moral luck essay

Moral Luck and the Law

In a Tortoiseshell: In this exemplary feature piece, published in full, Daniel Teehan intertwines contemporary urgency to the philosophical concept of moral luck , exploring how one’s background and circumstance can affect how one is treated in modern America’s criminal justice system.

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Excerpt / daniel teehan.

In Florida in 2003, a 20-year-old woke up after a night of drinking, gave his roommate permission to borrow his car, and went back to sleep. For his actions that morning, he was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to life in prison. 1  Just over ten years later in Cleveland, a different man intentionally shot and killed a twelve-year-old child within seconds of encountering him. He was recently spared even the possibility of being found guilty of murder or spending a day in jail. 2 There was nothing extralegal or illegal in the administration of either trial. However objectionable to individual observers, both outcomes were entirely justifiable within the established legal processes of the jurisdictions where they were adjudicated. And yet, there is something intuitively paradoxical about the notion that society officially designates the car-lender a murderer, and the child-killer not.

To understand how this could be the case, it helps to consider the notion of moral luck, especially as it is articulated by the contemporary American philosopher Thomas Nagel. Nagel’s formulation of moral luck complicates our intuitive assignations of blame and guilt by forcing a consideration of the ways that luck–in, among other things, outcomes and antecedent circumstances–affects an actor’s personal culpability for a certain outcome. 3 And while Nagel’s argument certainly has far-reaching theoretical implications for philosophy, it also poses pressing practical questions for the administration of criminal law. An examination of criminal justice policies in the United States reveals that, without formally acknowledging them as such, aspects of the law implicitly take certain forms of moral luck into account already. And to the extent that having bad moral luck is an exculpatory–or at least mitigating–factor in the eyes of the law for some people but not others, the U.S. criminal justice system manifests internal incoherence.

“Ultimately, nothing or almost nothing about what a person does seems to be under his control.”

– Thomas Nagel 4

In his essay “Moral Luck,” Nagel presupposes a simple but critical framework for thinking about moral judgments, which rests upon the notion of control. Succinctly put, people should be judged based upon what they freely and intentionally do. It would seem unfair to judge someone based on things that happened to them, or for outcomes influenced by factors outside their control. And yet, Nagel points out, “the things for which people are morally judged are determined in more ways than we at first realize by what is beyond their control.” 5 Nagel identifies four such ways that factors beyond an actor’s control frequently modulate the degree of blame that is assigned to them. These are his forms of moral luck: luck in outcomes, luck in circumstances, luck in antecedent events, and constitutive luck. 6 Taken together, these forms of luck complicate almost every situation of moral judgment. The implications of this make moral luck’s strength as a concept clear. As Nagel puts it, “the area of genuine agency, and therefore legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point.” 7 And yet, on the other hand, the near-infinite extensibility of this concept also proves to be its greatest challenge–if almost every negative moral judgment unfairly blames an actor for her bad luck, how are we to make fair, consistent moral judgments at all? Nagel does not give an answer to this question–perhaps he thinks it unanswerable. But as a society tasked with doling out blame and apportioning punishment in response to such situations, we don’t have the luxury of avoiding it.

The examples Nagel uses to illustrate his forms of moral luck convincingly demonstrate that our intuitive judgments of a person can be modulated by factors outside of that person’s control. Take one of his parable-like cases for luck in outcomes. The degree to which we judge a drunk driver can depend more on her surroundings and the behavior of those around her than on her personal irresponsibility in driving drunk. Were the driver to swerve onto the sidewalk and fatally strike someone, she would be judged much more harshly than were she to swerve without inflicting damage. 8 Were she to hit and kill a mother and child, the judgment would be harsher still. And yet the act for which she is responsible–driving while drunk and losing control of her car–has not changed. The case is simple, but illustrative in how a consideration of luck complicates formation of moral judgment. One either ignores bad luck and judges a person for the uncontrollable outcome of her action (unfair judgment), acknowledges luck and judges her solely on her personal responsibility, without regard to outcomes (strict fairness), or arrives at some middle ground of judgment that straddles the harsh and lenient options (calculated blame). 9 The strictly fair choice seems plausible enough, until Nagel introduces other forms of moral luck that undermine the existence of personal responsibility.

In the same way that people are regularly subject to unfair judgment for outcomes that were beyond their control, Nagel shows that people are judged for choices they made that were themselves conditioned by circumstances beyond their control. 10 These pre-action conditions are Nagel’s other three forms of luck–luck in circumstances (conditions of the environment), in personal constitution (mental/physiological features), and antecedent circumstances (other factors that condition the will to make certain choices). As with luck in outcomes, aspects of this argument are simple to grasp. If someone is genetically predisposed to alcoholism, they have bad moral luck: there is a factor outside of their control that informs their decision-making process when drinking. Placing sole blame on them for negative outcomes that resulted from their drunkenness would be unfair. But Nagel goes further than asserting that some decisions are influenced by factors outside a subject’s control–he suggests that all decisions are determined by such factors. 11 The argument, familiar to determinists, that actions are not elected by some inner self but are rather preconditioned by extrinsic events and preceding circumstances, has expansive implications. As Nagel phrases it, “the effect of concentrating on the influence of what is not under his control is to make this responsible self seem to disappear, swallowed up by the order of mere events.” 12 According to the above definition of strict fairness, in the absence of personal responsibility, there can be no moral judgment.

Nagel ends his essay grappling with the implications of this dissolution of the responsible self. What he is left with, philosophically, is a world view somewhat akin to Buddhism. 13 What he leaves us with, practically, is a conundrum. It is clear how reasoning using moral luck could be used to absolve people of responsibility for tragic outcomes in individual cases. But it is unclear how moral luck should be factored into judgments in a way both practical and fair: given the various forms of moral luck at play in any situation, strict fairness could be used to absolve everyone of judgment. But it is not, and probably should not, be used. Employing unfair judgment–that is, ignoring luck, is unfair to exceptionally unlucky individuals. And calculating blame leaves the calculators with the task of parsing out how much of an outcome is attributable to a person’s willing action, and how much to luck.

That bad luck can be incorporated into judgments in these three different ways–completely, to exculpate; partially, to mitigate; or not at all, to indict–puts a significant amount of discretion in the hands of the person or system doing the judging. This flexibility of application could be a good thing. It could lead to fairer outcomes, where egregious or systemic instances of bad luck are accounted for, while tendentious claims to innocence are ignored. But when we turn our consideration to the criminal justice system – the institution tasked most explicitly with dealing with these questions – it is clear that this flexibility, rather than counterbalancing the vagaries of luck, facilitates outcomes ranging from the inconsistent to the unfair.

Luck in Law

Moral luck is a useful concept, but it leaves us with a problem. Nagel convincingly makes the case that luck complicates our moral judgments in almost every situation, but provides no clear instructions on how to use the concept practically to make consistent and fair judgments. For individuals, this tension challenges personal notions of fairness towards others. But for society, which passes moral judgment on individuals’ actions through the criminal justice system, it calls into question the legitimacy of the foundational principle of equal justice. While Nagel’s argument concludes without a clear prescription for applying moral luck, it does provide the tools to analyze instances of moral judgment through the lens of luck (and the attendant notions of control and fairness). Using this lens to examine the ways that our society navigates moral luck through criminal law may provide insight into both the criminal justice system and the rigor of moral luck as a practical concept.

Considering criminal justice through the lens of luck makes it clear that the system already incorporates luck–both in outcomes and in preconditions–in certain situations. But the way that luck is currently used in adjudicating guilt and punishment appears arbitrary at best and biased at worst. While a statistical approach to the question is beyond the scope of this inquiry, consideration of three different cases is enough to confirm that the judicial response to situations in which a defendant did not have complete control runs the gamut from unfair judgment to calculated blame to strict fairness. In the case of “felony murder,” absolutely no consideration is given to bad luck in outcomes in cases where it clearly applies. Through the ruling of “not guilty by reason of insanity” (NGRI), strict fairness is applied and the court formally recognizes constitutive bad luck as an exculpatory factor. And through judicial consideration of the impressionable circumstances of youth, calculated blame is apportioned to non-adult offenders. These cases, when taken together, show that the courts are capable of incorporating the concept of luck into their judgments, but do not do so in a consistent way.

Felony murder is a statute in many jurisdictions in the U.S. It takes the notion that people engaged in felonies are responsible for any ill effects of their actions–no matter how unpredictable, unintended, or uncontrollable–and codifies it into law. 14 It is frequently applied to people engaging in collective misdeeds. If several people are burglarizing a house or store and one of them kills someone in the process, everyone involved can be charged with felony murder. Likewise, if someone dies as a result of a felony, the person committing the felony is deemed the murderer as a result of this statute. The latter form of reasoning led to a shoplifter being charged with murder when the security guard struggling to handcuff him collapsed and died. While the charge of felony murder can be used as simply a prosecutorial bargaining chip or eventually overturned by higher courts, legal history is full of cases where a person with no intent to kill or control over a death was convicted of murder. Felony murder thus represents not just unfair judgment, but juridical weaponizing of bad luck as a tool to increase criminal responsibility.

If felony murder represents a refusal to attribute bad outcomes to bad luck, then NGRI is a legal concession that constitutive bad luck can override an individual’s responsibility for a crime. It is significant that the plea, if accepted, does not merely excuse an insane person from the consequences of their actions–it rules that they are substantively not responsible for them. This conclusion is in line with Nagel’s emphasis on conditions of control: an insane person does not have full control over their actions, so it does not make sense to judge them for those actions. However, it is unclear why a lack of control due to insanity is more relevant than a lack of control over outcomes manifested in felony murder. The case of special juvenile considerations adds even more confusion to the mix by introducing a situation where blame is effectively divided between circumstances and individual agency.

The legal treatment of juvenile responsibility is less clear cut than that of insanity or felony murder. As cited in the Marshall Project, research indicates that “until about age 25, adolescents and young adults lack a fully developed brain.” 15 This constitutive trait makes youth less reflective, more impulsive, and more likely to be influenced by their surroundings. Young people who end up committing crimes must then be suffering from at least some level of bad luck–constitutively and circumstantially. Some jurisdictions ignore this reality altogether, applying what seems to be unfair judgment to youth offenders. New York, for example, automatically tries 16- and 17-year-olds as adults for all crimes, and kids as young as 13 as adults for homicide, rape, and some other serious offenses. 16 In general, however, the national trend has been to acknowledge bad luck by treating youth as a mitigating–but not exculpating–factor. This manifests through shorter sentences, banning of the death penalty for juveniles, and even the trying of youth cases in family court instead of criminal court. This (very slight) leniency reflects a stance that kids, while not absolved of responsibility for their actions, at least share that responsibility with the bad luck of their youthful circumstance.

Felony murder, NGRI, and juvenile justice collectively demonstrate that the law is capable of acknowledging the role of bad luck in contributing to outcomes, but doesn’t do so in a consistent or comprehensive way. Indeed, beyond the inconsistent treatment of luck between the cases, there is discretion and degrees of difference within each category. Juveniles facing family court can be waived to criminal court by a judge, people with severe mental impairments can be deemed competent to stand trial, and tenuous charges of felony murder can be overturned by higher courts or negotiated down to lower charges. This level of discretion in the system facilitates cases of both extreme unfairness and exceptionable charitability. Indeed, it also subjects defendants to an additional, meta-layer of moral luck. For if the resonance of moral luck arguments in a defendant’s case depends on such factors as the quality of her lawyer, the receptiveness of her judge, and the capriciousness of the prosecutor in bringing certain charges, her guilt or innocence in the eyes of the law is further dependent on factors beyond her control. That a poor youthful defendant facing charges of felony murder in adult court in front of an unsympathetic judge has a higher chance of being deemed guilty and getting a life sentence than a wealthy youth being tried in a family court for non-murder charges for the same action seems a particularly unfair consequence of moral luck. While these hypotheticals may seem like extreme extensions of a benign principle, real life juxtapositions such as that posed in the introduction to this essay demonstrate the importance of luck in determining how the state judges individual actors.

Kid-Killer and Car-Lender

“No car, no crime. No car, no consequences. No car, no murder.”

-Ryan Holle’s Prosecutor 17

Let’s return, then, to the cases of Ryan Holle, the young man convicted of felony murder for lending his car to a friend, and that of Timothy Loehmann, the man–and police officer–who was spared charges in the shooting of an unarmed 12-year-old, Tamir Rice. The two cases are illustrative insofar as they demonstrate the ways that discretion–when it comes to incorporating luck into moral judgment–facilitates hugely disparate outcomes in the criminal justice system.

