QuestionsWhat makes something right?Moral luck: we are also judged for what is not up to us
What makes something right?Morality questioned

Moral luck: we are also judged for what is not up to us

Moral luck

Bernard Williams 1929 · 2003Luck plays a part in what we are held responsible for: morality cannot ignore it.
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What it claims

The control principle cannot be true as it stands: luck enters into our moral judgements. Morality cannot be the shelter against luck that Kant wanted it to be.

Why

We constantly judge people by outcomes beyond their control, and luck also shapes their character and circumstances.

The same idea through history
Bernard Williams1976Williams coins the expression, which he meant as a paradox. His example: a painter (inspired by Gauguin) leaves his family for his art; only success will tell whether he was right, and that success partly depends on luck. He also describes the lorry driver who runs over a child through no fault of his own.
Thomas Nagel1979Nagel replies to Williams (1976) then reprints his paper in Mortal Questions (1979). He distinguishes four kinds of luck: in the results of our acts, in our circumstances, in the character we were given, and in the causes of our choices.
In short

"Moral luck: we are also judged for what is not up to us" is an argument by Bernard Williams (Williams, "Moral Luck" (1976); Nagel, "Moral Luck" (1976, 1979), 1976) on the question "What makes something right?" (answer: morality questioned). Its claim: The control principle cannot be true as it stands: luck enters into our moral judgements. Morality cannot be the shelter against luck that Kant wanted it to be. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Williams, "Moral Luck" (1976); Nagel, "Moral Luck" (1976, 1979)
Valid with an implicit premise

Two drivers have had too much to drink and drive home, each as reckless as the other. The first gets home without trouble. In front of the second, a child crosses the road: he kills the child. The second will go to prison and will be judged far more harshly. Yet the only difference between them, the presence of a child, did not depend on them. But we usually think, with Kant, that people can only be judged for what depends on them. Williams and Nagel show that our moral judgements constantly contradict this idea, and that we cannot follow it all the way without ceasing to be able to judge anyone.

P1The control principle: someone can only be morally judged for what depends on him. If this principle is true, a moral judgement that depends on luck is never legitimate.
P2Yet we constantly judge people by what does not depend on them: the careless driver who kills a child is blamed far more than the one who, just as careless, met nobody, although the carelessness is the same.
P3We cannot correct these judgements by judging only the will: luck also affects our circumstances, our character and the causes of our choices. If we remove everything that depends on luck, nothing is left to judge.
P4 · implicit premiseYet there remain people who can legitimately be judged: morality is not empty.
So the control principle cannot be true as it stands: luck enters into our moral judgements. Morality cannot be the shelter against luck that Kant wanted it to be.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where the control principle is true and where, as a result, nobody is ever really responsible for anything. This is the sceptical line, which Nagel takes seriously: in the end, he says, all that is left is a sequence of events "which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised".
If the control principle were true (P1), all our judgements that depend on luck (P2) would be illegitimate; but removing them would leave nothing to judge (P3); and something is left to judge (P4). So the principle falls. The debate is about P3: can we keep a judgement sheltered from luck, for instance about the will (Kant) or about what one would have done (Zimmerman)?
Analogy. Two pupils cheat in the same way in a test. The teacher walks past one of them, not the other. The first gets a zero and a summons, the second a good mark. Nobody will say the second is more honest. Yet our whole moral life resembles that test: what we end up having done also depends on who walks past.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Kant (the Kantian reply) 1785 · attacks premise 3

Only the good will counts. Even if bad luck prevents it from achieving anything, it shines like a jewel, by its own light; success or failure neither add to nor take away from its value. So it is enough to judge the will: the two drivers willed the same thing and deserve the same judgement. The difference in outcome changes nothing.

Williams replies
Thomas Nagel 1979
Nagel quotes this very passage from Kant, then shows that the will itself is not sheltered. The character we were given, the circumstances we find ourselves in and the causes that produced our choices do not depend on us either. How can one be responsible even for one's acts of will, if they are the product of circumstances the will does not control?
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Norvin Richards; Nicholas Rescher 1986 · The epistemic argument
Luck does not change what people deserve, only what we know about it. The one who kills the child clearly shows his carelessness; the other is lucky that his goes unnoticed. As Richards puts it, a culprit may be lucky or unlucky in how clear his deserts are. Rescher: luck affects our image, not what we are.
The debate goes on (our summary) The epistemic argument works well for outcomes (the two drivers), somewhat for circumstances, but it is hard to see how to extend it to the character we were given or to the causes of our choices. For those two kinds of luck, Nagel's question stands.
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Michael Zimmerman (degrees of responsibility) 2002 · attacks premise 3

We must distinguish what one is responsible for from the degree to which one is responsible. The driver who kills the child is responsible for one more thing, a death. But both drivers are responsible to the same degree, and it is this degree that morality judges. Even someone who never had the chance to do wrong can be just as guilty, if it is true that he would have done wrong in the other's place. So luck never touches the degree, and there is always something left to judge.

Williams replies
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Nathan Hanna 2014
Take Jenny, who lives in a peaceful society and never developed what it takes to resist tyranny. Placed in a Nazi Germany, she would collaborate. On Zimmerman's view, she is as guilty as a real collaborator. Yet that seems false: Jenny has done nothing wrong. Judging people for what they would have done clashes with our intuitions as much as moral luck itself.
The debate goes on (our summary) Zimmerman accepts the cost: we would all be guilty, or praiseworthy, in many ways we do not know of. His critics add that many sentences of the form "he would have done this" may have no settled truth, which weakens the solution.
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Judith Andre 1983 · attacks the conclusion

The Gauguin example shows nothing about morality. That success justifies the painter's choice after the fact is true in the rational sense (was it a good bet for his life?), not in the moral sense: abandoning his family remains wrong, whatever the result. It only shows that morality is not the only source of value.

Williams replies
Bernard Williams 1993 · Williams's postscript
Williams admits that his paper may have been misunderstood. One can keep a morality sheltered from luck, in Kant's sense. But if we are glad that Gauguin did what he did, then that morality is no longer the supreme value. It loses what made it attractive: offering a realm of value, indeed of supreme value, protected against chance.
The debate goes on (our summary) Critics reply that our gratitude towards Gauguin may simply be misplaced, and that a choice is judged by what one knew at the time of deciding, not by the result. This part of the debate is as much about the place of morality in life as about luck.