The problem of moral luck has its origins, at least in its modern conception, with Thomas Nagel.
The author notes: "A familiar understanding of the problem of moral luck has it that it consists in a contradiction to which common-sense ideas about moral responsibility seem to commit us: that moral luck exists and that it does not." (Anna Nyman, 177)
I wonder if this paradox just is the paradox of blaming the human qua person vs blaming the human qua organism? In one sense we are not blameworthy at all – in the sense of moral blame, which is the sense of whether there is anything bad we can say about the soul itself. I argue that we cannot judge souls; souls are passengers, experiencing life. Even our choices are just experiences. On a more epiphenomenal interpretation, our choices are literally just experiences; we don't cause anything. On a more common sensical interpretation, we do in fact cause things and we do make choices, but in doing so we are merely experiencing the decision making qualities that have been handed to us by nature and nurture. Either way, we merely experience our choices and cannot be blamed for them, not in the sense of judging the poor soul (or the happy soul) who gets to enjoy (or suffers from) the choices they will make, borne out of the poor qualities of nature and/or nurture surrounding the soul that the soul had no control over.
But in another sense we are totally blameworthy. You can acknowledge the goodness or badness of these qualities. And in this sense of critical blame, we can legitimately criticise people. But we aren't criticizing their souls; those we (should) feel nothing but sympathy (or envy) for. We legitimately criticize people in the sense that we legitimately evaluate the goodness or badness of the qualities that people happen to have, but cannot be identified with. You have the quality of being young, smart, attractive, kind, selfish, narcissistic, jealous, or what have you, but you are not identified with these qualities. These qualities are part of you, or associated with you, or you possess or have them, but you are not identical to them. You are identical to yourself, which is a pure subject, a self, the self which is not only right in front of you, but is the front in front of all fronts.
The classic case of moral luck that I believe is from Nagel is the two drivers who drive recklessly. Both drivers selfishly take on the chance of getting someone hurt just so they can have some fun. One driver crashes into another car, killing an innocent person. The other driver does no damage to anything. Intuitively, the driver that actually caused damage is more blameworthy than the driver that did not (they are the one who goes to jail). And yet, both drivers committed the same selfish act. So intuitively, both drivers are equal in their guilt.
Our author today gives examples of assassins. Both assassins intend to kill for money. One succeeds. The other does not because a bird flies in the way, taking the hit. Again, both perpetrators had the exact same evil intention. But because of chance events, only one evil act is actually completed, and it's this assassin that takes the greater blame. If the assassin that fails has the better moral character, it's only thanks to the luck of having a bird fly through at the right moment. Intuitively, this lucky moral character should count for nothing in terms of moral value.
Our author gives three examples of moral luck (thought experiments are mine, though I'm sure I've heard similar versions elsewhere):
Resultant moral luck: this is the assassin or the reckless driver as described above.
Circumstantial moral luck: imagine two people come across a wallet full of cash. One has a great job and is doing well financially. He returns the wallet. The other is homeless and broke. He takes the money.
The person who returns the wallet does the right thing. But if they do the right thing purely because of the good fortune of their circumstances, where's the moral value in that?
Likewise, for the person who takes the money, if they would have returned the wallet under different circumstances, then how does their taking the money disparage their moral character when it's the circumstances, not their character, that causes the difference in action?
Constitutive moral luck: again imagine two people come across a wallet full of cash. Neither person needs the money. One takes it anyway because he enjoys the thrill of getting away with things. The other returns the wallet because he would have a guilty conscience otherwise.
Again, the person who returns the wallet does the right thing, but only because their constitution was so shaped by nature and nurture. They were raised by morally upright parents and taught that stealing is wrong, maybe they recently had their own wallet stolen giving them a sense of empathy, their brain structure is such that they have a strong sense of conscience, and so on.
The person who takes the money does the wrong thing, but only because they were unlucky enough to have their dispositions shaped by unfortunate life circumstances.
Because your constitution is a result of circumstances, I don't see why we couldn't just subsume constitutive luck under circumstantial luck? While we're at it, resultant luck could be described in terms of circumstances as well, like the circumstances of a bird flying through the air at the right moment. Even if a circumstance was purely result-based, like in radioactive decay, then you still have the circumstances of the decay happening this moment rather than another. So it seems like we could solidly fit "resultant luck" under circumstantial luck.
