What Results from Resultant Luck?

This chapter distinguishes, in a preliminary way, among different views on the role of luck in ascriptions of blameworthiness. First, there is the ‘Strict Liability Account’, which makes agents blameworthy if and only if their acts cause harm. Second, and in stark contrast, there is the ‘Anti-Luck Account’, which holds that any lucky differences between agents should be neutralized: any lucky differences between them should make no difference to how much agents are blamed. Third, there is the ‘Restricted Luck-Sensitive Account’, which appears to blend elements of these other views. The Restricted Account agrees with the Anti-Luck Account that agents are not eligible for blameworthiness unless they act either maliciously, or negligently, or recklessly. This is the ‘Internal Claim’. But the Restricted Account also contends that agents who have qualified for blameworthiness by satisfying the Internal Claim may then be blameworthy to different degrees, depending on how their acts turn out, even if the differences between them at this stage reflect luck. This is the ‘External Claim’. (The other chapters in Part I of the book will build up a case for the Restricted Account and against the Anti-Luck Account.) This chapter also searches for the fundamental constituents of the Anti-Luck Account, and identifies key roles for the ‘Irrelevance Intuition’ and ‘Fairness Intuition’, and for comparative luck. Finally, it takes issue with anti-luckist ‘accommodation strategies’, which attempt to explain away our habits of assigning different amounts of blameworthiness to agents who seem to be separated only by luck.

Gauguin’s Lucky Escape

This chapter tackles Bernard Williams’s argument in his ‘Moral Luck’. Despite some relatively superficial similarities between him and Nagel, Williams’s critical targets differ from Nagel and those who have continued to worry about resultant luck, because Williams is mainly concerned about an agent’s prospects for escaping a Kantian version of morality that he described as the ‘morality system’ by undertaking projects whose success depends on luck. It is suggested that it is difficult to find an interpretation of Williams’s position that does full justice to his various desiderata. Seven interpretations are considered, and the most promising of them makes an agent a beneficiary of moral luck if her acts succeed in transforming her perspective in such a way that she is immune to a certain form of regret for the consequences of what she has done. It is contended that this interpretation does not provide a convincing assault on the morality system, as Williams does not have enough to say about the differences between agents who have genuinely escaped the authority of ordinary morality and agents who have simply decided to ignore morality. Williams’s arguments can be interpreted as providing a model of responsibility which rivals the Restricted Account, but it is argued here that the Restricted Account provides the better way forward.

Justice, Luck, and Pairwise Comparisons

This chapter extends the anti-anti-luckist programme to political philosophy, and to the doctrine of luck egalitarianism in particular. Luck egalitarianism affirms that unchosen relative inequalities between agents are unjust. It condemns inequalities that are due to ‘brute luck’, and upholds inequalities that are due to ‘option luck’. Though it can be easily enough stated, luck egalitarianism is actually a complex theory with two separate components: egalitarianism and anti-luckism. Standard luck egalitarianism’s commitment to pairwise comparisons makes it vulnerable to what Susan Hurley calls the ‘Boring Problem’. The Boring Problem points out that any two agents in a pairwise comparison are bound to lack control over the relevant income gap between them, because each of them controls, at best, only one side of that comparison. Though Hurley herself is relatively dismissive of the Boring Problem, it is contended here that, when it is properly appreciated, it inflicts huge damage on luck egalitarianism, which needs in turn to be re-organized as a ‘baseline-sensitive’ theory that dispenses with pairwise comparisons. Baseline-sensitive luck egalitarianism makes decent progress on a number of critical fronts, particularly Saul Smilansky’s ‘Paradox of the Baseline’. But even this form of luck egalitarianism is still open to a worry about how it understands the relationship between its egalitarian default and its case for permissible inequalities, and it has less to say than it should about the structural aspects of a social system that generate inequalities.