Holle had incredibly bad luck. Because the car that he innocently lent to a roommate was used in the commission of a crime that resulted in a death, prosecutors were able to use the felony murder statute to charge him as an accomplice and a murderer. His circumstance would be a laughable reductio ad absurdum of the notion of unfair judgment, were it not a real case of a young man being sentenced to life in prison. For a situation over which he had minimal control, Holle was assigned maximum responsibility. Loehmann, on the other hand, was absolved of responsibility for a killing over which he had almost complete control. There were certainly forms of bad luck at play in his case–the circumstances he faced as a police officer put him in a position of moral peril, and the information available to him at the moment he acted inclined him to believe that deadly force was justified. But to acknowledge that these minor forms of bad luck absolve Loehmann of any personal responsibility for Rice’s murder extend to him a degree of charitability completely absent in Holle’s case. That Loehmann’s and Holle’s cases can coexist in our system of laws is clear proof that we do not deal with situations of moral luck in a consistent or fair way.

Extreme discretion when it comes to parsing out the contributions of luck and will to a crime is a problematic aspect of our criminal justice system. As long there is flexibility to absolve certain actors of responsibility altogether, and to prosecute others completely out of proportion to their individual contribution to a crime, that flexibility will manifest unfair outcomes such as Holle’s and Loehmann’s. And as with many cases where there is broad discretion, that discretion will inevitably facilitate various individual and societal biases. Loehmann was not just morally unlucky to be put in the situation for which he has garnered attention – he was morally lucky to be a cop. For all of the uncertainty surrounding forms of moral bad luck in the criminal justice system, the moral good luck of being in law enforcement seldom fails to deliver.  

Author Commentary / Daniel Teehan

This essay, written as a final paper for REL 320, “The Problem of Evil,” coalesced a few different concepts I was trying to work through when I was given the assignment. As making arguments in essays is effectively a form of disciplined thinking, I try to pick essay topics that pertain to problems I am already thinking about, so as to better understand them. In this case, I had spent much of winter break trying to work through some of the thoughts and emotions I had in response to the non-indictment of Tamir Rice’s murderer, the police officer Timothy Loehmann. I was also really struck by reading about the concept of moral luck for the religion class I was in, and the concept’s seemingly broad extensibility to the realm of ordinary and institutionalized moral judgments. Finally, I had read a really provocative article in Jacobin about the bizarre and worrying existence of felony murder statutes, which in retrospect seemed curiously related to moral luck. With those three pieces I had the makings of an essay about the role of luck in the criminal justice system.

My instructor for the class, Professor Liane Carlson, helped immensely in developing the ideas for this essay and maintaining a realistic scope–mainly by talking through the ideas and helping make what was essentially a long-form article into an essay that grapples more substantively with a philosophical concept. The end result is still inflected by my background in journalism–especially the narrative form of the opening and the punchy ending–mainly because I wanted to keep the essay focused on the very real lives it addresses. The essay, in the end, deals with social biases rather less than I initially intended, but hopefully it still accomplishes the intended effect of prompting people to reconsider the ways that their own moral judgments can be shaped. At the very least, I hope to introduce moral luck as a discursively useful concept for engaging in the ever-present and always difficult conversations around crime and punishment and disparate prosecution in this country.  

Editor Commentary / Kelly Rafey

Some essay topics are inherently engaging. Thomas Nagel’s philosophical theory of “moral luck” is probably not one of them. But in the journalistic hands of Daniel Teehan, his rigorous analysis of moral luck is not only clear and well argued, but relevant and engaging.

In “Moral Luck and the Law,” Teehan grapples with Nagel’s theory of moral luck—that people’s actions, hence their culpability for those actions, are inseparable from their personal circumstances. Teehan examines this theory against modern America’s criminal justice system, arguing that criminal law incorporates moral luck into its judicial process implicitly, granting benefits to those who have moral good luck while disadvantaging those who are morally unlucky.  

To motivate his critique of moral luck and its role in criminal justice, Daniel frames his essay with two contrasting murder cases: Ryan Holle, convicted of a murder he did not commit, and Timothy Loehmann, cleared of all charges after willfully murdering a child. By beginning his essay with an overview of each case, the philosophical content of the essay takes on real urgency. From the very start, the reader has real motivation to read on—to understand how in these two cases the criminal justice system appears to institutionalize injustice.

But in a crucial addition, Daniel does not rely on this motivating framework to carry the rest of his essay. As he walks the reader through his argument, introducing key terms such as moral luck and explaining key concepts with brief case studies, he motivates his argument throughout. In the opening paragraph of the section “Luck in Law,” for example, he articulates a problem with Nagel’s philosophy: it outlines a theory without acknowledging any practical applicability. By pointing out this issue, Daniel carves out space to insert his own argument into Nagel’s theoretical framework, writing: “Using [Nagel’s] lens to examine the ways that our society navigates moral luck through criminal law may provide insight into both the criminal justice system and the rigor of moral luck as a practical concept.” In this sentence, Daniel not only orients the reader to the next part of the paper—which they can now assume will examine moral luck in light of the criminal justice system—he states the implications of his argument—that it will clarify both moral luck and the criminal justice system.

In setting up his argument against a backdrop of these two murder cases, Daniel makes a promise to his reader. He pledges to use the rest of his paper to show how moral luck is integrated into the criminal justice system, and to ultimately show why in these two instances the nonmurderer was convicted and the real murderer released. And in his conclusion, Daniel fulfills his promise. He returns to his framing case studies to evaluate them against the role of moral luck in the criminal justice system, bringing his essay full circle.

From start to finish, Daniel’s essay leads the reader through a logical and well-substantiated argument, motivated throughout with a combination of popular and scholarly motive—real-world events and philosophical, academic questions. His essay challenges an institutional system along philosophical grounds and ends on a note that is not only insightful, but inciting.

Works Cited

Cahill, Teddy. 2015. “Calls for Calm after Grand Jury Declines to Indict Officers in Death of Tamir Rice.”  The Washington Post , December 29.

Goldstein, Dana. 2015. “What’s Justice for Kids Who Kill?”  The Marshall Project , July 23.

Liptak, Adam. 2007. “Serving Life for Providing Car to Killer.”  The New York Times , Dec. 4.

Madar, Chase. 2014. “A Blood Sacrifice for the NYPD.”  Jacobin , August 8.

Nagel, Thomas. 1991. “Moral Luck.” In  Mortal Questions , XXX. Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, Christie. 2015. “Charged with Murder Without Killing Anyone.” The Marshall Project , November 24.

DANIEL TEEHAN

Daniel Teehan ’17 is a Brooklyn native deeply engaged in anti-carceral advocacy and education. He has taught classes in state prisons, worked on anti-solitary confinement advocacy campaigns, and interned as an investigator for Brooklyn Defender Services, an indigent defense office. A Comparative Literature major, he focuses on Arabic and Hebrew literature, and spent his freshman summer living and studying in Amman, Jordan. Daniel wrote this essay as a junior.

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9 A Kantian View of Moral Luck

• Published: August 2023
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Kant’s moral vision appears to be resolutely opposed to the very possibility of moral luck. But it is argued that, if we distinguish between good moral luck, whereby an agent deserves moral praise for something that is not in their control, and bad moral luck, whereby an agent deserves moral blame for something that is not in their control, then it would be at least Kantian, if not a commitment of Kant’s own, to accept the possibility of bad moral luck. Indeed, it is argued that, on a suitably Kantian view, bad moral luck is what evil consists in, an evil agent being an agent who culpably loses control. This signals an important asymmetry, since an agent who does not lose control, and who thereby exercises their freedom, is not a beneficiary of good moral luck: their virtue consists precisely in their being in control of what they are doing. These ideas are explored through a series of comparisons and contrasts, notably with the views of Plato and Aristotle and with the traditional Christian doctrine of grace whereby there is a kind of good moral luck in the form of justification through the death of Christ.

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Moral Responsibility

Making judgments about whether a person is morally responsible for her behavior, and holding others and ourselves responsible for actions and the consequences of actions, is a fundamental and familiar part of our moral practices and our interpersonal relationships.

The judgment that a person is morally responsible for her behavior involves—at least to a first approximation—attributing certain powers and capacities to that person, and viewing her behavior as arising (in the right way) from the fact that the person has, and has exercised, these powers and capacities. Whatever the correct account of the powers and capacities at issue (and canvassing different accounts is the task of this entry), their possession qualifies an agent as morally responsible in a general sense: that is, as one who may be morally responsible for particular exercises of agency. Normal adult human beings may possess the powers and capacities in question, and non-human animals, very young children, and those suffering from severe developmental disabilities or dementia (to give a few examples) are generally taken to lack them.

To hold someone responsible involves—again, to a first approximation—responding to that person in ways that are made appropriate by the judgment that she is morally responsible. These responses often constitute instances of moral praise or moral blame (though there may be reason to allow for morally responsible behavior that is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy: see McKenna 2012: 16–17 and M. Zimmerman 1988: 61–62). Blame is a response that may follow on the judgment that a person is morally responsible for behavior that is wrong or bad, and praise is a response that may follow on the judgment that a person is morally responsible for behavior that is right or good.

It should be noted at the outset that the above schema, while useful, may be misleading in certain respects. For one thing, it suggests a correspondence and symmetry between praise and blame that may not exist. The two are certainly asymmetrical insofar as the attention given to blame far exceeds that given to praise. One reason for this is that blameworthiness, unlike praiseworthiness, is often taken to involve liability to a sanction. Thus, articulating the conditions of blameworthiness may seem to theorists the more pressing matter. Perhaps for related reasons, there is a richer language for expressing blame than praise (Watson 1996 [2004: 283]), and “blame” finds its way into idioms for which there is no ready parallel employing “praise”: compare “ S is to blame for x ” and “ S is to praise for x ”. Note, as well, that “holding responsible” is itself not a neutral expression: it typically arises in blaming contexts (Watson 1996 [2004: 284]). Additionally, there may be asymmetries in the contexts in which praise and blame are appropriate: private blame is a more familiar phenomenon than private praise (Coates & Tognazzini 2013a), and while minor wrongs may reasonably earn blame, minimally decent behavior often seems insufficient for praise (see Eshleman 2014 for this and other differences between praise and blame). Finally, the widespread assumption that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness are at least symmetrical in terms of the capacities they require has also been questioned (Nelkin 2008, 2011; Wolf 1980, 1990). Like most work on moral responsibility, this entry will tend to focus on the negative side of the phenomenon; for more, see the entry on blame .

A few other general observations about the concept of moral responsibility are in order before introducing particular conceptions of it. In everyday speech, one often hears references to people’s “moral responsibility” where the point is to indicate that a person has some duty or obligation—some responsibility —to which that person is required, by some standard, to attend. In this sense, we say, for example, that a lawyer has a responsibility (to behave in certain ways, according to certain standards) to his client. This entry, however, is concerned not with accounts that specify people’s responsibilities in the sense of duties and obligations, but rather with accounts of whether a person bears the right relation to her own actions, and their consequences, so as to be properly held accountable for them. (Unfortunately, this entry does not include discussion of some important topics related to moral responsibility, such as responsibility for omissions (see Clarke 2014, Fischer & Ravizza 1998, and Nelkin & Rickless 2017a) or collective responsibility (see the entry on collective responsibility and Volumes 30 and 38 of Midwest Studies in Philosophy ).

Moral responsibility should also be distinguished from causal responsibility. Causation is a complicated topic, but it is often fairly clear that a person is causally responsible for—that is, she is the (or a) salient cause of—some occurrence or outcome. However, the powers and capacities that are required for moral responsibility are not identical with an agent’s causal powers, so we cannot infer moral responsibility from an assignment of causal responsibility. Young children, for example, can cause outcomes while failing to fulfill the requirements for general moral responsibility, in which case it will not be appropriate to judge them morally responsible for, or to hold them morally responsible for, the outcomes for which they may be causally responsible. And even generally morally responsible agents may explain or defend their behavior in ways that call into question their moral responsibility for outcomes for which they are causally responsible. Suppose that S causes an explosion by flipping a switch: the fact that S had no reason to expect such a consequence from flipping the switch might call into question his moral responsibility (or at least his blameworthiness) for the explosion without altering his causal contribution to it. Having distinguished different senses of responsibility, unless otherwise indicated, “responsibility” will refer to “moral responsibility” (in the sense defined here) throughout the rest of this entry.

