=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-278/paper-3
|storemode=property
|title=Is the Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-278/paper03.pdf
|volume=Vol-278
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==Is the Case Against Moral Luck Successful?==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-278/paper03.pdf
Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
Sergi Rosell*
* University of Valencia, Spain: sergi.rosell@uv.es
Abstract. In this paper I argue against the idea that the existence of moral luck is an illu-
sion. 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 ulti-
mately work—unless an intelligible notion of ultimate true desert can be presented.
1 Introduction: the issue
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 some-
thing 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 sim-
ply 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.
That is, an agent answerable to moral responsibility has to control her behaviour, in
the appropriate degree and in relation to the relevant aspects involved. This also
means possession of sufficient factual knowledge and some minimal number of moral
beliefs. But, in spite of the intuitive validity of this principle, it turns out that there
are cases in which we judge an agent’s moral responsibility for something that is
beyond her control (in the appropriate level). We can say that, in those cases, an agent
A is judged morally responsible for action x, although x or some relevant aspect of
Latin Meeting in Analytic Philosophy Genova 20-22 September 2007
CEUR-WS Proceedings ISSN 1613-0073. pp.33-44
Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
action x, is not under her control. So, we can define the moral judgements involved
in cases of moral luck in the following way:
(2) An agent A is to be morally responsible for x although she has not (an ap-
propriate) control on x.
This results in a collision between (1) and (2): in fact, (2) is an assumption of the
ordinary practice of making moral judgements. We have, then, a clash between a
principle and a practice; and it seems that both of them are fundamental. On this
point, some philosophers say that we are so strongly committed to the Control Con-
dition that it is impossible for us to give it up. For them, the Control Condition is
essential in order to maintain morality. In particular, it seems that it is a consequence
of our idea of fairness that we ought not to judge differently two persons for doing
the same thing, or for factors beyond their control. A corollary of the Control Condi-
tion would like this:
(Col) Two people ought not to be morally assessed differently if the only differ-
ences between them are due to factors beyond their control.
Hence, on the anti-moral luck side, either the previous description is wrong or our
practices need revising. Others, however, have claimed that it is not possible to re-
nounce our practices and it is the principle that should be rejected.
In addition, the issue is broader that it seems. Moral luck is a wide-ranging phe-
nomenon that extends beyond our assessment of the consequences of certain actions.
It also affects our assessment regarding an agent having to face some relevant circum-
stances, or having received some influences, and not others, or possessing a certain
constitution. In this paper, I will only distinguish three main kinds:
a. Resultant moral luck is moral luck in the way that actions or projects of an
agent result. E1 is a prime example of this kind of luck. Consider also E2. John
intends to kill someone, but when he is in the position to do it, he misses his
shot. His counterpart Sean also goes ahead and performs all previously necessary
actions to kill someone, and finally he doesn’t miss his shot. Ordinarily, our
evaluation varies; we judge with a higher degree of severity the successful murderer
than the unsuccessful one, precisely because of factors beyond their control.
b. Situational moral luck is the luck of being in one or other place, at one or other
time, that can affect the way we are morally judged. Consider E3, the case of two
German citizens with Nazi sympathies. One of them, let us call him Rudolf, be-
cause of business, has to move out Germany before Hitler seizes power; whereas
the other one, say Adolf, stays in Germany for all the Nazi period. This being so,
only Adolf has the opportunity of making his Nazi sympathies effective and be-
coming, say, head of a concentration camp. We can stipulate that if the émigré had
stayed in Germany he would have acted in the same horrible way. But, do we
mean that we have to assess the expatriate businessman Rudolf as harshly as Nazi
head Adolf? If we answer no, luck will make a moral difference.1
1 All these examples (with some minimal variants) comes from Nagel (1976), ‘Moral
Luck’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. 50, 137-152; reprinted revised i n
Nagel, T. (1979), Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). I’ll keep
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Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
c. Antecedent moral luck. By antecedent moral luck I mean antecedent factors to
the situation in which an agent has to behave, including her original constitution
(what has been called constitutive luck), but also education, all kind of previous
experiences, etc., i.e. character formation, that made her into the person she cur-
rently is. Some of those factors may be more important than others. For example,
think of a boy whose best friend died in a car accident killed by a drunk driver. As
a consequence of this awful experience he avoids any occasion in which he could
drink and drive. Or think of a child that is sexually abused and as a consequence
develops a subsequent character that makes him into an exceptionally morally sen-
sitive person.
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. Moreo-
ver, 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 phe-
nomenon. 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 success-
ful. 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 The “Epistemic Argument”
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 exam-
ples often work in different ways. Therefore, I prefer to assess the debate on the common-
place cases. On the other hand, we can wonder whether the accounts given could be gen-
eralized 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.
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Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
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 dif-
ferently, 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 judg-
ment. However, an immediate problem with this sort of argument arises: it identifies
with no justification real desert and situations that we can call (putatively) epistemi-
cally 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 con-
trol).
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 lo-
cated 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 follow-
ing 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 scenar-
ios 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
2 It is Latus’s name; see A. Latus (2001) ‘Moral Luck’, in Feiser, J. (ed.) The Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For this kind of argument, see: N. Richards (1986), ‘Luck and
Desert’, Mind 65, 198-209, reprinted in Statman, D. (ed.) (1993) Moral Luck (Albany: State
University of New York Press), 167-180; J.J. Thomson (1989), ‘Morality and Bad Luck’,
Metaphilosophy 20, 203-221, reprinted in Statman, 195-215; N. Rescher (1990), ‘Moral
Luck’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 64, 5-20, a revised version
printed in Statman, 141-166; Rosebury (1995) ‘Moral Responsibility and ‘Moral Luck’’,
The Philosophical Review 104, 499-524.
