Athanassoulis, Nafsika

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“The Good, the Bad and the Lucky”Nafsika ATHANASSOULISThe Philosopher’s Magazine2011, 55(4): 77-81http://secure.pdcnet.org/tpm/content/tpm_2011_0055_0077_0081To understand the problem of moral luck we need to take a step back and consider what is involved in making moral judgements. When we make judgements of moral praise and blame, we do so on the assumption that the actions we are judging are attributable to the person in question. In other words, what the person did was, in some sense, under his control. So, for example, if A slaps B, fully intending to cause B harm, we would hold A responsible for the slap. However, if instead it so happens that A suffers from unpredictable, involuntary movements, and B unknowingly moved into A’s space so that A’s jerking hand made contact with B’s face, we would no longer think it appropriate to hold A morally responsible for this act. It was not something A had control over. Morality presupposes control, and there seems to be a fundamental connection between assigning moral responsibility to agents for their actions and assuming that they had control over their action.Moral luck poses a problem because it challenges this fundamental assumption about morality and control. In cases of moral luck, a significant aspect of the action is outside the agent’s control, but we nevertheless still think that moral praise and blame are appropriate responses. Bernard Williams calls moral luck an oxymoron, because  morality presupposes control and responsibility, but luck is about the lack of control. Cases of moral luck bring to the surface exactly this tension between morality and luck, and leave us wondering about the validity of our moral judgements.Thomas Nagel described cases of moral luck as falling into three broad categories:  resultant luck, situational luck, and constitutive luck.  We’ll consider some examples of each, and then briefly consider some responses to the problem of moral luck. To get a handle on resultant luck, imagine two people plotting murders.  They both take steps to carry out their vicious intentions:  they load their guns, point them at their victims, and pull the triggers. The first agent is “successful” in that his gun works, and he kills his intended victim. The second is not, because his gun jams, and rescuers step in to prevent him from further action. His intended victim survives unharmed. It seems that the only difference between the two men is the quality of their guns. Perhaps one gun jammed and the other did not, but at the end of the day one is standing over a corpse, and the other has not caused any  harm. The results – the presence of a dead victim in one case and a lucky survivor in the other – lead us to conclude that the successful murderer is more morally reprehensible than the unsuccessful murderer. We draw this conclusion despite the fact that it is only a matter of luck – something entirely outside of their control – that separates them. It’s not just rare events like murders that are affected by luck.  There are far more commonplace examples of this kind of luck changing the outcomes of our actions. Many drunken drivers have the good luck to make it home in one piece without harming anyone else, but a number of them will, unfortunately, swerve onto pavements just as pedestrians happen to cross their path. Many an overworked parent will take their eyes off their children at bath time, but only a few will suffer the horrific consequences of a child drowning because of their momentary inattention. What differentiates the agents who get away with their inattention or their drunkenness from those who do not is often just a matter of luck. While we want to hold people responsible for the results of their actions, there does seem to be an incongruity in letting some off with a lighter judgement simply because something outside of their control prevented a disaster from occurring. There is both a sense that the outcome should sway our moral judgements in these cases, and a sense of the underlying unfairness that that chance should make such a huge difference to our evaluations.It is perhaps worth pausing here to make an important point about the distinction between moral and legal judgements in cases of moral luck. The severity of legal judgements in cases like the ones above may well vary depending on elements of luck. Thus, the successful murderer and the drunken driver who kills a pedestrian will be subject to much more severe legal sanctions than the inept murderer and the drunken driver who happens to make it home without incident. This is partly because of an important principle of law which says that legal sanctions are only applicable for what people have actually done, as opposed to what we might think could have happened. While for the purposes of a philosophical example we can imagine two agents whose intentions to kill are identical, for legal purposes evidence of guilt is only established based on what the agents actually did, rather than what they might have done had things been otherwise. So it may be less problematic to draw a sharp division in terms of our legal judgement of successful and attempted murderers than in terms of our moral judgement of the same agents. It is anyway not unusual for legal and moral judgements to diverge.  It is illegal to ride a bicycle on a footpath, but there’s nothing immoral about this, and while it is immoral to betray one’s partner with an adulterous relationship, there’s no reason that this transgression should be dealt with by the law. We come now to situational luck. The proverb “There but for the grace of God, go I” captures in a very evocative manner the recognition that, sometimes, luck is all that separates us from the fate of others. Consider two German citizens just before the start of the Second World War, who have pretty much similar moral characters in terms of their ability to stand up to moral inequities. One of them happens to immigrate to Latin America shortly before the rise of the Nazi party,  just because he is fed up with the cold weather in Northern Europe. As a result, he avoids all of the subsequent moral challenges involved in living in Nazi Germany. Simply because he is no longer in the country, he does not need to decide whether to collaborate or not, he is not tempted by Nazi inducements or threats to behave in morally abhorrent ways. The other German citizen happens to continue living in the country, and therefore