​Good Luck, Bad Luck, or No Luck at All?
 
One can be lucky in love, as the saying goes, or one can be lucky in winning the lottery, or lucky in stooping to pick up a dime from the sidewalk just as a stray bullet whizzes by, and stooping or not stooping, dime or no dime, means life or demise. These instances of luck, or of its absence, normally are not thought to involve questions of moral blameworthiness, but there are many instances where the determination of moral culpability – whether or not to assign moral blame – is thought to involve a consideration of luck, to thereby judge whether or not luck in some way mitigates, justly or unjustly, one’s degree of moral blameworthiness.
Not everyone agrees that matters of morality involve consideration of luck in any degree, for indeed one of the greatest of philosophers, Immanuel Kant, held that questions of morality were independent of the presence or the absence of luck. As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes, “the Kantian believes that there is one domain of value, the domain of moral value, that is altogether immune to the assaults of luck” (The Fragility of Goodness, pg. 4). Why would Kant’s position exclude the possibility of moral luck? As Thomas Nagel writes in Moral Luck (1979), “Kant believed that good or bad luck should influence neither our moral judgment of a person and his actions, nor his moral assessment of himself.” The reason that Kant denied the possibility of luck being a factor in moral blameworthiness is that luck has no role in forming one’s good will. Kant held that the only unqualified good is a good will, and one possesses a good will if one acts according to one’s moral obligations, and desiring to act according to one’s sense of duty to one’s moral obligation is not a desire that is diminished or enhanced by instances of luck. 
An unqualified good is never a means to an end, for any good that is deemed a good only to the degree it secures some other good is not itself an unqualified good. Further, all other goods except a good will can be employed for immoral purposes, one example of such a good being wealth, which can be put to good or to evil ends. Is strength not an unqualified good? Hardly. Great strength can be put to bad use, and even good health can be capitalized upon to serve evil intent. Happiness and pleasure are not unconditional goods, for they are dependent upon other goods.
For Kant, whereas the consequences of our actions are often not wholly under our control, as these consequences are vulnerable to the vagaries of luck, and therefore the consequences of our actions do not determine our moral blameworthiness. For Kant, what is invulnerable to fortune is a good will, for one with a good will, that is, one who wills himself or herself to act according to moral duty, can maintain her good will irrespective of whatever good or bad luck she experiences. She can suffer the worst luck imaginable, and still retain her good will. Per Kant, regardless of the outcome of our actions, our moral blameworthiness or our moral worthiness is determined by our will to act in accordance with the moral law. Hence, Kant does not countenance luck as being to any degree a consideration in our moral standing.
When philosophers discuss the intersection of luck and morality, the term employed, unsurprisingly, is moral luck, and for a succinct definition of the term, the philosopher Robert Hartman offers that “Moral luck occurs when factor’s beyond an agent’s control positively affect how much blame or praise she deserves” (Moral Luck and the Unfairness of Morality, 2018). Therefore, based on this definition, if one believes that two individuals indistinguishably negligent in some manner are equally morally blameworthy even though one individual causes harm but due to luck the other does not, then one does not believe in moral luck. Here, one is holding the individual accountable for intent and for actions, irrespective of the consequences of the act. And if one holds that the individual who due to a matter of luck causes harm is more morally blameworthy than an individual who due to a matter of luck does not cause harm, even though intentions and actions were equivalent, then one believes in moral luck. Here, one receives the benefit of having the good luck to not have caused harm.
The expression moral luck was first introduced by the philosopher Bernard Williams in 1976, but as with almost all of the important questions, the ancient Greeks were concerned with the influence of luck in human actions, and Plato (The Laws, IX) proposes that the individual who intends to kill another but is unsuccessful due to an instance of luck must be treated as though the attempt had been successful. Yet Plato goes on to propose that this instance of luck must be due to the intercession of a guardian angel, and that this luck should be given “due respect” (877a), and hence the would-be murderer is spared the death penalty. Apparently, the ancient Greeks did not accept that one can be the beneficiary of a random instance of luck, and that should one receive some good luck, then one must, for that moment anyway, have been aided by an attentive spirit.
