The Moral Irrelevance of Constitutive Luck

One’s constitution—whether one is generous or miserly, temperate or intemperate, kind or mean, etc.—is beyond one’s control in significant respects. Yet one’s constitution affects how one acts. And how one acts affects one’s moral standing. The counterintuitive inference—the so-called problem of constitutive moral luck—is that one’s moral standing is, to some significant extent, beyond one’s control. This article grants the premises but resists the inference. It argues that one’s constitution should have no net impact on one’s moral standing. While a bad constitution lowers the chance that one will act morally, it offers significant gains to moral standing should that chance materialize. A good constitution increases one’s chance of performing good acts but for correspondingly more modest gains. This effect should smooth out, and possibly eliminate, the expected impact of constitution on moral standing.

Introduction

The Introduction identifies the 1976 symposium between Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel as the key moment in the development of the contemporary wide-ranging debate on moral luck. Despite Nagel’s proposal to proceed with an account of luck that can straddle the gap between ethics and epistemology, it is argued that the sort of luck relevant to moral and political philosophy need not be identical with the sort of luck pressed into service by epistemologists. The ‘Lack of Control Account’ of luck will serve adequately for normative issues, even if it leaves theoretical philosophers dissatisfied. Nagel’s familiar taxonomy of types of moral luck is outlined: resultant luck, circumstantial luck, constitutive luck, and causal luck. The treatment of moral luck in this book prescinds from any detailed engagement with issues of free will and responsibility, and also issues of blameworthiness and responsibility. Different views can be taken about these various issues, but the specific challenge of moral luck will still await resolution. That challenge is fundamentally distributive in character, and is typically focused on the apparatus of the pairwise comparison. The anti-luckist programme in normative ethics objects to different assignments of blameworthiness to agents whose acts turn out differently due to luck. The problem here lies with that prior investment in the pairwise comparison. That contention will be pursued across the early chapters of the book.

Restraining Situational Luck

This chapter examines circumstantial luck, or the luck of being in circumstances where a moral response or course of action is called for. The anti-anti-luckist programme is maintained for circumstantial luck as well as resultant luck. The argument proceeds, first, through an examination of Good Cases, calling for praiseworthiness. The fact that a well-intentioned agent is not in a position to collect praise for performing a meritorious act does not generate any serious moral concern. We can still praise this inactive agent for her dispositions if we wish to, and morality does not insist, in any case, upon equal opportunities for collecting praise. These lessons are then transferred to Bad Cases, calling for blameworthiness. The chapter also engages in detail with Michael Zimmerman’s argument involving situational luck, which combines circumstantial luck with constitutive luck. Zimmerman’s radical argument suggests that one agent should be no more blameworthy than another agent if they are separated only by luck, whether of the resultant, circumstantial, or constitutive variety. It is suggested here that Zimmerman’s argument misfires, due to an inconsistency between two principles he relies upon: the ‘Control Principle’ and the ‘No-Difference Claim’.

Constitutive Moral Luck and Strawson's Argument for the Impossibility of Moral Responsibility

Galen Strawson's Basic Argument is that because self-creation is required to be truly morally responsible and self-creation is impossible, it is impossible to be truly morally responsible for anything. I contend that the Basic Argument is unpersuasive and unsound. First, I argue that the moral luck debate shows that the self-creation requirement appears to be contradicted and supported by various parts of our commonsense ideas about true moral responsibility, and that this ambivalence undermines the only reason that Strawson gives for the self-creation requirement. Second, I argue that the self-creation requirement is so demanding that either it is an implausible requirement for a species of true moral responsibility that we take ourselves to have or it is a plausible requirement of a species of true moral responsibility that we have never taken ourselves to have. Third, I explain that Strawson overgeneralizes from instances of constitutive luck that obviously undermine true moral responsibility to all kinds of constitutive luck.

Justice without Constitutive Luck

What fundamental aim should be seen as animating egalitarian views of distributive justice? I want to challenge a certain answer to this question: namely, that the basic aim of egalitarianism is to neutralize the effects of luck on the distribution of goods in society. I shall also sketch part of a different answer, which I think does a better job of supporting egalitarianism.My arguments here are not presented in a way that is intended to win over those who have no sympathy with egalitarianism to begin with; they move within the compass of egalitarian concern. Moreover, it is difficult, for familiar reasons, to separate the question of what the basic aim of egalitarianism is from the question of what it should be. If one aim does a better job of supporting egalitarian results than another, then, even if few egalitarians recognize this, it may be regarded as a stronger candidate for what the basic aim of egalitarianism is. As with other essentially contested concepts, a new conception does not change the subject.