Topics Ethics

Question I have trouble understanding the value of moral luck as a concept. If I am a conscientious juror who weighs the available evidence, deliberates in good faith, then returns a guilty verdict, yet the defendant is in fact not guilty, then I have in every sense met my moral burden. I am not "wrong" in the moral sense because I did everything asked of a citizen placed in that situation. My guilty verdict was, rather, incorrect. Moral luck does nothing to explain or illuminate the situation. My decision more likely resulted from an incomplete investigation or a poor defense. To claim that it is bad moral luck that my beauty attracts many suitors and enhanced my chances of infidelity is as absurd or empty as to claim that beauty is good moral luck because attractive people are perceived to be more credible.

Accepted:
July 30, 2015

Comments

Moral luck is a tricky

Moral luck is a tricky concept. The examples you offer in your question illustrate why.

Philosophers use the notion of moral luck to refer to situations where a person is subject to moral judgment for something which is (at least in part) outside of her control. A common example: Two drivers side by side speed recklessly through an intersection. A pedestrian enters the intersection from the right, and the driver on the right strikes her. The driver on the left speeds through the intersection without injuring anyone. That the driver on the right struck the pedestrian is to some extent a matter of luck (the pedestrian could just have easily having been entering from the left side). So too, that the driver on the left did not strike the pedestrian is to some extent a matter of luck (again, the pedestrian could just as easily entered from the left with the result that she is struck by the driver on the left). In his seminal article on this topic, Thomas Nagel distinguishes four different kinds of luck. (http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/THOMAS_NAGEL_Moral_Luck.pdf) This example corresponds to 'resultant luck,' luck having to do with the fact that outcomes of our actions are not entirely within our control. The right side driver, we might say, had "bad" resultant luck inasmuch he may well be blamed for a bad outcome that was outside his control. The left side driver is the beneficiary of "good" resultant luck since, despite driving recklessly, he did not injure anyone thanks to facts outside his control and is likely to escape blame altogether.

As to your two examples: I agree with you in the conscientious juror case that moral luck doesn't explain much — but that's because if you deliberate conscientiously, etc., you aren't morally blameworthy for reaching the wrong verdict. While factors outside your control explain why you reached the wrong verdict, your reaching that verdict doesn't reflect any moral wrongdoing on your part (you weren't careless or inattentive in considering the evidence, etc.). Moral luck requires both:
(a) a person is blameworthy for some act
(b) but that act (or some feature of it, such as its outcomes) is at least part the product of luck
As I see it, (a) doesn't hold in this example. (Incidentally, this might be an example of what epistemologists have come to call epistemic luck.)

Your second set of examples raises a slightly different set of issues: they concern constitutive luck, luck relating to traits outside one's control. (I'm assuming beauty is such a trait). You seem to be pointing out that one and the same trait can be good moral luck or bad moral luck depending on other factors. That's a good observation, though it doesn't undermine the claim that luck can often explain good or bad outcomes.