixed or substantial self that stands behind her various
psychological and physical dispositions. But this is exactly the image of the self that
is a necessary presupposition of the radical argument against moral luck.
17 Greco (1975) 93-4.
18
My main point has been to discredit the strategy of appealing to the notion of an ultimate true desert, as a perfect function of the agent’s strict control, to explain away in general the phenomenon of moral luck. When we pursue this idea to its ultimate consequences, it becomes just an unintelligible idea that deserves to be dropped. Settling this point means to me that, to the extent that a global case against moral luck necessarily presupposes this notion, no general argument against moral luck can ultimately work. However, this does not mean that all kinds of moral luck are thereby vindicated. Independent arguments are needed for different kinds of moral luck—particularly, resultant and situational moral luck. But, once we discredit general intuitions against moral luck, then to try to avoid at any price that luck interfers with our moral judgments becomes senseless.
From my conclusion, it follows is that the link between control and desert cannot be as strong as it, prima facie, seems. To receive what one deserves is, maybe, just a part of fairness or justice. At least from the point of view of the actual practice of judging, the notion of true desert cannot be more than an unreasonable ideal. In any case, I do not intend to deny such a link between control, fairness, and desert; it appears as morally undeniable and worth pursuing. The main difficulties lie in the very notions of desert and control—especially the latter—which are in need of further investigation.
Let me finish with some roughly stated prospects for an account of how to embed moral luck in a coherent conception of moral responsibility and morality. As seen, the issue of moral luck is usually presented as a clash of intuitions, a clash between a particular intuition or practice and a principle or general intuition. However, we should distinguish, at least, these there levels: (1) (particular) practices of moral judgment, (2) (folk) beliefs and principles regulative of those practices, and (3) theoretical/philosophical views of moral responsibility attributions. It would be useful to connect this analysis of the concept of moral responsibility with the current discussion on revisionism and theory construction, and also with the variantist literature on moral responsibility and some related meta-philosophical worries. Anyway, it would be worthy to pursue the idea that neither our practices of moral judgment, regarding the moral luck issue, are especially in need of revision; nor are our folk beliefs, as long as they are not particularly influenced by some theoretical views of moral responsibility attributions. We just need to re-interpret some of our folk beliefs.19.