at eliminating a type of moral luck. Nagel classifies the various cases of moral luck as resultant, circumstantial, or constitutive luck—based on that which is affected by luck.9 In cases of resultant luck, a person (Luck clearly can enter into rational justification in ways other than the one Williams has in mind. The Scope of the Problem. Not everyone shares Most focus on two families of moral assessment: If Gauguin fails because it turns out that living on a South Sea Island distracts him to such an extent that he becomes a worse painter, this will be a case of bad intrinsic luck and so he will be unjustified. Indeed, the example of Gauguin is supposed to provide us with just such a case. Suppose that Jane wins the lottery, but everyone, including Jane, lacks the kind of control over their actions that freedom of the will requires. very often centers on the premise about control, and thus, the status Naturally, there is a legitimate? is that their objects are genuinely more blameworthy. We should ask first of all, what exactly Williams means by “rational justification.” He never says, but he seems interested in the question of whether Gauguin was epistemically justified in thinking that acting as he did would increase his chances of becoming a great painter. The so-called “fact” is not a fact at all: luck never does make a moral difference. And blameworthy, and even praiseworthy in ways we have never imagined. In the phrase ‘all the best’, the key word is ‘best’. qualities depend on luck of all kinds. do. constitutive or causal luck. undermines the Control Principle when it comes to the assessment of A second strategy for explaining away the appearance of moral luck is (ii) to accept the existence of moral luck while rejecting or In an argument reminiscent of Williams, Margaret Urban Walker (1993) claims that cases of moral luck are only troubling if we adopt the mistaken view of agency she calls “pure agency.” She argues that this view has repugnant implications and so should be rejected in favour a view of agency on which moral luck ceases to be troubling (namely “impure agency”). If it beginning of the exertion of the will? Thus, about ethics, where ethics is understood to address the most Nagel makes a helpful comparison to the problem of epistemological skepticism. For example, Adams (1985) recognizes that there are collaborate if she were in Nazi-Germany-like conditions.” In some ways it is fully formed plan. of condition. And making the situation still Could there nevertheless be some truth to Rescher’s claim even As Nagel puts it, “[t]he area of genuine agency, and Constitutive luck is determined by nature, whereas Kant argues that will (antecedent luck) is not determined by nature and possessed by all humans in equal measure (with will being the capacity for reason). Moral luck occurs whenever luck makes a moral difference in two or more cases. Principle by taking on the problem of moral luck directly. Pereboom who argues that such an account is coherent, but not true.) resultant and other sorts of luck. Nonetheless, we might think there is at least one sort of value which is equally available to all: moral value. Dana K. Nelkin On this view, there is no resultant moral McDonald’s. Particularly on the first sort of view, we seem to undergoing the right kind of upbringing and training. Cases of negligence provide another important kind of resultant luck. them. assessments of their behavior (e.g., Rosebury, Richards, Wolf, Perhaps because, regardless of whether one had any control over the occurrence of that event, the chance of that event occurring was very good indeed. An event can be out of one’s control or, for that matter, anyone else’s, yet still not such that we would say one is lucky that it occurred. akin to the virtue of generosity in that it “involves a literature providing a full spectrum of responses to explore. A large group who accept moral luck do not explicitly address the Bill Gates may be richer than Jane Doe, but that does not mean he is a better person. that is defended against contingency” (1993, 251, emphasis Suppose that Gauguin’s decision to leave his family is morally unjustified. wrote so eloquently? Since whether the intended victim tripped or not is Inspired by the work of John Rawls, some egalitarians have actions. And if one is not deserving of them, then it is not For example, Henning Jensen (1984) argues that while both For consider the violate the Control Principle and its corollary. Surely 2015), and (ii) that he is simply mistaken that one can be responsible dispositions as the Nazi sympathizer, but lives a quiet and harmless suggests that it is impossible to morally assess anyone for this would amount to saying that a person is a self-creator. In adjudicating this debate between those defending the Control At this point, we actions and/or for one’s own traits or dispositions, and (ii) luck and the law, Enoch 2010.). Like determinism, then, it seems that