3 Probably the word identification is too strong here. What is rather claimed, it could be
replied, is that success is an indicator of an agent’s commitment, or that even if a par-
ticular successful action does not complete reveal the agent’s true desert, at least there i s
an epistemic gain on the agent’s moral status. (Thanks both to Dana Nelkin and Josep
Corbí for this point.) My following discussion also works for that interpretation.
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Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
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 (re-
garding drivers, perhaps recklessness is more important), or in other more controver-
sial cases, when a harmful outcome due to an agent’s action takes place but no inten-
tion of bringing about this state of affairs is present in her.
But things are more difficult when we move on to consider situational and antece-
dent luck and look at the role luck also plays in the very formation of an agent’s
intentions.
3 The ‘Epistemic Argument’ Counterfactually Extended
Here, anti-moral-luck theorists cite cases that point to the fact that a person can de-
serve 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 disap-
pears.
Michael J. Zimmerman has significantly argued in this way. His strategy follows
this schema:
Given the Control Condition,
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 (re-
stricted) control,4
Then: 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 praise-
worthy 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 occur-
rence.” 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 Statman 1993.
Doubtless, our concern is with restricted control; unrestricted control is impossible t o
attain.
5 Zimmerman (1987) 381.
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Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
though, in the pro-Nazis case, there is nothing that we can hold the counterpart re-
sponsible for—the scope of the agent’s responsibility is 0—indeed we can and should
still hold him responsible to the same degree as the Nazi sympathizer. He is respon-
sible tout court even if he is not responsible for anything (2002, 565). As Nelkin
summarizes this position: “He is responsible in the sense that his moral record is
affected for better or worse in virtue of something about him. For there is something
in virtue of which he is responsible, namely, his being such that he would have freely
performed the very same wrong actions had he been in the same circumstances as the
Nazi sympathizer.”6 But this something about him in virtue of which he is responsi-
ble, in Zimmerman account, can be neither his actual intentions nor his own charac-
ter, given that they are factually formed.
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 disposi-
tions. 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 conse-
quence 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 con-
siderations 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 neutraliza-
tion—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
6 See Nelkin, D. (2004) “Moral Luck”, in Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia o f
Philosophy (Spring 2004 Edition).
7 See Nagel (1979) 26.
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Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
4 Kinds of moral assessment
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 dis-
tinct sorts of assertion with divergent purposes: acts of blame consisting of subject-
ing 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 distin-
guished, i.e. aretaic, deontic and moral responsibility judgements, but only the last is
the fundamental regarding desert. To him, the successful murderer and the unsuccess-
ful one must be morally assessed exactly in the same way; although one is responsi-
ble 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
8 See J.J. Thomson (1989), ‘Morality and Bad Luck’, reprinted in Statman 1993, at p. 200-
3.
9 See H. Jensen (1985), ‘Morality and Luck’, Philosophy 59: 323-330; reprinted i n
Statman 1993.
10 Richards (1986) and Rosebury (1995) do not strictly distinguish among two or
more kinds of judgments, but between the judgments we are justified to utter, given our
cognitive faculties and available evidence, and real desert.
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Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
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 uncon-
ditioned 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 argu-
ment in favour of a privileged kind of luck-free moral assessment.
5 No True Desert
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 ra-
tional, and whose attributions are founded on the agent’s absolute control of her
11 M. Zimmerman (2002), ‘Taking Luck Seriously’, The Journal of Philosophy 99,
553-576, at p. 568. See also Zimmerman (1987).
12 I will mainly use the idiom “true desert”, but I take it as synonymous of real desert,
ultimate desert, or even moral worth—only for the purpose of this discussion.
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Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
deeds, and therefore completely luck free.13 These attributions would consist in abso-
lute, timeless judgments so long as they are free of any purpose or aim, and make up
an ideal agent’s moral record, which is not conditioned by circumstances of any kind.
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 essen-
tial 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 his-
tories 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 rea-
sonable, 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 de-
sert would undermine our righteousness when blaming others who faced situation less
13 See J. Feinberg (1962) “Problematic Responsibility in Law and Morals”, The Philoso-
phical Review 71: 340-351. Reprinted in Feinberg (1970) Doing and Deserving: Essays
in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), at p. 344.
14 As I have already said, intentions and will are neither the only relevant thing to con-
sider nor always the most important. 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 pre-
sent in her.
15 For this strategy, see J. Greco (1995) “A Second Paradox Concerning Responsibility
and Luck”, Metaphilosophy 26: 81-96, at p. 94. He talks of ‘factual moral worth’ and
‘essential moral worth’.
16 This position is defended by Richards (1986) Greco (1995), and Rosebury (1995).
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Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
lucky.17 Nevertheless, this is a move more easily accessible to the moral luck de-
fender, without the necessity of positing such an entity as true desert.
Another reply might be like this: a person’s moral record is a sign of her true de-
sert; circumstances in which a person indeed chooses and act are a subset of the over-
all range of circumstances in which that person would have chosen or acted; “a per-
son’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 under-
stand 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 es-
sential 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 un-
avoidably 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 pro-
ponent 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 meaning-
less, 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 forma-
tive 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 Greco (1995) 93. Something like this is also needed in Richard’s account. See Richards
(1986).
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Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
6 Final Remarks and Prospects
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 gen-
eral 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) theo-
retical/philosophical views of moral responsibility attributions. It would be useful to
connect this analysis of the concept of moral responsibility with the current discus-
sion 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 re-
sponsibility attributions. We just need to re-interpret some of our folk beliefs.19.
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19 I’m grateful for helpful comments and criticisms on previous drafts to Josep Corbí,
George Couvalis, Carlos Moya and Dana Nelkin.
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Sergi Rosell – Is The Case Against Moral Luck Successful?
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