Though different thinkers of different eras approached and understood the matter of luck in differing ways, many of these thinkers sought to clarify the matter of moral luck through the idea of control, and whether or not an agent can be held blameworthy for anything outside of her control. Intuitively, we tend to agree that an agent cannot be held accountable, morally, for anything outside of her control. Yet this intuition encounters considerable difficulties, and hence moral luck seems an authentic phenomenon. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, “Moral luck occurs when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment despite the fact that a significant aspect of what she is assessed for depends on factors beyond her control.”
The Encyclopedia formulates the Control Principle thusly:
            (CP) We are morally assessable only to the extent that what we are assessed for depends                        on actors under out control,
and formulates its corollary as
            (CP-Corollary) Two people out not to be morally assessed differently if the only other                differences between them are due to factors beyond their control.
The matter of control does seem the critical criterion in assessing blame, its being intuitively very plausible, for if our vehicle is rear-ended by another vehicle, initially we are irritated if not angry with the other driver, for we assume that the other driver was or should be in control of his vehicle, but if we subsequently learn that the car that impacted ours was itself rear-ended, and hence the driver had no control over hitting our car or not, then our anger at the driver dissipates, or at least should do so. In this example, there is no moral luck, for the driver lacked control and is not blameworthy for the act. Further, had he been in control, and still hit our car, then there is still no moral luck, for the driver is blameworthy, for the act was under his control.
Yet our moral assessments often are influenced by factors outside of the agent’s control. For example, say two women are equally motivated to murder a neighbor, and both endeavor to do so by shooting the neighbor through a window. One of the women is successful, and commits the murder, while the other woman, possessed of the precise same intent and engaging in the precise same action, is unsuccessful, because just as she shoots a resident in the apartment above accidently knocks off a flowerpot from the balcony, which diverts the bullet, hence averting the murder. The first woman is charged with murder, and the second woman is charged with attempted murder. The second woman is charged with a lesser crime, and hence, presumably, faces a lighter punishment, even though her intent to murder her neighbor was thwarted by a factor beyond her control.
Or, for another example, say there are two brothers each with a motorboat, both of whom are boating along a river, and both are intoxicated. The first brother is racing along, and just before impacting a partially-submerged log, a log he should have clearly seen and easily avoided were he not intoxicated and not speeding, he swerves at the last moment and avoids the log, and nothing further results from this act. He travels along to no bad consequence. The other brother, racing behind the first, also sees the log just in time to swerve, but it is this brother’s unfortunate luck that just as he did so, there was another boat in the path of his swerve, and consequently he crashed into this other vessel, killing its occupant. The two brothers both engaged in the same reckless behavior, and both should be equally morally culpable, but the first brother suffers no consequences, and the second brother is charged. Hence, moral luck is in fact present.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel (who along with Williams is considered seminal in modern discussions of moral luck), proposed that moral luck can be resultant, circumstantial, constitutive, and causal. Resultant luck is the sort of luck most often being referenced in discussions of moral luck, and is the luck that is found in how matters turn out, such as the example of the reckless boat drivers. Circumstantial luck is that luck that arises in the circumstances one happens to find oneself in, such as being a resident of Rwanda during the genocide, and at the time of the bloodshed, one happens to be on an extended stay in another country. Had one not been away, then one would have participated in murdering one’s fellow citizens. Constitutive luck arises in the facts of one’s being, that is, in those particular characteristics comprising one’s being. We are, as malleable beings, substantially a product of such influences as our early environment, our experiences, our genetic inheritance, and so forth. Understandably, given the importance of a sense of fairness to most human beings, we tend to judge less harshly those born into very disadvantaged circumstances, such as being born to neglectful parents, and never being afforded proper nutrition, adequate educational opportunities, and the like, as compared with how we judge one born into privilege who was raised by attentive parents who provided with all advantages to the child. Perhaps the former simply lacks the cognitive ability to make the correct decisions in certain circumstances.