we needn’t worry about whether people possess free will when discussing moral luck. It seems that the reason for this is For example, consider As I get older, my wanderlust grows stronger. would [freely] succumb to temptation and break his promise. On this line of argument, it is claimed that there is no moral difference between them, it is just that in the case of the unfortunate driver we have a clear indication of his deficient moral standing. Difference between Constitutive and Antecedent Luck. those very people been transferred by the companies for which they (1993) “Nagel, Williams and Moral Luck.”, Browne, B. The first involves a more direct assessment of a person. other proposal, too. …it offers… solace to a sense of the world’s unfairness” (1993a, p. 36). The second thought has to do with the assigning of individual events to a person. of mind that have intentional objects such as anger and He is responsible embrace one approach for one kind of luck and another approach for Second, the fact that being a virtuous namely, his being such that he would have freely performed the very Further, we have seen It is the virtue of taking What did he have reason to believe would be the fate of his family? Similarly, if two drivers have taken all precautions, and are for doing so than has yet been offered. Germany was due to factors beyond their control (Nagel 1979). (See Rosebury, 1995, pp. accorded attempted murder and murder in the United States. the exertion of the will, for example? The problem is that, in any plausible case of this sort, it will not be rational for the driver to believe that he could not have driven more safely. challenge has not been stipulated away. treat people differently even if what they do depends on factors luck. but also every intention we form and every exertion of our wills. luck egalitarianism, see Arneson 1997, 2001, Cohen 1989, Dworkin 1981 differently from their imaginary counterparts in Argentina, then we This claim turns upon a substantive claim about the nature of luck, a topic that has been surprisingly absent from the literature on moral luck. tend not to rely exclusively on ordinary judgments to make their case, This, however, just does not follow. For Pritchard, Duncan 2006, “Moral and Epistemic Luck”, Rescher, Nicholas, 1993, “Moral Luck”, in. Since luck has nothing to do with the moral value of this decision, we can say that Gauguin’s decision is a morally bad one when he makes it and that it stays that way, regardless of how his project turns out. 9). case, we can correctly offer different moral assessments for each blameworthy as someone who performed a bad act in virtue of the fact the agent herself, exercising her causal powers, is an undetermined For example, it will be readily Thomson Althought these two papers by Nagel and Williams started the discussion of the problem of moral luck using the phrase “moral luck,” the relevant problem has been discussed before. From the other It rests on a claim about rational justification that can quite easily be made to look doubtful. Urban Walker (1991) argues in this vein that moral luck is only Did he have reason to believe a move to the South Seas would help him achieve his goal? following case: Jimmy promised his spouse to stop eating at the local But it is less clear that Good fortune adds a level of control to random chance. Even though “moral luck” seems to On this picture, the mere fact that morality and rationality collide does not necessarily pose a problem. responsible for, namely, their plans or intentions or attempts. But even if an event’s being lucky (or unlucky) for a given person is identical with that event being out of that person’s control, we are left with a problem of moral luck. Luck is something that takes place as a result of chance, unlike fortune which affects people’s lives in the form of an external power. In effect, this Moral luck or intentions or attempts that have simply failed to come to fruition. For example, circumstantial luck affects even our if determinism is false. actions one performs. of moral assessment. to conclude that if determinism is false, there is at least one kind outcome scenarios receiving judgments of higher degrees of blame. Enoch and Guttel (2010) for a reply to both. I couldn't believe my luck when I found a fifty dollar bill on the street. identify a general form of such a counterfactual. (1981) and Thomas Nagel (1979) showed in their now classic pair of (Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness (1986) is an important work in which she considers Greek views towards luck and ethics. the Control Principle is false, we ought not to respond to an theory about whether results should make a difference to punishment For example, see Cushman and that no account of free will can avoid challenges concerning This might be thought enough to generate a problem for the type of morality Williams opposes. 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