Until fairly recently, the bulk of philosophical work on moral responsibility was conducted in the context of debates about free will, which largely concerned the various ways that (various sorts of) determinism might threaten free will and moral responsibility. A largely unquestioned assumption was that free will is required for moral responsibility, and the central questions had to do with the ingredients of free will and with whether their possession was compatible with determinism. Recently, however, the literature on moral responsibility has addressed issues that are of interest independently of worries about determinism. Much of this entry will deal with these latter aspects of the moral responsibility debate. However, it will be useful to begin with issues at the intersection of concerns about free will and moral responsibility.

1. Freedom, Responsibility, and Determinism

2.1 forward-looking accounts, 2.2.1 “freedom and resentment”, 2.2.2 criticisms of strawson’s approach, 2.3 reasons-responsiveness views, 3.1.1 attributability versus accountability, 3.1.2 attributionism, 3.1.3 answerability, 3.2.1 the moral competence condition on responsibility, 3.2.2 conversational approaches to responsibility, 3.2.3 psychopathy, 3.3.1 moral luck, 3.3.2 ultimate responsibility, 3.3.3 personal history and manipulation, 3.3.4 the epistemic condition on responsibility, other internet resources, related entries.

How is the responsible agent related to her actions; what power does she exercise over them? One (partial) answer is that the relevant power is a form of control, and, in particular, a form of control such that the agent could have done otherwise than to perform the action in question. This captures one commonsense notion of free will, and one of the central issues in debates about free will has been about whether possession of it (free will, in the ability-to-do-otherwise sense) is compatible with causal determinism (or with, for example, divine foreknowledge—see the entry on foreknowledge and free will ).

If causal determinism is true, then the occurrence of any event (including events involving human deliberation, choice, and action) that does in fact occur was made inevitable by—because it was causally necessitated by—the facts about the past (and the laws of nature) prior to the occurrence of the event. Under these conditions, the facts about the present, and about the future, are uniquely fixed by the facts about the past (and about the laws of nature): given these earlier facts, the present and the future can unfold in only one way. For more, see the entry on causal determinism .

If possession of free will requires an ability to act otherwise than one in fact does, then it is fairly easy to see why free will has often been regarded as incompatible with causal determinism. One way of getting at this incompatibilist worry is to focus on the way in which performance of a given action should be up to an agent if he has the sort of free will required for moral responsibility. As the influential Consequence Argument has it (Ginet 1966; van Inwagen 1983: 55–105; Wiggins 1973), the truth of determinism seems to entail that an agent’s actions are not up to him since they are the unavoidable consequences of things over which the agent lacks control. Here is an informal summary of this argument from Peter van Inwagen’s important book, An Essay on Free Will (1983):

If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us. (1983: 16)

For an important argument that suggests that the Consequence Argument conflates different senses in which the laws of nature are not up to us, see David Lewis (1981). For more on incompatibilism and incompatibilist arguments, see the entries on free will , arguments for incompatibilism , and incompatibilist (nondeterministic) theories of free will , as well as Randolph Clarke (2003).

Compatibilists maintain that free will (and/or moral responsibility) is possible even in a deterministic universe. Versions of compatibilism have been defended since ancient times. For example, the Stoics—Chryssipus, in particular—argued that the truth of determinism does not entail that human actions are entirely explained by factors external to agents; thus, human actions are not necessarily explained in a way that is incompatible with praise and blame (see Bobzien 1998 and Salles 2005 for Stoic views on freedom and determinism). Similarly, philosophers in the Modern period (such as Hobbes and Hume) distinguished the general way in which our actions are necessitated if determinism is true from the specific instances of necessity sometimes imposed on us by everyday constraints on our behavior (e.g., physical impediments that make it impossible to act as we choose). The difference is that the necessity involved in determinism is compatible with agents acting as they choose to act: even if S ’s behavior is causally determined, it may be behavior that she chooses to perform. And perhaps the ability that matters for free will (and responsibility) is just the ability to act as one chooses, which seems to require only the absence of external constraints (and not the absence of determinism).

This compatibilist tradition was carried into the twentieth century by logical positivists such A. J. Ayer (1954) and Moritz Schlick (1930 [1966]). Here is how Schlick expressed the central compatibilist insight in 1930 (drawing, in particular, on Hume):

Freedom means the opposite of compulsion; a man is free if he does not act under compulsion , and he is compelled or unfree when he is hindered from without…when he is locked up, or chained, or when someone forces him at the point of a gun to do what otherwise he would not do. (1930 [1966: 59])

Since deterministic causal pressures do not always force one to “do what otherwise he would not do”, freedom—at least of the sort specified by Schlick—is compatible with determinism.

A closely related compatibilist strategy, influential in the early and mid-twentieth century, was to offer a conditional analysis of the ability to do otherwise (Ayer 1954, Hobart 1934, Moore 1912; for earlier expressions, see Hobbes 1654 and Hume 1748). As just noted, even if determinism is true, agents may often act as they choose, and it is equally compatible with determinism that an agent who performed act A (on the basis of his choice to do so) might have performed a different action on the condition that (contrary to what actually happened) she had chosen to perform the other action. Even if a person’s actual behavior is causally determined by the actual past, it may be that if the past had been suitably different (e.g., if the person’s desires, intentions, choices, etc. had been different), then she would have acted differently. And perhaps this is all that the ability to do otherwise comes to: one can do otherwise if it is true that if one had chosen to do otherwise, then one would have done otherwise.

However, this compatibilist picture is open to serious objections. First, it might be granted that an ability to act as one sees fit is valuable, and perhaps related to the type of freedom at issue in the free will debate, but it does not follow that this is all that possession of free will comes to. A person who has certain desires as a result of indoctrination, brainwashing, or psychopathology may act as he chooses, but his free will and moral responsibility may still be called into question. (For more on the relevance of such factors, see §3.2 and §3.3.3 .) More specifically, the conditional analysis is open to the following sort of counterexample. It might be true that an agent who performs act A would have omitted A if she had so chosen, but it might also be true that the agent in question suffers from an overwhelming compulsion to perform act A . The conditional analysis suggests that the agent in question retains the ability to do otherwise than A , but, given her compulsion, it seems clear that she lacks this ability (Broad 1934, Chisholm 1964, Lehrer 1968, van Inwagen 1983). More generally, incompatibilists are likely to be dissatisfied with the conditional analysis since it fails to give an account of an ability that agents can have, right here and right now, to either perform or omit an action while holding everything about the here and now, and about the past, fixed.

Despite the above objections, the compatibilist project described so far has had significant lasting influence. As will be seen below, the fact that determined agents can act as they see fit is still an important inspiration for compatibilists, as is the fact that determined agents may have acted differently in counterfactual circumstances. For more, see the entry on compatibilism . For recent accounts related to (and improving upon) early compatibilist approaches, see Michael Fara (2008), Michael Smith (2003), and Kadri Vihvelin (2004), and for criticism of these accounts, see Randolph Clarke (2009).

Another influential trend in compatibilism has been to argue that moral responsibility does not require an ability to do otherwise. If this is right, then determinism would not threaten responsibility by ruling out access to behavioral alternatives (though determinism might threaten responsibility in other ways: see van Inwagen 1983: 182–88 and Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 151–168). In a very influential 1969 paper, Harry Frankfurt offers examples meant to show that an agent can be morally responsible for an action even if he could not have done otherwise. Versions of these examples are often called Frankfurt cases or Frankfurt examples . In the basic form of the example, an agent, Jones, considers a certain action. Another agent, Black, would like to see Jones perform this action and, if necessary, Black can make Jones perform it through some type of intervention in Jones’s deliberative process. However, as things transpire, Black does not intervene in Jones’s decision making since he can see that Jones will perform the action on his own and for his own reasons. Black does not intervene to ensure Jones’s action, but he could have, and he would have, had Jones showed some sign that he would not perform the action on his own. Therefore, Jones could not have done otherwise , yet he seems responsible for his behavior. After all, given Black’s non-intervention, Jones’s action is a perfectly ordinary bit of voluntary behavior.

There are questions about whether Frankfurt’s example really shows that Jones is morally responsible even though he couldn’t have done otherwise. For one thing, it may not be clear that Jones really couldn’t have done otherwise: while he performed the action on his own, there was the alternative that he perform the action due to some intervention on Black’s part, and not on his own. Furthermore, though he did not do so, Jones might have given Black some indication that he would not perform the action in question. Alternatively, an objection might be framed by asking how Black could be certain that Jones would or would not perform the action on his own. There seems to be a dilemma here. Perhaps determinism obtains in the universe of the example, and Black sees some sign that indicates the presence of factors that causally ensure that Jones will behave in a particular way. But in this case, incompatibilists are unlikely to grant that Jones is morally responsible if they think that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. On the other hand, perhaps determinism is not true in the universe of the example, but then it is not clear that the example excludes alternatives for Jones: if Jones’s behavior isn’t causally determined, then perhaps he can do otherwise. For objections to Frankfurt’s original example along these lines, see Carl Ginet (1996) and David Widerker (1995); for defenses of Frankfurt, see John M. Fischer (1994: 131–159; 2002; 2010); and for refined versions of Frankfurt’s example, meant to clearly deny Jones access to alternatives, see Alfred Mele and David Robb (1998), David Hunt (2000), and Derk Pereboom (2000; 2001: 18–28).

In response to criticisms such as the above, Frankfurt has said that his example was intended mainly to draw attention to the fact “that making an action unavoidable is not the same thing as bringing it about that the action is performed” (2006: 340; emphasis in original). In particular, while determinism may make an agent’s action unavoidable, it does not follow that the agent acts as he does only because determinism is true: it may also be true that he acts as he does because he wants to and because he sees reasons in favor of so acting. The point of his original example, Frankfurt suggests, was to draw attention to the significance that the actual causes of an agent’s behavior (such as her reasons and desires) can have independently of whether the agent might have done something else. Frankfurt concludes that “[w]hen a person acts for reasons of his own…the question of whether he could have done something else instead is quite irrelevant” for the purposes of assessing responsibility (2006: 340). A focus on the actual causes that lead to behavior, as well as investigation into when an agent can be said to act on her own reasons, has characterized a great deal of work on responsibility since Frankfurt’s essay (see §2.3 and §3.3.3 ).

2. Some Approaches to Moral Responsibility

This section discusses three important approaches to responsibility. Additional perspectives (attributionism, conversational theories, mesh or structural accounts, skeptical accounts, etc.) are introduced in more or less detail in the discussions of contemporary debates below.

Forward-looking approaches to moral responsibility justify responsibility practices by focusing on the beneficial consequences that can be obtained by engaging in these practices. This approach was influential in the earlier parts of the twentieth century (as well as before), had fallen out of favor by the closing decades of that century, and has recently been the subject of renewed interest.

Forward-looking perspectives tend to emphasize one of the central points discussed in the previous section: an agent’s being subject to determinism does not entail that he is subject to constraints that force him to act independently of his choices. If this is true, then, regardless of the truth of determinism, it may be useful to offer certain incentives to agents—to praise and blame them and generally to treat them as responsible—in order to encourage them to make certain choices and thus to secure positive behavioral outcomes.

According to some articulations of the forward-looking approach, to be a responsible agent is simply to be an agent whose motives, choices, and behavior can be shaped in this way. Thus, Moritz Schlick argued that

The question of who is responsible is the question concerning the correct point of application of the motive …. in this its meaning is completely exhausted; behind it lurks no mysterious connection between transgression and requital…. It is a matter only of knowing who is to be punished or rewarded, in order that punishment and reward function as such—be able to achieve their goal. (1930 [1966: 61]; emphasis in original)

And, according to Schlick, the goals of punishment and reward have nothing to do with the past: the idea that punishment “is a natural retaliation for past wrong, ought no longer to be defended in cultivated society” (1930 [1966: 60]; emphasis in original). Instead, punishment ought to be

concerned only with the institution of causes, of motives of conduct…. Analogously, in the case of reward we are concerned with an incentive. (1930 [1966: 60]; emphasis in original)

J. J. C. Smart (1961) also defended a well-known, forward-looking approach to moral responsibility in the mid-twentieth century. Smart claimed that to blame someone for a piece of behavior is simply to assess the behavior negatively (to “dispraise” it, in Smart’s terminology) while simultaneously ascribing responsibility for the behavior to the agent. And, for Smart, an ascription of responsibility merely involves taking an agent to be such that he would have omitted the behavior if he had been provided with a motive to do so. Whatever sanctions may follow on an ascription of responsibility are administered with eye to giving an agent motives to refrain from such behavior in the future.

