Good Luck, Bad Luck, or No Luck at All?

​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.