Moral luck

Did You Know?

• Recent behavioral research shows that people systematically judge identical financial decisions as less moral when they lead to negative outcomes beyond the decision-maker's control.
• Participants in experimental investment studies relabeled unprofitable decisions as 'speculation' or 'gambling' rather than 'investment' after learning of a loss.

Responsibility and voluntarism

Human beings tend to correlate responsibility with voluntary action. The most blame is assigned when an action was performed voluntarily without outside coercion and the agent understood the full range of reasonably foreseeable consequences. Conversely, sympathy increases when the agent was coerced, acted through accident without fault or negligence, or had no way of knowing the consequences. These criteria do not correlate exactly with moral praise: while voluntary good actions deserve praise, it is debatable whether involuntary actions that produce good outcomes merit the same. This correlation is echoed in American and European law, where manslaughter or killing in self-defense carries different legal punishment than premeditated murder.

The problem of moral luck

Given the equation of moral responsibility with voluntary action, moral luck produces counterintuitive solutions. Two drivers run a red light: one hits and kills a child, the other does not. A bystander may assign more blame to the driver whose action resulted in death, yet the controllable actions of both drivers are identical. The only difference is an external uncontrollable event. If moral responsibility should only apply to voluntary actions, both drivers should be blamed equally, which may be intuitively problematic.

Four types of moral luck

Nagel identified four kinds of moral luck. Resultant moral luck concerns the consequences of actions, as in the traffic example where circumstances turned out differently. Circumstantial moral luck concerns the surroundings of the agent: Nazi supporters in Hitler's Germany are blameworthy, but if they had been moved elsewhere in 1929 they might have led different lives, making blame assignment depend on luck of circumstances. Constitutive moral luck concerns personal character: education, upbringing, and genes shape personality, yet moral blame is assigned for selfishness even though it is partly due to external environmental effects. Causal moral luck equates largely with the problem of free will, holding that actions are determined by external events over which the agent has no control, so agents should not be held responsible. Dana Nelkin has criticized causal moral luck as largely redundant, since it covers no cases not already included in constitutive and circumstantial luck and seems to exist only to raise the problem of free will.

Alternatives

Susan Wolf introduced rationalist and irrationalist positions as a reconciliation. The rationalist position holds that equal fault deserves equal blame: two drivers who fail to check their brakes should be blamed equally regardless of whether one hits a pedestrian. The consequentialist position argues that blame should depend on consequences, so the lucky driver deserves less blame. Wolf combines these by introducing the virtuous agent, who accepts a special connection with the consequences of their actions, even in equal-fault or no-fault cases. This retains the rationalist claim that equal fault deserves equal blame while also retaining the consequentialist claim that different outcomes should make agents feel and act differently. Wolf distinguishes internal from external blame: outsiders should blame the lucky and unlucky drivers equally, but the unlucky driver should voluntarily accept a special connection to the unfortunate consequences and assign more blame to themselves.