Smart’s general approach has its contemporary defenders (Arneson 2003), but many have found it lacking in important ways. For one thing, as R. Jay Wallace notes, an approach like Smart’s “leaves out the underlying attitudinal aspect of moral blame” (Wallace 1996: 56, emphasis in original; see the next subsection for more on blaming attitudes). According to Wallace, the attitudes involved in blame are “backward-looking and focused on the individual agent who has done something morally wrong” (Wallace 1996: 56). But a forward-looking approach, with its focus on bringing about desirable outcomes

is not directed exclusively toward the individual agent who has done something morally wrong, but takes account of anyone else who is susceptible to being influenced by our responses. (Wallace 1996: 56; emphasis added)

In exceptional cases, a focus on beneficial outcomes may provide grounds for treating as blameworthy those who are known to be innocent (Smart 1973). This last feature of (some) forward-looking approaches has led to particularly strong criticism.

Recent efforts have been made to develop partially forward-looking accounts of responsibility that evade some of the criticisms mentioned above. These (somewhat revisionary) accounts justify our responsibility practices by appeal to their suitability for fostering moral agency and the acquisition of capacities required for such agency. Most notable in this regard is Manuel Vargas’s “agency cultivation model” of responsibility (2013; also see Jefferson 2019 and McGeer 2015). Recent conversational accounts of responsibility ( §3.2.2 ) also have an important forward-looking component insofar as they regard those with whom one might have fruitful moral interactions as candidates for responsibility. Some responsibility skeptics have also emphasized the forward-looking benefits of certain responsibility practices. For example, Derk Pereboom—who rejects desert-based blame—has argued that some conventional blaming practices can be maintained (even after ordinary notions of blameworthiness have been left behind) insofar as these practices are grounded in “non-desert invoking moral desiderata” such as “protection of potential victims, reconciliation to relationships both personal and with the moral community more generally, and moral formation” (2014: 134; also see Caruso 2016, Levy 2012, and Milam 2016). In contrast to some of the forward-looking approaches described above, Pereboom (2017) proposes that only those agents who have in fact acted immorally should be open to forward-aiming blaming practices. (For more on skepticism about responsibility, see §3.3 and the entry on skepticism about moral responsibility .)

2.2 The Reactive Attitudes Approach

P. F. Strawson’s 1962 paper, “Freedom and Resentment”, is a touchstone for much of the work on moral responsibility that followed it, especially the work of compatibilists. Strawson’s aim was to chart a course between incompatibilist accounts committed to a free will requirement on responsibility, and forward-looking compatibilist accounts that did not, in Strawson’s view, appropriately acknowledge and account for the interpersonal significance of the affective component of our responsibility practices. In contrast with forward-looking accounts such as J. J. C. Smart’s and Moritz Schlick’s ( §2.1 ), Strawson focuses directly on the emotions—the reactive attitudes—that play a fundamental role in our practices of holding one another responsible. Strawson’s suggestion is that attending to the logic of these emotional responses yields an account of what it is to be open to praise and blame that need not invoke the incompatibilist’s conception of free will. Indeed, Strawson’s view has been interpreted as suggesting that no metaphysical facts beyond our praising and blaming practices are needed to ground these practices.

Part of the novelty of Strawson’s approach is its emphasis on the “importance that we attach to the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings” (1962 [1993: 48]) and on

how much it matters to us, whether the actions of other people…reflect attitudes towards us of goodwill, affection, or esteem on the one hand or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on the other. (1962 [1993: 49])

For Strawson, our practices of holding others responsible are largely responses to these things: that is, “to the quality of others’ wills towards us” (1962 [1993: 56]).

To get a sense of the importance of quality of will for our interpersonal relations, note the difference in your response to one who injures you accidentally as compared to how you respond to one who does you the same injury out of “contemptuous disregard” or “a malevolent wish to injure [you]” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 49]). The second case is likely to arouse a type and intensity of resentment that would not be (appropriately) felt in the first case. Corresponding points may be made about positive responses such as gratitude: you would likely not have the same feelings of gratitude toward a person who benefits you accidentally as you would toward one who does so out of concern for your welfare. The focus here is on personal reactive attitudes directed toward another on one’s own behalf, but Strawson also discusses “sympathetic or vicarious” attitudes felt on behalf of others, and “self-reactive attitudes” that an agent may direct toward herself (1962 [1993: 56–7]).

On Strawson’s view, the tendency to respond with relevant reactive attitudes to displays of good or ill will implicates a demand for moral respect and due regard. Indeed, for Strawson, “[t]he making of the demand is the proneness to such attitudes”, and the attitudes themselves are the “correlates of the moral demand in the case where the demand is felt to be disregarded” (1962 [1993: 63]; emphasis in original). Thus, among the circumstances that mollify a person’s (negative) reactive attitudes, are those which show that—despite initial appearances—the demand for due regard has not been ignored or flouted. When someone explains that the injury she caused you was entirely unforeseen and accidental, she indicates that her regard for your welfare was not insufficient and that she is therefore not an appropriate target for the negative attitudes involved in moral blame.

Note that the agent who excuses herself from blame in the above way is not calling into question her status as a generally responsible agent: she is still open to the demand for due regard and liable, in principle, to reactive responses. Other agents, however, may be inapt targets for blame and the reactive emotions precisely because they are not legitimate targets of a demand for regard. In these cases, an agent is not excused from blame, he is exempted from it: it is not that his behavior is discovered to have been non-malicious, but rather that he is seen to be one of whom better behavior cannot reasonably be demanded. (The widely-used terminology in which the above contrast is drawn—“excuses” versus “exemptions”—is due to Watson 1987 [2004]).

For Strawson, the most important group of exempt agents includes those who are, at least for a time, significantly impaired for normal interpersonal relationships. These agents may be children, or psychologically impaired like the “schizophrenic”; they may exhibit “purely compulsive behaviour”, or their minds may have “been systematically perverted” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 51]). Alternatively, exempt agents may simply be “wholly lacking…in moral sense” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 58]), perhaps because they suffered from “peculiarly unfortunate…formative circumstances” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 52]). These agents are not candidates for the range of emotional responses involved in our personal relationships because they do not participate in these relationships in the right way for such responses to be sensibly applied to them. Rather than taking up interpersonally-engaged attitudes (that presuppose a demand for respect) toward exempt agents, we instead take an objective attitude toward them. The exempt agent is not regarded “as a morally responsible agent…as a member of the moral community” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 59]); though he may be regarded as “an object of social policy” and as something “to be managed or handled or cured or trained” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 52]).

Strawson’s perspective has an important compatibilist upshot. We may be able, in limited circumstances, to take up a detached, objective perspective on the behavior of normal (that is, non-exempt) agents. But Strawson argues that we cannot take up with this perspective permanently, and certainly not on the basis of discovering that determinism is true:

The human commitment to participation in ordinary interpersonal relationships is, I think, too thoroughgoing and deeply rooted for us to take seriously the thought that a general theoretical conviction [e.g., about the truth of determinism] might so change our world that, in it, there were no longer any such things as interpersonal relationships as we normally understand them; and being involved in inter-personal relationships…precisely is being exposed to the range of reactive attitudes and feelings that is in question. (1962 [1993: 54])

More specifically, the truth of determinism would not show that human beings generally occupy excusing or exempting conditions that would make the attitudes involved in holding one another responsible inappropriate. It would not follow from the truth of determinism, for example, “that anyone who caused an injury either was quite simply ignorant of causing it or had acceptably overriding reasons for” doing so (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 53]; emphasis in original); nor would it follow (from the truth of determinism)

that nobody knows what he’s doing or that everybody’s behaviour is unintelligible in terms of conscious purposes or that everybody lives in a world of delusion or that nobody has a moral sense. (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 59])

Various objections have been raised regarding P. F. Strawson’s general theoretical approach to moral responsibility, his assumptions about human psychology and sociality, and his arguments for the compatibility of determinism and responsibility.

As noted in the previous subsection, Strawson argues that learning that determinism is true would not raise general concerns about our responsibility practices. This is because the truth of determinism would not show that human beings are generally abnormal in a way that would call into question their openness to the reactive attitudes: “it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not itself self-contradictory that abnormality is the universal condition” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 54]). In reply, it has been noted that while the truth of determinism might not suggest universal abnormality, it might well show that normal human beings are morally incapacitated in a way that is relevant to our responsibility practices (Russell 1992: 298–301). Strawson’s assumptions that we are too deeply and naturally committed to our reactive-attitude-involving practices to give them up, and that doing so would irreparably distort our moral lives, have also been criticized (Nelkin 2011: 42–45; G. Strawson 1986: 84–120; Watson 1987 [2004: 255–258]).

A different sort of objection emphasizes the response-dependence of Strawson’s account: that is, the way it explains an agent’s responsibility in terms of the moral responses that characterize a given community’s responsibility practices, rather than in terms of independent facts about whether the agent is responsible. This feature of Strawson’s approach invites a reading that may seem paradoxical:

In Strawson’s view, there is no such independent notion of responsibility that explains the propriety of the reactive attitudes. The explanatory priority is the other way around: It is not that we hold people responsible because they are responsible; rather, the idea ( our idea) that we are responsible is to be understood by the practice, which itself is not a matter of holding some propositions to be true, but of expressing our concerns and demands about our treatment of one another. (Watson 1987 [2004: 222]; emphasis in original; see Bennett 1980 for a related, non-cognitivist interpretation of Strawson’s approach)

Strawson’s approach would be particularly problematic if, as the above reading might suggest, it entails that a group’s responsibility practices are—as they stand and however they stand—beyond criticism simply because they are that group’s practices (Fischer & Ravizza 1993a: 18).

But there is something to be said from the other side of the debate. It may seem obvious that people are appropriately held responsible only if there are independent facts about their responsibility. But on reflection—and following R. Jay Wallace’s (1996) influential Strawsonian approach—it may be difficult “to make sense of the idea of a prior and thoroughly independent realm of moral responsibility facts” that is separate from our practices and yet to which our practices must answer (1996: 88). For Wallace, giving up on practice-independent responsibility facts doesn’t mean giving up on facts about responsibility; rather, “we must interpret the relevant facts [about responsibility] as somehow dependent on our practices of holding people responsible” (1996: 89). Such an interpretation requires an investigation into our practices, and what emerges most conspicuously, for Wallace, from this investigation is the degree to which our responsibility practices are organized around a fundamental commitment to fairness (1996: 101). Wallace develops this commitment to fairness, and to norms of fairness, into an account of the conditions under which people are appropriately held morally responsible for their behavior (1996: 103–109). (For a more recent defense of the response-dependent approach to responsibility, see Shoemaker 2017b; for criticism of such approaches, see Todd 2016.)

As noted in §1 , one of the lasting influences of Harry Frankfurt’s defense of compatibilism was to draw attention to the actual causes of agents’ behavior, and particularly to whether an agent—even a causally determined agent—acted for her own reasons. Reasons-responsiveness approaches to responsibility have been particularly attentive to these issues. These approaches ground responsibility by reference to agents’ capacities for being appropriately sensitive to the rational considerations that bear on their actions. Interpreted broadly, reasons-responsiveness approaches include a diverse collection of views, such as David Brink and Dana Nelkin (2013), John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza (1998), Ishtiyaque Haji (1998), Michael McKenna (2013), Dana Nelkin (2011), Carolina Sartorio (2016), R. Jay Wallace (1996), and Susan Wolf (1990). Fischer and Ravizza’s Responsibility and Control (1998), which builds on Fischer (1994), offers the most influential articulation of the reasons-responsiveness approach.

Fischer and Ravizza begin with a distinction between regulative control and guidance control. Regulative control involves the possession of a dual power: “the power freely to do some act A , and the power freely to do something else instead” (1998: 31). Guidance control, on the other hand, does not require access to alternatives: it is manifested when an agent guides her behavior in a particular direction (and regardless of whether it was open to her to guide her behavior in a different direction). Since Fischer and Ravizza take Frankfurt cases ( §1 ) to show that access to behavioral alternatives is not necessary for moral responsibility, they conclude that “the sort of control necessarily associated with moral responsibility for action is guidance control ” and not regulative control (1998: 33; emphasis in original).

