Many moral theorists have largely ignored the relationship between morality and luck. The issue is that luck can completely undermine moral judgment. Moral judgment is not merely saying whether an action is good or bad, it is a way of critiquing a person at his very core. If extraneous circumstances exist which are not under the control of the person being judged, then the process of judgment is completely undermined.
First, I will give a brief definition of luck. Luck has four major pieces: a lack of control, some sort of value, subjectivity, and an element of chance. For example, take a person, we’ll call him Jim, who wins the lottery. Jim buys a ticket, however which ticket he receives is completely out of his control. His winning is normally considered to be a good thing, thus having a good versus bad value. However, Jim can still see it as a bad thing, for whatever reason he might have. He interprets his luck as good or bad as it happens to him. Finally, of course, there is the element of chance. Jim just happened to get the card with the winning numbers. There was a one in a million chance of him winning, and he won. The chances of winning are usually low in cases of luck, but this is not always true. In a game of Russian roulette, there is only a one in six chance of shooting oneself. However, one is still considered lucky if one does not shoot oneself, even though there was a higher probability for that to happen.
Thomas Nagel addresses this issue in his essay, “Moral Luck.” Nagel defines moral luck as “… 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…” (Nagel, 720). He asserts that there are essentially four different kinds of moral luck that affect the moral judgment of people. He outlines resultant luck, circumstantial luck, causal luck, and constitutive luck. He explains and provides examples for each kind of luck, which I will now summarize and evaluate. The important thing to keep in mind is that one’s actions are not being assessed in these cases, one is being critiqued and judged as a person. It is not whether murder is bad, but whether the murderer is bad.
The first type of moral luck he covers is resultant luck. The result of a certain intent or action involves outside factors which are not under one’s control. Nagel states that one is often judged based on the outcome of one’s actions rather than just the intent. Let’s say that there are two men who are about to commit murder. One man shoots his victim in the heart and successfully commits murder. The other man shoots at his victim’s heart, but right as the bullet is about to strike, a bird flies in the way and takes the bullet. The first man is charged with murder, whereas the second man is only charged with attempted murder.
On this account, I believe that moral luck should fail to be a factor in a moral assessment. Both men had the same intent, and therefore had the same fundamentally bad moral character. I think this holds true in a less obvious case as well. Suppose there are two drunk drivers driving home. One makes it home safely. The other hits a child who runs into the street. The first man might get reprimanded by his friends, whereas the second man is charged with manslaughter. While the results were very different, both men should be morally assessed the same way. Regardless of the end result, both men were careless enough to put themselves and others in danger by driving drunk. Both, therefore, have the same sort of moral character that would allow them to be so reckless.
The second kind of moral luck that Nagel discusses is circumstantial luck. This is when factors out of one’s control put the person in different circumstances that somehow affect the moral assessment of that person. For example, suppose there is a man in Germany before World War II starts. He has to move to Argentina for business, and therefore is out of the country for the duration of the war. However, without the circumstantial luck of moving to Argentina, he would have been a Nazi officer who committed horrible war atrocities. He is never morally judged as a monster because the opportunity never presented itself for him to become one.
I do not think that circumstantial moral luck should be taken into account while morally judging a person. It is true that arguing whether or not the person would have been a Nazi for certain is more or less a moot point. It is still possible, though, to assess the person’s moral character based on their actual actions and speculate what the person would do in a different situation. If the man were to use shady business practices in Argentina, for example, his true moral character would still show. Regardless of the circumstances, one can still be morally assessed based on their character, not necessarily how they act. The example of the drunk drivers applies here, as well. One of the drivers was unlucky enough to have a kid walk in front of his car, whereas the other had a safe drive home. Even though there was a difference of luck, both still have the same compromised character, so luck should not be a factor.
The third type of moral luck that Nagel presents is causal luck. The idea behind causal luck is that nothing in the universe is necessarily in our control, which makes it near impossible to morally judge anyone. Causal moral luck is most often discussed as an argument for or against free will. Since there is plenty of literature on the debate of the existence of free will, I will not go into detail with this form of moral luck.
The final and most interesting type of luck is constitutive luck. People cannot control who they are. Their personalities are determined by a seemingly random combination of genetics and events throughout their lives, all of which are out of their control. Ted Bundy became a serial killer due to the cumulated events that made up his entire life. Bundy’s personality was a culmination of factors beyond his control, and therefore makes it difficult to morally assess him since he could not control how his personality was.
This is the one kind of moral luck that I believe in. Opponents to this form of luck say that if these random events did not occur to make us who we are, then we would not be ourselves. I do not think that this is a very strong reproach to the idea of constitutive luck. The argument is abstract and incoherent. According to them, if Ted Bundy had died in a car crash before he began his notorious killing spree, then he never would have been the same Ted Bundy, therefore being a different person. Supposing this is true, it does not really matter. Regardless of who he becomes, he is still shaped by every episode in his life, and therefore exempt from moral judgment.
The issue with constitutive moral luck is that if it is true, then it undermines all moral theory. If one cannot be judged for happenings outside one’s control, then really they cannot be morally assessed for anything because their entire being is shaped by events outside of their control. Nagel discusses how difficult it is to look introspectively and see how our core morality is shaped by random, outside events. However, when you turn outward to look at other people, you can see this demonstrated quite clearly. Nagel concludes his essay with a statement that effectively says that he does not know how to resolve the issue of an undermined moral theory. While it may be true, then, that it is impossible to judge someone from a moral perspective, it does not mean that you cannot from a legal perspective. The laws are generally designed to punish those who are morally blameworthy. However, it is impossible to prove someone’s moral character, so for all practical purposes, we have to judge their actions. For example, we cannot prosecute the man who moved to Argentina for the potential to commit war crimes, so we just punish him based on anything bad he actually does.
While some forms of moral luck presented by Thomas Nagel may not seem plausible, the idea of constitutive moral luck definitely rings true. Resultant luck and circumstantial luck are both negated by the good or bad will of the person being judged. However, their character itself cannot be morally judged because it is simply a collection of reactions to events outside of their control.
Works Cited
Nagel, Thomas. “Moral Luck.” Ethics: History, Theory, and Contemporary Issues. Ed. Steven M. Cahn and Peter Markie. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 719-727.