Causal luck is the matter of free will, for every circumstance is the result of antecedent circumstances, and these prior circumstances are not under one’s control. Some philosophers propose that whereas we do not control all the circumstances that resulted in the existence of ourselves and how we are constituted, that therefore we cannot be held morally responsible for our actions. Of course, civilization is impossible without moral responsibility of some degree, and hence causal luck seems of little significance in considerations of moral luck.
The problem of moral luck continues to trouble philosophers, as the intuitions for and against the existence of moral luck seem equipotent, or at least neither seems able to be vanquished by the many arguments put forth both for and against over the past several decades. One intuition is that moral luck does not exist, for it must be the case, if moral blameworthiness is to have any substantive meaning, that two individuals indistinguishably negligent are identically blameworthy, irrespective of the outcome of the negligence, and therefore both individuals should be held equally accountable, even though by an instance of luck one individual causes harm and the other does not. The other intuition is that an individual whose act causes harm is more morally blameworthy than an equally negligent individual whose same act similarly motivated fails, by luck only, to cause harm. This intuition is evident most clearly in the criminal justice system, such as the different punishment an individual will receive if he murders someone compared with the punishment he will receive if, as a result of mere luck, his intent to murder is thwarted, and consequently he is convicted of attempted murder.
Both intuitions are enduring, but incompatible, and therefore the conundrum of moral luck remains unresolved. 

​We human beings, manifestly the earthly creatures with the highest capacity for reason, yet are the sole creatures that, maddeningly, act against our own advantage, and by choice engage in actions that harm ourselves, even though other options were present, and these other options not only would not have caused self-harm, but have benefitted us. How is it that we so often act against our own best interest? That is, we encounter a choice between either A or B, and though A overall is more advantageous to us, we choose B. Why?
The Ancient Greeks sought to explain this perplexing contrary aspect of the human psyche by the term akrasia, a term that is commonly understood as meaning 'weakness of will', in that we are cognizant of all relevant matters in a particular choice, and thus are aware that A is the better choice for us, but yet we, seemingly perversely, nonetheless choose B. The term is often defined as "incontinence," but in the present, the word incontinence cannot escape its urinary associations, and so a literal translation is perhaps best, with kratia meaning control or governance, and therefore akrasia being best understood as an absence of self-mastery or of self-control.
For Socrates, as is very well known, only through a lack of knowledge does one ever engage in bad actions, for Socrates believed that if one had true knowledge of the greater good derived from choosing A over B, or in choosing B over A, then one could not help but make the right choice. Hence for Socrates akrasia is impossible, for one would never act against one's own good, so long as one understood the facts in a given case. It is important here to grasp that for Socrates, to choose B over A when A offers a greater quantity of good for ourselves involves a logical contradiction, and hence was impossible. An illustration here is helpful. In defense of akrasia, one might offer that, well, yes one chose B over A, but the choice was compelled by the greater pleasure received by choosing B over A. For Socrates this makes no sense, for if it is truly the case that A offers greater good than B, then selecting B is equivalent to choosing option B over A when B represents one ounce of gold and A represents two ounce of gold. It just makes no sense. Socrates, then, believed that one chose B only because one lacked the necessary knowledge of relative worth, that one for some reason could not understand the greater good found in choice A. Socrates suggested that the impairment of understanding might be due to proximity, that one chose B because B was more proximate in some sense, and hence one lacked a clear view of the totality of the situation, and B appeared more appealing because of its appearing larger in one's view. As Socrates asks, "Do things of the same size appear to you larger when seen near at hand, and smaller when seen from a distance?" (356d). Socrates advises that if we can perfect the art or the skill of measurement, that then we will not be deceived by appearances, but see or measure things as they really are, and if we can accomplish this, then we deprive mere appearance of its "power" that "often makes us wander all over the place in confusion" (356d). For Socrates, one is capable of doing evil because one is deceived by appearances, and one mistakes what is in fact evil for what appears good, or one mistakes for a greater good what in fact is a lesser good. If one perceives clearly, and is not mislead by appearances, then one is not capable of committing evil, for as Socrates states, "no one goes willingly toward the bad or what he believes to be bad" (358d).  