A number of factors can undermine guidance control. If a person’s behavior is brought about by hypnosis, brainwashing, or genuinely irresistible urges, then that person may not be morally responsible for her behavior since she does not reflectively guide it in the way required for responsibility (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 35). More specifically, an agent in the above circumstances is not likely to be responsible because he “is not responsive to reasons—his behavior would be the same, no matter what reasons there were” (1998: 37). Thus, Fischer and Ravizza characterize possession of guidance control as (partially) dependent on responsiveness to reasons. In particular, guidance control depends on whether the psychological mechanism that issues in an agent’s behavior is responsive to reasons. (Guidance control also requires that an agent owns the mechanism on which she acts. According to Fischer and Ravizza, this requires placing historical conditions on responsibility; see §3.3.3 .)

Fischer and Ravizza’s focus on mechanisms is motivated by the following reasoning. In a Frankfurt case, an agent is responsible for an action even though his so acting is ensured by external factors. But the presence of these external factors means that the agent in a Frankfurt case would have acted the same no matter what reasons he was confronted with, which suggests that the responsible agent in a Frankfurt scenario is not responsive to reasons. This is a problem for Fischer and Ravizza’s claim that guidance control, and thus reasons-responsiveness, is necessary for responsibility. Fischer and Ravizza’s solution is to argue that while the agent in a Frankfurt case may not be responsive to reasons, the agent’s mechanism—“the process that leads to the relevant upshot [i.e., the agent’s action]”—may well be responsive to reasons (1998: 38). In other words, the agent’s generally-specified psychological mechanism might have responded (under counterfactual conditions) to considerations in favor of omitting the action that the agent actually performed (and that he was guaranteed to perform, regardless of reasons, since he was in a Frankfurt-type scenario).

Fischer and Ravizza thus arrive at the following provisional conclusion: “relatively clear cases of moral responsibility”—that is, those in which an agent is not hypnotized, etc.—are distinguished by the fact that “an agent exhibits guidance control of an action insofar as the mechanism that actually issues in the action is his own, reasons-responsive mechanism” (1998: 39). But how responsive to reasons does an agent’s mechanism need to be for that agent to have the type of control over his behavior associated with moral responsibility? A strongly reasons-responsive mechanism would both recognize and respond to any sufficient reason to act otherwise (1998: 41). (In Fischer and Ravizza’s terminology, such a mechanism is strongly “receptive” and “reactive” to reasons). But strong reasons-responsiveness cannot be required for guidance control since many intuitively responsible agents—i.e., many garden variety wrongdoers—fail to attend to sufficient reasons to do otherwise. On the other hand, weak reasons-responsiveness is not enough for guidance control. An agent with a weakly reasons-responsive mechanism will respond appropriately to some sufficient reason to do otherwise, but the pattern of responsiveness revealed in the agent’s behavior might be too arbitrary for the agent to be credited with the kind of control required for responsibility. A person’s pattern of responsiveness to reasons would likely seem erratic in the relevant way if, for example, she would forego purchasing a ticket to a basketball game if it cost one thousand dollars, but not if it cost two thousand dollars (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 66).

Fischer and Ravizza settle on moderate reasons responsiveness as the sort that is most germane to guidance control (1998: 69–85). A psychological mechanism that is moderately responsive to reasons exhibits regularity with respect to its receptivity to reasons: that is, it exhibits “an understandable pattern of (actual and hypothetical) reasons-receptivity” (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 71; emphasis in original). Such a pattern will indicate that an agent understands “how reasons fit together” and that, for example, “acceptance of one reason as sufficient implies that a stronger reason must also be sufficient” (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 71). (In addition, a pattern of regular receptivity to reasons will include receptivity to a range of moral considerations (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 77). This will rule out attributing moral responsibility to non-moral agents; see Todd and Tognazzini 2008 for criticism of Fischer and Ravizza’s articulation of this condition.) However, a moderately responsive mechanism may be only weakly reactive to reasons since, as Fischer and Ravizza put it (somewhat mysteriously), “reactivity is all of piece” such

that if an agent’s mechanism reacts to some incentive to…[do otherwise], this shows that the mechanism can react to any incentive to do otherwise. (1998: 73; emphasis in original)

Fischer and Ravizza’s account has generated a great deal of attention and criticism. Some critics focus on the contrast (just noted) between the conditions they impose on receptivity to reasons and those they impose on reactivity to reasons (McKenna 2005, Mele 2006a, Watson 2001). Additionally, many are dissatisfied with Fischer and Ravizza’s presentation of their account in terms of the powers of mechanisms as opposed to agents. This has led some authors to develop agent-based reasons-responsiveness accounts that address the concerns that led Fischer and Ravizza to their mechanism-based approach (Brink & Nelkin 2013, McKenna 2013, Sartorio 2016).

3. Contemporary Debates

3.1 the “faces” of responsibility.

Do our responsibility practices accommodate distinct forms of moral responsibility? Are there different senses in which people may be morally responsible for their behavior? Contemporary interest in these possibilities has its roots in a debate between Susan Wolf and Gary Watson. Among other things, Wolf’s important 1990 book, Freedom Within Reason , offers a critical discussion of “Real Self” theories of responsibility. According to these views, a person is responsible for behavior that is attributable to her real self, and

an agent’s behavior is attributable to the agent’s real self…if she is at liberty (or able) both to govern her behavior on the basis of her will and to govern her will on the basis of her valuational system. (Wolf 1990: 33)

The basic idea is that a responsible agent is not simply moved by her strongest desires, but also, in some way, approves of, or stands behind, the desires that move her because they are governed by her values or because they are endorsed by higher-order desires. Wolf’s central example of a Real Self view is Watson’s (1975). In an important and closely related earlier paper, Wolf (1987) characterizes Watson (1975), Harry Frankfurt (1971), and Charles Taylor (1976) as offering “deep self views”. For more on real-self/deep-self views, see §3.3.3 ; for a recent presentation of a real-self view, see Chandra Sripada (2016).

According to Wolf, one point in favor of Real Self views is that they explain why people acting under the influence of hypnosis or compulsive desires are often not responsible (1990: 33). Since these agents are typically unable, under these conditions, to govern their behavior on the basis of their valuational systems, they are alienated from their actions in a way that undermines responsibility. But, for Wolf, it is a mark against Real Self views that they tend to be silent on the topic of how agents come to have the selves that they do. An agent’s real self might, for example, be the product of a traumatic upbringing, and Wolf argues that this would give us reason to question the “agent’s responsibility for her real self” and thus her responsibility for the present behavior that issues from that self (1990: 37; emphasis in original). For an important account of an agent with such an upbringing, see Wolf’s (1987) fictional example of JoJo (and see Watson 1987 [2004] for a related discussion of the convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris). For discussion of JoJo in this entry, see §3.2.1 , and for general discussion of the relevance of personal history for present responsibility see §3.3.3 .

Wolf suggests that when a person’s real self is the product of serious childhood trauma (or related factors), then that person is potentially responsible for her behavior only in a superficial sense that merely attributes bad actions to the agent’s real self (1990: 37–40). However, Wolf argues that ascriptions of moral responsibility go deeper than such attributions can reach:

When…we consider an individual worthy of blame or of praise, we are not merely judging the moral quality of the event with which the individual is so intimately associated; we are judging the moral quality of the individual herself in some more focused, noninstrumental, and seemingly more serious way. (1990: 41)

This deeper form of assessment—assessment in terms of “deep responsibility” (Wolf 1990: 41)—requires more than that an agent is “able to form her actions on the basis of her values”, it also requires that “she is able to form her values on the basis of what is True and Good” (Wolf 1990: 75). This latter ability will be impaired or absent in an agent whose real self is the product of pressures (such as a traumatic childhood) that have distorted her moral vision. (For the relevance of moral vision, or “moral competence”, for responsibility, see §3.2 .)

In “Two Faces of Responsibility” (1996 [2004]), Gary Watson responds to Wolf. Watson agrees with Wolf that some approaches to responsibility—i.e., self-disclosure views (a phrase Watson borrows from Benson 1987)—focus narrowly on whether behavior is attributable to an agent. But Watson denies that these attributions constitute a merely superficial form of responsibility assessment. After all, behavior that is attributable to an agent—in the sense, for example, of issuing from her valuational system—often discloses something interpersonally and morally significant about the agent’s “fundamental evaluative orientation” (Watson 1996 [2004: 271]). Thus, ascriptions of responsibility in this responsibility-as-attributability sense are “central to ethical life and ethical appraisal” (Watson 1996 [2004: 263]).

However, Watson agrees with Wolf that the above story of responsibility is incomplete: there is more to responsibility than attributing actions to agents. In addition, we hold agents responsible for their behavior, which “is not just a matter of the relation of an individual to her behavior” (Watson 1996 [2004: 262]). When we hold responsible, we also “demand (require) certain conduct from one another and respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson 1996 [2004: 262]). The moral demands, and potential for adverse treatment, associated with holding others responsible are part of our accountability (as opposed to attributability) practices, and these features of accountability raise issues of fairness that do not arise in the context of determining whether behavior is attributable to an agent (Watson 1996 [2004: 273]). Therefore, conditions may apply to accountability that do not apply to attributability: for example, perhaps “accountability blame” should be—as Wolf suggested—moderated in the case of an agent whose “squalid circumstances made it overwhelmingly difficult to develop a respect for the standards to which we would hold him accountable” (Watson 1996 [2004: 281]).

There are, then, two forms, or “faces”, of responsibility on Watson’s account. There is responsibility-as-attributability, and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility, behavior is properly attributed to her as reflecting morally important features of her self—her virtues and vices, for example. But there is also responsibility-as-accountability, and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility, which requires more than the correct attribution of behavior, she is open to being held accountable for that behavior in the ways that predominantly characterize moral blame.

It has become common for the views of several authors to be described (with varying degrees of accuracy) as instances of “attributionism”; see Neil Levy (2005) for the first use of this term. These authors include Robert Adams (1985), Nomy Arpaly (2003), Pamela Hieronymi (2004), T. M. Scanlon (1998, 2008), George Sher (2006a, 2006b, 2009), Angela Smith (2005, 2008), and Matthew Talbert (2012, 2013). Attributionists take moral responsibility assessments to be mainly concerned with whether an action (or omission, character trait, or belief) is attributable to an agent for the purposes of moral assessment, where this usually means that the action (or omission, etc.) reflects the agent’s “judgment sensitive attitudes” (Scanlon 1998), “evaluative judgments” (A. Smith 2005), or, more generally, her “moral personality” (Hieronymi 2008).

Attributionism resembles the self-disclosure views mentioned by Watson (see the previous subsection) insofar as both focus on the way that a responsible agent’s behavior discloses interpersonally and morally significant features of the agent’s self. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that contemporary attributionist views are interested only in specifying the conditions for what Watson calls responsibility-as-attributability. In fact, attributionists typically take themselves to be giving conditions for holding agents responsible in Watson’s accountability sense. (See the previous subsection for the distinction between accountability and attributability.)

According to attributionism, fulfillment of attributability conditions is sufficient for holding agents accountable for their behavior. This means that attributionism rejects conditions on moral responsibility that would excuse agents if their characters were shaped under adverse conditions (Scanlon 1998: 278–85), or if the thing for which the agent is blamed was not under her control (Sher 2006b and 2009, A. Smith 2005), or if the agent can’t be expected to recognize the moral status of her behavior (Scanlon 1998: 287–290; Talbert 2012). Attributionists reject these conditions on responsibility because morally and interpersonally significant behavior is attributable to agents that do not fulfill them, and such attributions are taken to be sufficient for an agent to be open to the responses involved in holding agents accountable for their behavior. Attributionists have also argued that blame may profitably be understood as a form of moral protest (Hieronymi 2001, A. Smith 2013, Talbert 2012); part of the appeal of this move is that moral protests may be legitimate in cases in which the above conditions are not met.

Several objections have been posed to attributionism. Some argue that attributionists are wrong to reject the conditions on responsibility mentioned in the last paragraph (Levy 2005, 2011; Shoemaker 2011, 2015a; Watson 2011). It has also been argued that the attributionist account of blame is too close to mere negative appraisal (Levy 2005; Wallace 1996: 80–1; Watson 2002). In addition, Scanlon (2008) has been criticized for failing to take negative emotions such as resentment to be central to the phenomenon of blame (Wallace 2011, Wolf 2011; a similar criticism would apply to Sher 2006a).

Building on the distinction between attributability and accountability ( §3.1.1 ), David Shoemaker (2011 and 2015a) has introduced a third form of responsibility: answerability. On Shoemaker’s view, attributability-responsibility assessments respond to facts about an agent’s character, accountability-responsibility responds to an agent’s degree of regard for others, and answerability-responsibility responds to an agent’s evaluative judgments. However, A. Smith (2015) and Hieronymi (2008 and 2014) use “answerability” to refer to a view more like the attributionist perspective described in the previous subsection, and Pereboom (2014) has used the term to indicate a form of responsibility more congenial to responsibility skeptics.

