| dc.description.abstract | The term “moral luck” is used to describe any instance of where a moral agent is appropriately praised or blamed for an event or its outcomes despite having no control over the preceding causes of either the event or its consequences. The possibility of moral luck would be rejected by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, to be a good person all that is required is that one have a “good will.” Per the Kantian moral framework, “The good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes or because of its adequacy to achieve some proposed end; it is good only because of its willing, i.e., it is good of itself” (Kant 1785, pg. 11). Simply put, regardless of the consequence of any action, if a moral agent acts in a way that comes from a good intention, they will be morally vindicated. There is no such thing as moral luck because one’s blameworthiness or praiseworthiness will always be in one’s control. Influential political philosopher and author of the 1979 publication titled “Moral Luck,” Thomas Nagel pushes back against the idea that moral luck cannot exist. His reason for believing this comes from our complicated reactions to what is known as the “control principle,” which posits that moral agents cannot be held accountable for events whose antecedent factors are outside of their control. Nagel believes that when we apply the control principle to our understanding of how ethics works on a human level, we will always see a paradox arise. Per Nagel it seems to be the case that everything arises from factors, both “antecedent and posterior,” human beings can just simply never have control over. This lack of control allows us to make our moral reactions to people’s actions only mere “aesthetic” claims, not deeper claims of moral blameworthiness or praise. Philosopher and author of Justice, Luck, and Knowledge Susan Hurley delves deeper into the question of moral luck by connecting to debates on determinism. She identifies the role responsibility must play in identifying and explaining moral luck and explains why Nagel’s defense of moral luck is accurate, but not entirely so, due to what she calls conceptions of thick luck and thin luck. The topic of moral luck forces us to ask several questions, with the most pertinent being whether the actions we perform that turn out to be morally permissible or morally wrong are truly in our control. In this paper I aim to argue against skepticism about moral luck by putting together the conversation on moral luck from the beginning, starting with Thomas Nagel and finishing with Susan Hurley. I will show how Hurley’s account of moral luck aims to make significant improvements to how Nagel originally presents the topic. | en |