As Socrates famously states in Protagoras, in this case (that is, if choices are made based on appearances), then knowledge is "dragged around by all these other things as if it were a slave" (352c). For Socrates, "if someone were to know good and bad, then he would not be forced by anything to act otherwise than knowledge dictates" (352c). Thus for Socrates, choosing B is the result of a lack of knowledge, for if one had the necessary knowledge, then one could only choose A. Socrates affirms this view in Gorgias, wherein he declares "if I engage in anything that's improper...I do not make this mistake intentionally but out of my ignorance" (488a).
Aristotle had a somewhat different view on akrasia, proposing that self-harming behavior originated in or was enabled by two different characteristics, one being impetuosity, whereby the intense pleasure derived from an activity, such as sugar indulgence, overwhelms - temporarily - one's reasoning, that the pleasure to be gained causes a lapse in sound judgment. We see this effect in anger as well, for in the heat of our agitation we may lash out, physically or verbally, to our later remorse, when clear-sighted reason dawns over our clouded cognition. The other cause is our weakness, for as Aristotle perceived matters, there are those who can reason well enough who yet lack the character needed to carry forth correct thinking into proper acting. With impetuosity, there is no deliberation, and one acts in accordance with one's (momentary) passion, but with weakness, there is deliberation but one still gratifies one's passions, for one lacks the character and the strength to do otherwise. In a sense, though, Aristotle is not far from the Socratic view, for he does associate akrasia with diminishment of cognitive acuity, but a significant distinction is that Aristotle believed that passions rival and even trump reason, and thus we can act against our best interests even with perfect knowledge of the facts of the situation. 
An akratic person, then, acts against reason due to being under the influence of some strong feeling or emotion (pathos). An enkratic person is one who experiences the same strong emotion of feeling, but does not act as the feeling or the emotion directs, but instead follows the dictates of reason. Thus for Aristotle, akrasia is a very real phenomenon indeed, for Aristotle was the great observer of all things, and the fact that individuals do sometimes act against their own best interest was too evident for Aristotle to accept Socrates's theory that one chooses the more harmful of two options for no reason other than the absence of necessary knowledge.
What Socrates seems not to have accepted is that an individual will sometimes willingly choose to act in a contrary manner, act against reason and against the good, just for what gratification the individual enjoys in doing so. It is important here to note that as far as we know, Socrates never wrote anything, and the Socrates we know through the Dialogues is Plato's conception. We do not know, therefore, to what extent the Dialogues present Socrates's views or Plato's views, or - as is likely - a blend of the two. In any case, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum states, Plato "never entertains the thought that there may be in human beings a desire simply to act in a perverse and irrational way" (Love's Knowledge, Essays on Philosophy and Literature, pg. 121). 
Dostoyevsky mined the depths of the human psyche as deeply as any, and as he wrote in Notes from Underground, the human being has odd qualities, and that one may "Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness....such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick." As Dostoyevsky goes on to write, an individual acts perversely "in order to prove to himself - as that were so necessary - that men are still men and not the keys of a piano." As Dostoyevsky's character (the Underground Man) goes on to say, even were the laws of nature (determinism) were wholly in control and science proved a man no more than a piano key, that the same man "would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point." 
For all Socrates's wisdom, most of us surely are in agreement with Aristotle and with Dostoyevsky, in believing that knowledge is not sufficient for virtue, that sometimes a human being will act in a perverse and irrational way, act against his or her own best interest, if only for the satisfaction of the act itself providing to the actor a sense of agency, that is, for the gratification obtained from a sense of having some influence on the world, some influence on others, for the gratification found in an expression of a will to power, and thus to declare by this act that one is an autonomous being, unbound, finally, by convention, by taboos, by ethical standards, by decency, or even by reason itself.