3.2 Moral Competence

The possibility that moral competence—the ability to recognize and respond to moral considerations—is a condition on moral responsibility has been suggested at several points above ( §2.2.1 , §2.2.2 , §2.3 , §3.1.1 , §3.1.2 ). Susan Wolf’s (1987) fictional story of “JoJo” is one of the best-known illustrations of this proposal. JoJo was raised by an evil dictator, and as a result he became the same sort of sadistic tyrant that his father was. As an adult, JoJo is happy to be the sort of person that he is, and he is moved by precisely the desires (e.g., to imprison, torture, and execute his subjects) that he wants to be moved by. Thus, JoJo fulfills important conditions on responsibility ( §3.1.1 , §3.3.3 ), however, Wolf argues that it may be unfair to hold him responsible for his bad behavior.

JoJo’s upbringing plays an important role in Wolf’s argument, but only because it left JoJo unable to fully appreciate the wrongfulness of his behavior. Thus, it is JoJo’s impaired moral competence that does the real excusing work, and similar conclusions of non-responsibility should be drawn about all those whom we think “could not help but be mistaken about their [bad] values”, if possession of these values impairs their ability to tell right from wrong (Wolf 1987: 57).

Many others join Wolf in arguing that impaired moral competence (perhaps on account of one’s upbringing or other environmental factors) undermines one’s moral responsibility (Benson 2001, Doris & Murphy 2007, Fischer & Ravizza 1998, Fricker 2010, Levy 2003, Russell 1995 and 2004, Wallace 1996, Watson 1987 [2004]). Part of what motivates this conclusion is the thought that it can be unreasonable to expect morally-impaired agents to avoid wrongful behavior, and that it is therefore unfair to expose these agents to the harm of moral blame on account of their wrongdoing. For detailed development of the moral competence requirement on responsibility in terms of considerations of fairness, see R. Jay Wallace (1996); also see Erin Kelly (2013), Neil Levy (2009), and Gary Watson (1987 [2004]). For rejection of the claim that blame is unfair in the case of the morally-impaired agent, see several of the defenders of attributionism mentioned in §3.1.2 (particularly Hieronymi 2004, Scanlon 1998, and Talbert 2012)

The moral competence condition on responsibility can also be motivated by the suggestion that impaired agents are not able to commit wrongs that have the sort of moral significance to which blame would be an appropriate response. The basic idea here is that, while morally-impaired agents can fail to show appropriate respect for others, these failures do not necessarily constitute the kind of flouting of moral norms that grounds blame (Watson 1987 [2004: 234]). In other words, a failure to respect others, is not always an instance of blame-grounding disrespect for others, since the latter (but not the former) requires the ability to comprehend the norms that one violates (Levy 2007, Shoemaker 2011).

Considerations about moral competence play an important role in the recent trend of conversational theories of responsibility, which construe elements of our responsibility practices as morally-expressive moves in an ongoing moral conversation. The thought here is that to fruitfully (and fully) participate in such a conversation, one must have some degree of competence in the (moral) language of that conversation.

Several prominent versions of the conversational approach develop P. F. Strawson’s suggestion ( §2.2.1 ) that the negative reactive attitudes involved in blame are expressions of a demand for moral regard from other agents. Gary Watson argues that a demand “presumes”, as a condition on the intelligibility of expressing it, “understanding on the part of the object of the demand” (1987 [2004: 230]). Therefore, since, “[t]he reactive attitudes are incipiently forms of communication”, they are intelligibly expressed “only on the assumption that the other can comprehend the message”, and since the message is a moral one, “blaming and praising those with diminished moral understanding loses its ‘point,’” at least in a certain sense (Watson 1987 [2004: 230]; see Watson 2011 for a modification of this proposal). R. Jay Wallace argues, similarly, that since responsibility practices are internal to moral relationships that are

defined by the successful exchange of moral criticism and justification…. it will be reasonable to hold accountable only someone who is at least a candidate for this kind of exchange of criticism and justification. (1996: 164)

Michael McKenna’s Conversation and Responsibility (2012) offers the most developed conversational analysis of responsibility. For McKenna, the “moral responsibility exchange” occurs in stages: an initial “moral contribution” of morally salient behavior; the “moral address” of, e.g., blame that responds to the moral contribution; the “moral account” in which the first contributor responds to moral address with, e.g., apology; and so on (2012: 89). Like Wallace and Watson, McKenna notes the way in which a morally impaired agent will find it difficult “to appreciate the challenges put to her by those who hold [her] morally responsible”, but he also argues that a suitably impaired agent cannot even make the first move in a moral conversation (2012: 78). Thus, the morally impaired agent’s responsibility is called into question not only because she is unable to respond appropriately to moral demands, but also because “she is incapable of acting from a will with a moral quality that could be a candidate for assessment from the standpoint of holding responsible” (McKenna 2012: 78). This point is related to Neil Levy’s and David Shoemaker’s contention, noted in the previous subsection, that impairments of moral competence can leave an agent unable to harbor and express the type of ill will or lack of regard to which blame responds. By contrast, Watson (2011), seems to allow that significant moral impairment is compatible with the ability to perform blame-relevant wrongdoing, even if such impairment undermines the wrongdoer’s moral accountability for her actions.

For another important account of responsibility in broadly conversational terms, see Shoemaker’s discussion of the sort of moral anger involved in holding others accountable for their behavior (2015a: 87–117). For additional defenses and articulations of the conversational approach to responsibility, see Stephen Darwall (2006), Miranda Fricker (2016), and Colleen Macnamara (2015).

Impairments of moral competence come in degrees. Susan Wolf’s JoJo ( §3.2.1 ) has localized impairments of the capacity to recognize and respond to moral considerations, but it is not clear that he is entirely immune to moral considerations. However, at the far end of the spectrum, we encounter more globally and thoroughly impaired figures such as the psychopath. In philosophical treatments, the psychopath is typically presented as an agent who, while retaining other psychological capacities, is entirely—or as nearly so as possible—incapable of responding appropriately to moral considerations. (This is something of a philosophical construct since real-life psychopathy admits of varying degrees of impairment, corresponding to higher or lower scores on diagnostic measures.)

One interesting question is whether the psychopath’s inability—or at least consistent failure—to respond appropriately to moral incentives is primarily the result of a motivational rather than cognitive failure: does the psychopath in some way know what morality requires and simply not care? If a positive answer is given to this last question (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 76–81; Nichols 2002), then it seems likely that the psychopath could be responsible for at least some of his bad behavior. And some have argued that even if psychopathy is primarily a cognitive impairment, it may still be the case that psychopaths possess a sufficient capacity for distinguishing right and wrong—or that they possess sufficient related capacities—to be held responsible, at least to some extent and in certain ways (Glannon 1997, Greenspan 2003, Maibom 2008, Shoemaker 2014, Vargas & Nichols 2007). On the other hand, many believe that the psychopath’s capacity for grasping moral considerations is too superficial to sustain responsibility (Kennett 2019; Levy 2007; Nelkin 2015; Wallace 1996: 177–78; Watson 2011; see Mason 2017 for the claim that the relevant deficiency is one of moral knowledge rather than moral capacity). And still others have argued that even those who are fully impaired for moral understanding are open to blame as long as they possess broader rational competencies (Scanlon 1998: 287–290; Talbert 2014). However, the psychopath’s possession of these broader competencies has been called into question (Fine & Kennett 2004, Greenspan 2003, Litton 2010).

3.3 Skepticism and Related Topics

This section introduces contemporary skepticism about moral responsibility by way of discussions of several topics that have broad relevance for thinking about responsibility.

If moral responsibility requires free will, and free will involves access to alternatives in a way that is not compatible with determinism, then it would follow from the truth of determinism that no one is ever morally responsible. The above reasoning, and the skeptical conclusion it reaches, is endorsed by the hard determinist perspective on free will and responsibility, which was defended historically by Spinoza and d’Holbach (among others) and, more recently, by Ted Honderich (2002). But given that determinism may well be false, contemporary skeptics about moral responsibility more often pursue a hard incompatibilist line of argument according to which the kind of free will required for desert-based (as opposed to forward-looking, see §2.1 ) moral responsibility is incompatible with the truth or falsity of determinism (Pereboom 2001, 2014). The skeptical positions discussed below are generally of this sort: the skeptical conclusions they advocate do not depend on the truth of determinism.

According to Thomas Nagel, a person is subject to moral luck if factors that are not under that person’s control affect the moral assessments to which he is open (Nagel 1976 [1979]; also see Williams 1976 [1981] and the entry on moral luck .)

Is there such a thing as moral luck? More specifically, can luck affect a person’s moral responsibility? Consider a would-be assassin who shoots at her target, aiming to kill, but fails to do so only because her bullet is deflected by a passing bird. It seems that such a would-be assassin has good moral outcome luck (that is, good moral luck in the outcome of her behavior). Because of factors beyond her control, the would-be assassin’s moral record is better than it would have been: in particular, she is not a killer and is not morally responsible for causing anyone’s death. One might think, in addition, that the would-be assassin is less blameworthy than a successful assassin with whom she is otherwise identical, and that the reason for this is just that the successful assassin intentionally killed someone while the unsuccessful assassin (as a result of good moral luck) did not. (For important recent defenses of moral luck, see Hanna 2014 and Hartman 2017.)

On the other hand, one might think that if the two assassins just mentioned are identical in terms of their values, goals, intentions, and motivations, then the addition of a bit of luck to the unsuccessful assassin’s story cannot ground a deep contrast between these two agents in terms of their moral responsibility. One way to sustain this position is to argue that moral responsibility is a function solely of internal features of agents, such as their motives and intentions (Khoury 2018; also see Enoch & Marmor 2007 for some of the main arguments against moral luck). Of course, the successful assassin is responsible for something (killing a person) for which the unsuccessful assassin is not, but it might be possible to argue that both are morally responsible—and presumably blameworthy— to the same degree insofar as it was true of both of them that they aimed to kill, and that they did so for the same reasons and with the same degree of commitment toward bringing about that outcome (see M. Zimmerman 2002 and 2015 for this influential perspective).

But now consider a different would-be assassin who does not even try to kill anyone, but only because his circumstances did not favor this option. This would-be assassin is willing to kill under favorable circumstances (and so he may seem to have had good circumstantial moral luck since he was not in those circumstances). Perhaps the degree of responsibility attributed to the successful and unsuccessful assassins described above depends not so much on the fact that they both tried to kill as on the fact that they were both willing to kill; in this case, the would-be assassin just introduced may share their degree of responsibility since he shares their willingness to kill. But an account that focuses on how agents would be willing to act under counterfactual circumstances is likely to generate unintuitive conclusions about responsibility since many agents who are typically judged blameless might willingly perform terrible actions under the right circumstances. (M. Zimmerman 2002 and 2015 does not shy away from this consequence, but criticisms of his efforts to reject moral luck—Hanna 2014, Hartman 2017—have made much of it; see Peels 2015 for a position that is related to Zimmerman’s but that may avoid the unintuitive consequence just mentioned.)

Another approach to luck holds that it is inimical to moral responsibility in a way that generally undermines responsibility ascriptions. To see the motivation for this skeptical position, consider constitutive moral luck: that is, luck in how one is constituted in terms of the “inclinations, capacities, and temperament” one finds within oneself (Nagel 1976 [1979: 28]). Facts about a person’s inclinations, capacities, and temperament explain much—if not all—of that person’s behavior, and if the facts that explain why a person acts as she does are a result of good or bad luck, then perhaps it is unfair to hold her responsible for that behavior. As Nagel notes, once the full sweep of the various kinds of luck comes into view, “[t]he area of genuine agency” may seem to shrink to nothing since our actions and their consequences “result from the combined influence of factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not within the agent’s control” (1976 [1979: 35]). If this is right, then perhaps,

nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a…sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised. (Nagel 1976 [1979: 37])

The above quotations notwithstanding, Nagel himself doesn’t fully embrace a skeptical conclusion about responsibility on grounds of moral luck, but others have done so, most notably, Neil Levy (2011). According to Levy’s “hard luck view”, the encompassing nature of moral luck means “that there are no desert-entailing differences between moral agents” (2011: 10). Of course, there are differences between agents in terms of their characters and the good or bad actions and outcomes that they produce, but Levy’s point is that, given the influence of luck in generating these differences, they don’t provide a sound basis for differential treatment of people in terms of moral praise and blame. (See Russell 2017 for a compatibilist account that is led to a variety of pessimism, though not skepticism, on the basis of the concerns about moral luck just described.)