But calling luck circumstantial seems like a redundancy, considering what it means to be lucky just is to have circumstances in your favor that are beyond your control. So it seems to me that we can simplify all the above terms (Resultant moral luck; Circumstantial moral luck; Constitutive moral luck) to just one: moral luck. How are these distinctions meant to be useful?
What it means to be "committed" to moral luck is to be committed to the idea that the person who does the right thing really is praiseworthy, despite doing the right thing only by good luck.
(Assuming being a morally good person is a lucky thing to be. You could argue that there are circumstances where being a morally good person is very unlucky, because it will cause you to fight against evil and die a horrible death.)
And, the person who does the wrong thing really is blameworthy, despite doing the wrong thing only by bad luck.
Contrast this commitment to a commitment to the control principle, which says that "agents are responsible for something only to the extent that it depends on factors within their control" (Anna Nyman, 179).
These are the two clashing intuitions...
(L) people are praiseworthy / blameworthy despite moral luck.
(The assassin that hits their target really is more blameworthy than the assassin who misses.)
(C) people are only praiseworthy / blameworthy if they are in control.
(Both assassins are equally blameworthy or blameless.)
...that form the paradox of moral luck.
And yes, I see my distinction between kinds of persons as an immediate solution to the moral luck problem. I absolutely deny L and affirm C. But I affirm L in a critical sense. I can acknowledge the badness of a hurricane without blaming any person. Likewise, I can acknowledge the badness (or goodness) of (dispositions, constitution, brain structure, sensitivity to reasons, upbringing, traumas, genetics, psychological factors... basically, nature and nurture) that a person has without blaming the person per se.
It's confusing because we use terms like "blame" and "praise" both in the sense of "attributing sourcehood" and in the sense of "regarding with awe or spite."
It's important that we separate these two senses. I call one set "moral" praise and blame and the other set "critical" praise and blame. Though, we could call moral praise and blame "praise and blame" and call critical praise and blame "love and hatred" or "awe and criticism" or "celebration and condemnation" or "beholding the goodness / badness of."
Here's a picture of things that might illuminate what I am imagining.
Imagine that souls begin in heaven. God speaks to us and says, "Do you want to go down there? Down to earth?"
Some of us say no and stay behind in heaven. Some say yes and are let down to earth.
"What will it be like if I go down there?", one soul asks.
God says, "Well, you will possess the body and brain of a man named John Smith. You will be a coal miner working for a company town. Your miserable and unfair working conditions will make you a terrible person, and you will become abusive to your wife and children. Alcohol becomes your only escape and you die middle-aged from liver failure."
And the soul responds, "That sounds, uh, bad. I don't want to do that."
And God says, "Too bad" and the poor soul is flung down to earth.
(God is not a good guy in this story.)
The poor soul proceeds to do all the things God said it would do. The soul is just a witness to its own choices and experiences.
Question: is anything the man does the fault of the soul? No. The soul is just the unlucky subject that happens to be attached to the poor body, poor brain, and poor circumstances of the doomed miner. (And the souls attached to his abused family members are likewise unlucky.)
(This is not to advocate for substance dualism. The point is to show that subjectivity itself is on the receiving end of the body it's attached to. If it's true that the quality of your brain is something that happens to you, and is not your fault, then the poor quality of the soul's choices, caused by the brain, are not the soul's fault either.)
Continuing with the article:
Per the author, "The most popular strategy is to abandon the particular moral responsibility judgments", that is, to accept C and reject L. (Nyman, 179)
However, abandoning moral responsibility judgments sounds like... free will skepticism! If someone abandons all moral responsibility judgments, doesn't that amount to endorsing free will skepticism? But if someone abandons only some moral responsibility judgments but not others, how do you tell which judgments are worthy of abandonment and which aren't? Where do you draw the line? Is this the problem that Nyman is pointing out?
I will quote an extended passage that gets at the heart of the issue:
I believe, however, that consistently denying moral luck is harder than previously recognized, because there seems to be little room for denying that certain factors are both beyond agents’ control and affect moral responsibility. Consider, for instance, the truth of principles about moral responsibility and the deontic status of actions. It is beyond an agent’s control that a correct moral principle condemns a certain action of hers as wrong, and yet the principle’s condemning it surely affects her moral responsibility in that it is because the principle is true that she will, given that she fulfils conditions for moral responsibility, be blameworthy for the action rather than praiseworthy. Likewise, it is beyond an agent’s control that a correct moral principle says that agents who act as she does are blameworthy for what they do rather than praiseworthy. Yet the principle’s saying so plainly affects her moral responsibility in that it is because the principle is true that she is blameworthy rather than praiseworthy. Thus, since moral principles are both beyond agents’ control and affect moral responsibility, it would seem that quite a bit of moral luck exists. (179-80)
(Emphasis mine.)
