Moral Luck (Nagel)

Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge 1979), 24-38.

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“The inclusion of consequences in the conceptions of what we have done is an acknowledgment that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical nature of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgment shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be. The same thing is revealed in the appearance that determinism obliterates responsibility.”
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The paradoxical nature of moral luck: “A person can be morally responsible only for what he does; but what he does results from a good deal that he does not do; therefore he is not morally responsible for what he is and is not responsible for.”

In other words, an important condition for finding a person responsible for an act under a certain description is that she have control over that act (and that act being of the relevant description). But moral luck means that we lack control over considerations that should not undermine attributions of responsibility.
• Four kinds of moral luck: Constitutive luck (personality); circumstantial luck; luck in how one is antecedently determined (includes determination of the will/problem of free will); luck in how actions and projects turn out (includes decision under uncertainty & negligence).
• NB: We can say in advance how a moral verdict depends on the results of a choice, so this isn’t the claim that moral judgment depends on temporal standpoint.
• The compatibilist solution is to carve out categories of control—some absences of control undermine attributions of responsibility, and some don’t. This solution doesn’t show how the problem arises in the first place.
How the problem arises: “Something in the idea of agency is incompatible with actions being events, or people being things.”
• We work with an internal view of ourselves that includes a rough boundary between what is us/not us and what we do/what happens to us.
• We apply this internal self-conception to others when we morally assess them.
• Reactive attitudes have something to do with this self-conception and its application to others.

(note: possibly something here makes sense of why we feel guilt about hoping for bad things, even when we do nothing to bring them about.)

Tags: moral luck, freewill, agency, reactive attitudes