his ability to continue to behave morally is put to the test. He faces the pressure of social conformity and the threat of punishment for non-compliance. While some people did successfully resist the Nazis at huge cost to themselves and their families, a lot of German citizens at the time failed this moral test. However, the disturbing conclusion of this example is that many more people might fail moral tests had they been exposed to it. The reason they weren’t is down to nothing more than the luck of their situation. In this case, a coincidental move to another country at the right time got a person out of a morally difficult situation.While we would all like to assume the best for ourselves and would think that, faced with great temptation or great difficulty, we would rise to the occasion, empirical evidence suggests that this is wishful thinking. In the 1960s, the American psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted famous experiments which placed participants in situations that tempted them to perform immoral acts, pushed on by pressure from those in authority. The surprising results of the experiments were that while 100% of subjects predicted that they would resist being forced to behave immorally, up to 60% of subjects in experimental situations gave in to authority, to the point where they were willing to seriously harm and possibly kill another human being simply because they were being told to do so. The problem here is that while we want to hold those who fail such moral tests responsible for their actions, there is a sense of unease that others escape the same moral judgement merely by luckily avoiding certain situations altogether. Since the situations we find ourselves in are largely governed by luck, this seems, again, to sever the link between moral responsibility and control over one’s actions.We can generalise this point to include not merely situations involving great temptations or threats, but all situational factors that go towards shaping who we are. Situational luck then broadens to become a kind of developmental luck, for all sorts of arbitrary factors go towards determining the sorts of people we are.  Factors such as where we are born, what kinds of role models we are exposed to, who our friends, influences and peer group are, how we are educated, and so on, all of this shapes our personalities. Imagine a child exposed to the worst of influences and role models. This child has a much more difficult situation to overcome than a child who is exposed to much better influences and role models. The first child’s failure on the road to virtue may be the result of the kinds of influences he was exposed to, rather than a personal characteristic under his control which we might think naturally merits moral blame. And what holds true for children often holds true for adults as well, for the road to vice or virtue is a long one, one that involves a lifetime of gradual and delicate development. We can be easily diverted by factors we have little control over.If resultant and situational/developmental luck were not problematic enough, there is a third type of moral luck that is even more pervasive than the first two: constitutive luck. We have no control over the tendencies and character traits that form who we are from the start. When we observe even small infants we can sometimes see temperamental differences, differences which may eventually make virtuous choices  a lot easier for some than for others. For someone who is naturally even-tempered, kind, and fair minded, it will be much easier to cultivate these natural tendencies into stable and fixed dispositions. Someone who is naturally irascible, self-centred, and rash might have a natural tendency towards vice to constantly overcome. This seems to suggest that even before we come to consider the influence of luck in terms of the results of our actions or the types of situations we come across, luck plays a pervasive role in who we fundamentally are. So the problem of moral luck affects a wide range of our moral judgements. And in many cases there is a tension:  we both want to hold people morally responsible for aspects of their behaviour and, at the same time, we feel uneasy in the recognition of the influence of luck in shaping these aspects. Broadly speaking there are three general responses to the problem of moral luck. The first resolves the tension created by the problem of moral luck by refusing to accept that factors outside the agent’s control affect moral judgements. At the centre of this response is the Kantian idea that the goodness of the good will is entirely independent of external factors. One is good or bad no matter what the consequences of one’s actions are.  Think again about the two people planning murder.  Neither the dead victim nor the lucky escapee are relevant. The agents’ intentions were identical in both cases, and it’s the will of the agent that matters in judgements of moral praise and blame. So Kant can side-step the problem of moral luck.  Both the attempted murderer and the murderer are equally blameworthy. There’s a Kantian reply to problems associated with developmental luck too. For Kant, the freedom to make good choices is available to anyone at any time, so developmental and constitutive factors do not carry the weight we might think they do.The second possible response is to embrace the idea of moral luck and accept that our hold on moral judgements is not as secure as we want it to be. This, in a sense, is the opposite of the approach above. It challenges the idea of an all-powerful conception of reason that can overcome environmental factors and the influence of luck. Instead, we should recognise that we are creatures subject to the vagaries of fate, which cannot and should not be resisted.Finally, a third approach accepts the influence of luck but argues that this is a positive feature of the human experience. This approach, broadly speaking, has its roots in the work of Aristotle. It is the very fragility of our moral endeavours that give human lives their interest and richness. We should neither deny the influence of moral luck, nor abandon ourselves to it, rather we should embrace it as a fundamental feature of what it means to live distinctively human lives, which are fragile, tender and all the more precious for being so. 

The good, the bad, and the lucky

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The good, the bad, and the lucky

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