First, I accept the point that moral principles are indeed beyond our control. Consider a pair of individuals. One subscribes to what Nietzsche would refer to as a "slave morality," where virtue is identified with a lack of imposing oneself onto others, poverty, kindness, and non-violence. The other subscribes to a "master morality", where virtue is identified with domination, possessing material goods, and power. The person who happens to be born into peasantry is conveniently placed in the path of slave morality. The person who happens to be born into royalty is conveniently placed in the path of master morality.
I don't know if Nietzsche would make this point, but I would say that it's mighty convenient when your ethics match up with what comes easiest to you. We should be highly suspicious of such ethics. And yet, surely there are true ethical principles (assuming moral realism is true). And surely for some people those principles will line up with their circumstances such that they find it easy to be an objectively good person, whereas someone in different circumstances finds it much harder, through no fault of their own.
I don't see how this is any different from constitutive moral luck. After all, didn't we have true moral principles in mind when we were discussing the luck of ending up with a good constitution? And the luck of ending up with a good constitution is a matter of circumstance. In a footnote the author mentions that we can think of moral principle luck as circumstantial luck.
The slave/master morality scenario could be given as an example of constitutive luck: the meek peasant is constituted a decent person while the ambitious prince, say, is constituted a tyrant. Which one counts as the decent person and the other the moral failure is a matter of what the true moral principles happen to be.
So the angle of the luck of moral principles does give us another perspective through which to look at things, another level of non-control we have as moral agents. Needless to say, that fits well with free will skepticism, even if it doesn't really add any new evidence for free will skepticism, given that it's just moral luck rotated to reveal another surface.
I suppose you could take this opportunity to argue that a prince who takes on a slave morality out of their own sensitivity to reasons is demonstrating free will, given how they are "going out of their way" to adopt a certain ethical system. In this case, the prince is not adopting an ethical system out of convenience, but conviction.
However, this does nothing to give the prince any moral praiseworthiness, beyond the awe or admiration discussed earlier. The reason is because while it looks like the prince is using his free will to overcome his bias, in fact there are inputs that shape the prince's morality just like everything else, inputs beyond his control.
People who "overcome their circumstances" or "rise above their inclinations" – language pro-free-will folks use – in reality it's the intelligence and empathy, features of the brain, that cause the prince to feel the way he does to the point that it would be harder for him to take on a different ethical system. He is still very much acting within his natural inclinations.
Back to the task at hand: if moral principles are out of our control, and yet affect our moral responsibility, then there is moral luck, and a lot of it. Yes, I accept this, in one sense, and reject it in another. Whether someone has high moral qualities and is thus admirable (in the same way a beautiful vista is admirable) is a matter of luck. True moral principles determine which qualities are really "high" versus "poor." But whether someone, as a pure subject, is blameworthy in the sense of at fault or being the cause of or the source of despite having no control – that I reject wholeheartedly, and in that sense I "abandon all moral responsibility judgments." And so free will skepticism, combined with a bifurcated view of the self, solves moral luck quite nicely.
Now, calling them moral qualities might cause confusion, but it shouldn't. No, they are not moral qualities in the sense of indicating blameworthiness or praiseworthiness on the part of the soul. But they are moral qualities in the sense of qualities that pertain to moral contexts – rationality, sensitivity to reasons, reasonableness, kindness, level-headedness, selflessness, and so on. While these are admirable moral qualities, it is a matter of luck to what degree any person possesses any of them at any time, and so we cannot fairly attribute credit to the souls that happen to have them. That doesn't reduce the goodness (hence, the admirability) of having these qualities, as these qualities lead to flourishing for the person who has them and for those around them. (Generally this is true. As mentioned, in theory being virtuous could be hazardous to your health. You could have a tyrant who wants to crush all kind people, in which case being kind threatens your flourishing. But obviously this hazard only exists ultimately because of a lack of kindness – a lack in the tyrant.)
At this point, I don't feel the need to continue discussing the article here. At the end, the author acknowledges that free will skepticism solves the problem of relevant differences, but also notes that most deniers of moral luck will find free will skepticism an unattractive option. Free will skepticism, however, is a highly attractive option, and its ability to neatly solve the moral luck paradox, and a host of other problems, is why.