Another important skeptical argument—related to the observations about constitutive moral luck in the previous subsection—is Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument, which concludes that “we cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions” (1994: 5). (Since the argument targets “ultimate” moral responsibility, it does not necessarily exclude other forms, such as forward-looking responsibility ( §2.1 ) and, on some understandings, responsibility-as-attributability ( §3.1.1 ).) The argument begins by noting that an agent makes the choices she does because of certain facts about the way she is: for example, the facts about what seems choiceworthy to her. But if this is true, then, in order to be responsible for her subsequent choices, perhaps an agent also needs to be responsible for the facts about what seems choiceworthy to her. But how can one be responsible for these prior facts about herself? Wouldn’t this require a prior choice on the part of the agent, one that resulted in her present dispositions to see certain ends and means as choiceworthy? But this prior choice would itself be something for which the agent is responsible only if the agent is also responsible for the fact that that prior choice seemed choiceworthy to her. And now we must explain how the agent can be responsible for this additional prior fact about herself, which will require positing another choice by the agent, and the responsibility for that choice will also have to be secured, which will require explaining why it seemed choiceworthy to her, and so on. A regress looms here, and Strawson claims that it cannot be stopped except by positing an initial act of self-creation on the responsible agent’s part (1994: 5, 15). Only self-creating agents could be fully responsible for their own tendencies to exercise their powers of choice as they do, but self-creation is impossible, so no one is every truly or ultimately morally responsible for their behavior.

A number of replies to this argument (and the argument from constitutive moral luck) are possible. One might simply deny that how a person came to be the way she is matters for present responsibility: perhaps all we need to know in order to judge a person’s present responsibility are facts about her present constitution and about how that constitution is related to the person’s present behavior. (For views like this, see the discussion of attributionism ( §3.1.2 ) and the discussion of non-historical accounts of responsibility in the next subsection). Alternatively, one might think that while personal history matters for moral responsibility, Strawson’s argument sets the bar too high, requiring too much historical control over one’s constitution (see Fischer 2006; for a reply, see Levy 2011: 5). Perhaps what is needed is not literal self-creation, but simply an ability to enact changes in oneself so as to acquire responsibility for the self that results from these changes (Clarke 2005). A picture along these lines can be found in Aristotle’s suggestion that one can be responsible for being a careless person if one’s present state of carelessness is the result of earlier choices that one made (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics ; see also Michele Moody-Adams 1990).

Roughly in this Aristotelian vein, Robert Kane offers a detailed incompatibilist account of how we can secure ultimate responsibility for our actions (1996 and 2007). On Kane’s view, for an agent

to be ultimately responsible for [a] choice, the agent must be at least in part responsible by virtue of choices or actions voluntarily performed in the past for having the character and motives he or she now has. (2007: 14; emphasis in original)

This position may appear to be open to the regress concerns presented in Galen Strawson’s argument above. But Kane thinks a regress is avoided in cases in which a person’s character-forming choices are undetermined. Since these undetermined choices will have no sufficient causes, there is no relevant prior cause for which the agent must be responsible, so there is no regress problem (Kane 2007: 15–16; see Pereboom 2001: 47–50 for criticism of Kane on this point.)

Of particular interest to Kane are potential character-forming choices that occur “when we are torn between competing visions of what we should do or become” (2007: 26). In such cases, if a person sees reasons in favor of either choice that he might make, and the choice that he makes is undetermined, then whichever choice he makes will have been chosen for his own reasons. According to Kane, when an agent makes this kind of choice, he shapes his character, and since his choice is not determined by prior causal factors, he is responsible for it and for the character it shapes and for the character-determined choices that he makes in the future.

Kane’s approach is an important instance of those incompatibilist theories that attempt to explain how free will, while requiring indeterminism, could clearly be at home in the natural world as we know it (also see Balaguer 2010, Ekstrom 2000, and Franklin 2018). (This is as opposed to agent-causal accounts of free will—Chisholm 1964, O’Connor 2000—that invoke a type of causal power that is less easily naturalized). However, many have argued that any account like Kane’s, which inserts an indeterministic link in the causal chain leading to action, actually reduces an agent’s control over an action or at least leaves it unclear why such an insertion would increase agential control over actions as compared to a deterministic story of action (Hobart 1934; Levy 2011: 41–83; Pereboom 2014: 31–49; van Inwagen 1983: 126–52; Watson 1999).

Accounts such as Neil Levy’s (2011) and Galen Strawson’s (1994), described in the two preceding subsections, assume that the facts about the way a person came to be the way she is are relevant for determining her present responsibility. But non-historical views, such as attributionism ( §3.1.2 ) and the views that Susan Wolf calls “Real Self” theories ( §3.1.1 ), reject this contention. Real Self accounts are sometimes referred to as “structural” or “hierarchical” theories, and John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza (1998: 184–187) have called them “mesh” theories. By whatever name, the basic idea is that an agent is morally responsible insofar as her will has the right sort of structure: in particular, there needs to be a mesh or fit between the desires that actually move the agent and her values, or between the desires that move her and her higher-order desires, the latter of which are the agent’s reflective preferences about which desires should move her. (For approaches along these lines, see Dworkin 1970; Frankfurt 1971, 1987; Neely 1974; and Watson 1975.)

Harry Frankfurt’s comparison between a willing drug addict and an unwilling addict illustrates important features of his version of the structural approach to responsibility. Both of Frankfurt’s addicts have desires to take the drug to which they are addicted, and the nature of their addictions is such that both addicts will ultimately act to fulfill their first-order addictive desire. But suppose that both addicts are capable of taking higher-order perspectives on their first-order desires, and suppose that they take different higher-order perspectives. The willing addict endorses and identifies with his addictive desire. The unwilling addict, on the other hand, repudiates his addictive desire to such an extent that, when it ends up being effective, Frankfurt says that this addict is “helplessly violated by his own desires” (1971: 12). The willing addict has a kind of freedom that the unwilling addict lacks: they may both be bound to take the drug to which they are addicted, but insofar as the willing addict is moved by a desire that he endorses, he acts freely in a way that the unwilling addict does not (Frankfurt 1971: 19). A related conclusion about responsibility may be drawn: perhaps the unwilling addict’s desire is alien to him in such a way that his responsibility for acting on it is called into question (for a recent defense of this conclusion, see Sripada 2017).

One objection to Frankfurt’s view goes like this. His account seems to assume that the addicts’ higher-order desires have the authority to speak for them—they reveal (or constitute) the agent’s “real self”, to use Wolf’s language (1990). But if higher-order desires are invoked out of a concern that an agent’s first-order desires may not stem from his real self, why won’t the same worry recur with respect to higher-order desires as well? In other words, when ascending through the orders of desires, why stop at any particular point, why not think that appeal to a still higher order is always necessary to reveal where an agent stands? (See Watson (1975) for an objection along these lines, which partly motivates Watson—in his articulation of a structural approach—to focus on whether an agent’s desires conform with her values , rather than with her higher-order desires).

And even if one agrees with Frankfurt (or Watson) about the structural elements required for responsibility, one might wonder how an agent’s will came to have its particular structure. Thus, an important type of objection to Frankfurt’s view notes that the relevant structure might have been put in place by factors that intuitively undermine responsibility, in which case the presence of the relevant structure is not itself sufficient for responsibility (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 196–201; Locke 1975; Slote 1980). Fischer and Ravizza argue that

[i]f the mesh [between higher- and lower-order desires] were produced by…brainwashing or subliminal advertising…we would not hold the agent morally responsible for his behavior

because the psychological mechanism that produced the behavior would not be, “in an important intuitive sense, the agent’s own ” (1998: 197; emphasis in original). In response to this type of worry, Fischer and Ravizza argue that responsibility has an important historical component, which they attempt to capture with their account of how agents can “take responsibility” for the psychological mechanisms that produces their behavior (1998: 207–239). (For criticism of Fischer and Ravizza’s account of taking responsibility, see Levy 2011: 103–106 and Pereboom 2001: 120–22; for quite different accounts of taking responsibility, see Enoch 2012; Mason 2019: 179–207; and Wolf 2001. For work on the general significance of personal histories for responsibility, see Christman 1991, Vargas 2006, and D. Zimmerman 2003.)

Part of Fischer and Ravizza’s motivation for developing their account of “taking responsibility” was to ensure that agents who have been manipulated in certain ways do not turn out to be responsible on their view. Several examples and arguments featuring the sort of manipulation that worried Fischer and Ravizza have played important roles in the recent literature on responsibility. One of these is Alfred Mele’s Beth/Ann example (1995, 2006b), which emphasizes the difficulties faced by accounts of responsibility that eschew historical conditions. In the example, Ann has acquired her preferences and values in the normal way, but Beth is manipulated by a team of neuroscientists so that she now has preferences and values that are identical to Ann’s. After the manipulation, Beth is capable of reflecting on her new values, and when she does so, she endorses them enthusiastically. But whereas we might normally take such an endorsement to be a sign of the sort of self-governance associated with responsibility, Mele suggests that Beth, unlike Ann, exhibits merely “ersatz self-government” since Beth’s new values where imposed on her (1995: 155). And if certain kinds of personal histories similarly undermine an agent’s ability to genuinely or authentically govern her behavior, then agents with these histories will not be morally responsible. (For replies to Mele and general insights into manipulation cases, see Arpaly 2003, King 2013, McKenna 2004, and Todd 2011; for discussion of issues about personal identity that arise in manipulation cases, see Khoury 2013, Matheson 2014, Shoemaker 2012)

Now one can take a hard line in Beth’s case (McKenna 2004). Such a stance might involve noting that while Beth acquired her new values in a strange way (and in a way that involved moral wrongs done to her), everyone acquires their values in ways that are not fully under their control. Indeed, following Galen Strawson’s line of argument (1994), described in §3.3.2 , it might be noted that no one has ultimate control over their values, and even if normal agents have some capacity to address and alter their values, the dispositional factors that govern how this capacity is used are ultimately the result of factors beyond agents’ control. So perhaps it is not as clear as it might first appear that Beth is distinguished from normal agents in terms of her powers of self-governance and her moral responsibility for her behavior. But this reasoning can cut both ways: instead of showing that Beth is assimilated into the class of normal, responsible agents, it might show that normal agents are assimilated into the class of non-responsible agents like Beth. Derk Pereboom’s four-case argument employs a maneuver along these lines (1995, 2001, 2007, 2014).

Pereboom’s argument presents Professor Plum in four different scenarios. In each scenario, Plum kills Ms. White while satisfying the conditions on desert-involving moral responsibility most often proposed by compatibilists (and described in earlier sections of this entry): Plum kills White because he wants to, and while this desire is in keeping with Plum’s character, it is not irresistible; Plum also endorses his desire to kill White from a higher-order volitional perspective; finally, Plum is generally morally competent, and the process of deliberation that leads to his decision to kill White is appropriately responsive to reasons.

In Case 1, Plum is “created by neuroscientists, who…manipulate him directly through the use of radio-like technology” (Pereboom 2001: 112). These scientists cause Plum’s reasoning to take a certain (reasons-responsive) path that culminates in Plum concluding that the self-serving reasons in favor of killing White outweigh the reasons in favor of not doing so. Pereboom believes that in such a case Plum is clearly not responsible for killing White since his behavior was determined by the actions of the neuroscientists. In Cases 2 and 3, Plum is causally determined to undertake the same reasoning process as in Case 1, but in Case 2 Plum is merely programmed to do so by neuroscientists (rather than having been created by them), and in Case 3 Plum’s reasoning is the result of socio-cultural influences that determine his character. In Case 4, Plum is just a normal human being in a causally deterministic universe, and he decides to kill White in the same way as in the previous cases.

Pereboom claims that there is no relevant difference between Cases 1, 2, and 3 such that our judgments about Plum’s responsibility should be different in these three cases. Furthermore, the reason that Plum is not responsible in these cases seems to be that, in each case, his behavior is causally determined by forces beyond his control (Pereboom 2001: 116). But then we should conclude that Plum is not responsible in Case 4 (since causal determinism is the defining feature of that case). And since, in Case 4, Plum is just a normal human being in a causally deterministic universe, the conclusion we draw about him should extend to all other normal persons in causally deterministic universes. (For an important, related manipulation argument, see Mele’s “zygote argument” in Mele 1995, 2006b, and 2008.)