Justice and Arbitrary Boundaries

This chapter deals with three problems of discrimination, arising from our membership of certain communities. The first of these concerns the debate between cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans about international justice. It is just a lucky accident that we were born where we were, but these arbitrary facts can make a huge difference to life chances. Rawlsian non-cosmopolitans thus risk a charge of incoherence if they combine an acceptance of these sources of arbitrariness with a commitment to anti-arbitrariness principles of justice. The Irrelevance Interpretation of Rawls’s justice as fairness advanced in Chapter 7 is used to defuse this charge of incoherence. The second problem concerns the ‘basic equality’ project of establishing robust foundations for human moral equality by locating a morally significant property that every human possesses, and possesses equally. It is contended that the basic equality project is wrongheaded, and that we need not worry about descriptive inequalities among human beings. The third problem concerns interspecies relations and the charge of ‘speciesism’. It is maintained that much anti-speciesist literature rests upon the doctrine of ‘moral individualism’, and that this doctrine is severely flawed. To come to a satisfactory view of what we owe to each other, we need to pay attention to both the properties individuals possess, and also the properties they lack. To do that, in turn, requires that these individuals be situated in certain communities, including species-specific communities.

Resultant Luck and the Irrelevance Intuition

This chapter investigates the ‘Irrelevance Intuition’, which is the intuition that judgements of blameworthiness containing any element of resultant luck are irrelevant for judging agents. It deploys a number of claims against the Irrelevance Intuition. It holds that our interest in outcomes is fundamental, and these outcomes must in principle be relevant to the moral appraisal of agents who have acted wrongly (‘Relevance Claim’). It denies an agent a complaint against the fact her blameworthiness may exceed the blameworthiness of an identically motivated agent whose act caused less harm on the grounds that this agent had the option of not acting wrongly in the first place (‘Denial Claim’). And it holds that agents acting from descriptively identical mental states may differ in badness as a result of how their acts turn out on the grounds that their mental states differ in badness (‘Determination Claim’). The Determination Claim confirms that the main argument given for the Restricted Account is thoroughly externalist. The Restricted Account makes some allowance for acts prompted by ignorance or irrationality, and for acts that turn out in entirely unforeseeable ways.

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.

What is Arbitrary about Moral Arbitrariness?

John Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness’ is often cited as a central source of inspiration for luck egalitarianism, which is, correlatively, often characterized as a more refined version of justice as fairness. Rawls’s distributive hostility to morally arbitrary endowments is standardly interpreted as betraying hostility to distributions that are skewed by brute luck. This chapter argues otherwise. It has two main aims. First, it replaces the standard ‘Neutralization Interpretation’ of Rawls’s main arguments with the ‘Irrelevance Interpretation’. According to the Irrelevance Interpretation, morally arbitrary person endowments ought to play no role in the selection of principles of justice in the original position. According to the Neutralization Interpretation, by contrast, principles of justice ought to expunge the influence of any inequalities that are due to luck. The Irrelevance Interpretation is more permissive of inequalities, just as long as they serve some other purpose, such as improving the position of the worst-off. The Irrelevance Interpretation is also more congenial to Rawls’s investment in the contractarian machinery of the original position and the veil of ignorance.

Resultant Luck and the Fairness Intuition

This chapter examines the ‘Fairness Intuition’, which is the other fundamental constituent in the Anti-Luck Account. The Fairness Intuition holds that it is unfair, not just irrelevant, to hold one agent to be more blameworthy than another if the differences in the outcome of their acts reflect only luck. The Fairness Intuition prescribes ‘Equal Worlds’ for the allocation of blameworthiness, rather than ‘Lucky Worlds’. That does not mean that an agent who would have been more blameworthy than another agent in a Lucky World will be less blameworthy in an Equal World. It all depends. Luck cannot be evaded even in Equal Worlds, which contain ‘fate-sharing luck’. So it is far from clear that, even in terms of fairness, Equal Worlds are preferable to Lucky Worlds. The ‘Moral Cost Argument’ locates an explanation for why one agent may be more blameworthy than another, though the differences between them may reflect only luck: this agent is consequentially liable to be blamed for the foreseeable results of what she does. That liability is present in ‘Bad Cases’, which call for blameworthiness, but it is missing in ‘Good Cases’, which call for praiseworthiness. Thus an asymmetrical attitude to Good Cases and Bad Cases is favoured.

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’.