Pereboom’s argument has inspired a number of objections. For example, it could be argued that in Case 1, the manipulation to which Plum is subject undermines his responsibility for some reason besides the fact that the manipulation causally determines his behavior, which would stop the generalization from Case 1 to the subsequent cases (Fischer 2004, Mele 2005, Demetriou 2010; for a response to this line of argument, see Matheson 2016; Pereboom addresses this concern in his 2014 presentation of the argument; also see Shabo 2010). Alternatively, it might be argued, on compatibilist grounds, that Plum is responsible in Case 4, and this conclusion might be extended to the earlier cases since Plum fulfills the same compatibilist-friendly conditions on responsibility in those cases (McKenna 2008).

The four-case argument attempts to show that if determinism is true, then we cannot be the sources of our actions in the way required for moral responsibility. It is, therefore, an argument for incompatibilism rather than for skepticism about moral responsibility. But, in combination with Pereboom’s argument that we lack the sort of free will required for responsibility even if determinism is false (2001: 38–88; 2014: 30–70), the four-case argument has emerged as an important part of a detailed and influential skeptical perspective. For other skeptical accounts, see Caruso (2016), Smilansky (2000), Waller (2011); also see the entry on skepticism about moral responsibility .

There has been a recent surge in interest in the epistemic, or knowledge, condition on responsibility (as opposed to the freedom or control condition that is at the center of the free will debate). In this context, the following epistemic argument for skepticism about responsibility has been developed. (In certain structural respects, the argument resembles Galen Strawson’s skeptical argument discussed in §3.3.2 .)

Sometimes agents act in ignorance of the likely bad consequences of their actions, and sometimes their ignorance excuses them from blame for so acting. But in other cases, an agent’s ignorance might not excuse him. How can we distinguish the cases where ignorance excuses from those in which it does not? One proposal is that ignorance fails to excuse when the ignorance is itself something for which an agent might be blamed. And one proposal for when ignorance is blameworthy is that it issues from a blameworthy benighting act in which an agent culpably impairs, or fails to improve, his own epistemic position (H. Smith 1983). In such a case, the agent’s ignorance seems to be his own fault, so it cannot be appealed to in order to excuse the agent.

But when is a benighting act blameworthy? Several philosophers have suggested that we are culpable for benighting acts only when we engage in them knowing that we are doing so and knowing that we should not do so (Levy 2011, Rosen 2004, M. Zimmerman 1997). Ultimately, the suggestion is that ignorance for which one is blameworthy, and that leads to blameworthy unwitting wrongdoing, has its source in knowing wrongful behavior. Thus, if someone unwittingly does something wrong, then that person will be blameworthy only if we can explain his lack of knowledge (his “unwittingness”) by reference to something else that he knowingly did wrong.

Consider an example from Gideon Rosen (2004) in which a surgeon orders her patient to be transfused with the wrong type of blood, and suppose that the surgeon was unaware that she was making this mistake. According to Rosen, the surgeon will be blameworthy for harming her patient only if she is blameworthy for being ignorant about the patient’s blood type when she requests the transfusion, and she will be blameworthy for this only if her ignorance stems from some instance in which the surgeon knowingly failed to do something that she ought to have done to avoid her later ignorance. It won’t, for example, be enough that the surgeon’s ignorance is explained by her failure to doublecheck the patient’s medical records. In order to ground blame, this omission on the surgeon’s part must itself have been culpable, which requires that the surgeon knew that this omission was wrong. And if the surgeon wasn’t aware that she was committing a wrongful omission (when she failed to doublecheck her patient’s medical records), then this failure of knowledge on the surgeon’s part must be explained by some prior culpable—that is, knowing—act or omission. In the end, for Rosen,

the only possible locus of original responsibility [for a later unwitting act] is an akratic act …. a knowing sin. (2004: 307; emphasis in original)

Similarly, Michael Zimmerman argues that

all culpability can be traced to culpability that involves lack of ignorance, that is, that involves a belief on the agent’s part that he or she is doing something morally wrong. (1997: 418)

The above reasoning may apply not just to cases in which a person is unaware of the consequences of her action, but also to cases in which a person is unaware of the moral status of her behavior. A slaveowner, for example, might think that slaveholding is permissible, and so, on the account considered here, he will be blameworthy only if he is culpable for his ignorance about the moral status of slavery, which will require, for example, that he ignored evidence about its moral status while knowing that this is something he should not do (Rosen 2003 and 2004).

These reflections can give rise to a couple forms of skepticism about moral responsibility (and particularly about blameworthiness). First, we might come to endorse a form of epistemic skepticism on the grounds that we rarely have insight into whether a wrongdoer was akratic—that is, was a knowing wrongdoer—at some suitable point in the etiology of a given action (Rosen 2004). Alternatively, or in addition, one might endorse a more substantive form of skepticism on the grounds that a great many normal wrongdoers don’t exhibit the sort of knowing wrongdoing supposedly required for responsibility. In other words, perhaps very many wrongdoers don’t know that they are wrongdoers and their ignorance on this score is not their fault since it doesn’t arise from an appropriate earlier instance of knowing wrongdoing. In this case, very many ordinary wrongdoers may fail to be morally responsible for their behavior. (For skeptical suggestions along these lines, see M. Zimmerman 1997 and Levy 2011.)

There is more to the epistemic dimension of responsibility than what is contained in the above skeptical argument, but the argument does bring out a lot of what is of interest in this domain. For one thing, it prominently relies on a tracing strategy. This strategy is used, for example, in accounts that feature a person who does not, at the time of action, fulfill control or knowledge conditions on responsibility, but who nonetheless seems morally responsible for her behavior. In such a case, the agent’s responsibility may be grounded in the fact that her failure to fulfill certain conditions on responsibility is traceable to earlier actions undertaken by the agent when she did fulfill these conditions. For example, a person may be so intoxicated that she lacks control over, or awareness of, her behavior, and yet it may still be appropriate to hold her responsible for her intoxicated behavior insofar as she freely took steps to intoxicate herself. The tracing strategy plays an important role in many accounts of responsibility (see, e.g., Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 49–51), but it has also been subjected to important criticisms (see Vargas 2005; for a reply see Fischer and Tognazzini 2009; for more on tracing, see Khoury 2012, King 2014, Shabo 2015, and Timpe 2011).

Various strategies for rejecting the above skeptical argument also illustrate stances one can take on the relevance of knowledge for responsibility. These strategies typically involve rejecting the claim that knowing wrongdoing is fundamental to blameworthiness. For example, it might be argued that it is often morally reckless to perform actions when one is merely uncertain whether they are wrong, and that this recklessness is sufficient for blameworthiness (see Guerrero 2007; also see Nelkin & Rickless 2017b and Robichaud 2014). Another strategy would be to argue that blameworthiness can be grounded in cases of morally ignorant wrongdoing if it is reasonable to expect the wrongdoer to have avoided her moral ignorance, and particularly if her ignorance is itself caused by the agent’s own epistemic and moral vices (FitzPatrick 2008 and 2017). Relatedly, it might be argued that one who is unaware that he does wrong is blameworthy if he possessed relevant capacities for avoiding his failure of awareness; this approach may be particularly promising in cases in which an agent’s lack of moral awareness stems from a failure to remember her moral duties (Clarke 2014, 2017 and Sher 2006b, 2009; also see Rudy-Hiller 2017). Finally, it might simply be claimed that morally ignorant wrongdoers can harbor, and express through their behavior, objectionable attitudes or qualities of will that suffice for blameworthiness (Arpaly 2003, Björnsson 2017, Harman 2011, Mason 2015, Talbert 2013). This approach may be most promising in cases in which a wrongdoer is aware of the material outcomes of her conduct but unaware of the fact that she does wrong in bringing about those outcomes.

For more, see the entry on the epistemic condition for moral responsibility .

The special issues of Midwest Studies in Philosophy cited in the Introduction are Volume 30 (2006) and Volume 38 (2014), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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blame | compatibilism | determinism: causal | free will | free will: divine foreknowledge and | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | incompatibilism: arguments for | luck: moral | moral responsibility: the epistemic condition | responsibility: collective | skepticism: about moral responsibility

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I would like to thank Derk Pereboom for his helpful comments on drafts of this entry.

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Author: Jonathan Spelman Category: Ethics Word Count: 1000

1. Resultant Moral Luck

While my brother and I were growing up, our father would tell us stories from his time as a police officer. One of those stories was about a teenager who fell asleep at the wheel, crossed over the center line, and hit an oncoming vehicle containing two passengers, an elderly couple, both of whom were killed in the crash.

Years later, a friend of mine told me a similar story. Driving home one night, he fell asleep at the wheel, crossed over the center line, and hit an oncoming vehicle containing one passenger, a middle-aged woman. Though seriously injured, she survived.

Given these details, you might be tempted to think that the teenager is morally worse than my friend because the results of his actions were worse than the results of my friend’s actions.

If this is what you think, then you believe in the existence of moral luck , for you believe that how good a person is can depend on factors beyond one’s control (e.g., the safety features of the vehicle one hits, the physical condition of that vehicle’s passengers, whether those passengers are wearing seatbelts, etc.). In particular, you believe in the existence of resultant moral luck because you believe that how good one is can depend on the results of one’s actions, even when those results are beyond one’s control.

2. The Control Principle

While you may initially have been tempted to regard the teenager as morally worse than my friend, after carefully considering that the results of my friend’s actions were better due to purely lucky factors, you might be willing to reevaluate the moral situation. You might then conclude that the teenager and my friend are moral equals, neither any relevantly worse than the other. Why are they moral equals? Because the only difference between them is attributable to factors beyond their control . If this is what you think, then you do not, in fact, believe in the existence of resultant moral luck.

In “Moral Luck,” Thomas Nagel describes the motivation for denying the existence of moral luck. He writes, “Prior to reflection it is intuitively plausible that people cannot be morally assessed for what is not their fault, or for what is due to factors beyond their control.” 1 We’ll call this principle, that how good one is cannot depend on factors beyond one’s control, the control principle .

As Nagel admits, the control principle is quite plausible. We do not think that how good one is depends on factors beyond one’s control. There is a worry, however, that everything about a person depends on factors beyond her control, in which case moral assessment turns out to be impossible. To see how one might arrive at that conclusion, we’ll look at three other potential species of moral luck, namely circumstantial, constitutive, and causal moral luck.

3. Circumstantial Moral Luck

Whereas resultant moral luck exists if how good one is can depend on the results of one’s actions, even when those results are due to factors beyond one’s control, circumstantial moral luck exists if how good one is can depend on how one acts, even when how one acts is due to factors beyond one’s control. For example, imagine that two married women are drinking at a bar. Both find the bartender attractive, and each is willing to cheat on her husband with the bartender. The bartender, however, is only interested in one of them. Thus, only one of the two women cheats.

Intuitively, those who cheat are worse than those who don’t, but in cases like this one, whether an individual cheats depends on factors beyond his or her control. Thus, if those who cheat are worse than those who don’t, circumstantial moral luck exists.

4. Constitutive Moral Luck

Constitutive moral luck exists if how good one is can depend on one’s character traits, even when one’s character traits are due to factors beyond one’s control.

For example, although violent criminals seem worse than upstanding citizens, it’s plausible to think that whether one is a violent criminal or an upstanding citizen depends on one’s genes and the environment in which one is raised. Moreover, if that’s correct, then whether someone is a violent criminal or an upstanding citizen is due to factors beyond his or her control. Thus, if violent criminals are, in fact, worse than upstanding citizens, then constitutive moral luck exists.

5. Causal Moral Luck

Causal moral luck exists if how good an individual is can depend on anything about that individual despite the fact that everything about him or her is ultimately attributable to the laws of nature and antecedent circumstances.

The position that everything about us is attributable to the laws of nature and antecedent circumstances is known as  determinism . There is philosophical controversy regarding the compatibility (or incompatibility) of determinism and free will.  Regardless of this philosophical controversy, it does seem as though if determinism is true, everything about us is ultimately beyond our control.

6. The Problem of Moral Luck and Potential Solutions

By this point, it should be clear that the control principle is incompatible with the way we practice moral assessment. This is the problem of moral luck.

There are two popular responses to this problem. First, there are those who would have us reject the control principle in order to preserve the way we practice moral assessment. 2 Second, there are those who would have us alter the way we practice moral assessment in order to preserve the control principle. 3

If neither of those options seems plausible, one could give up on the possibility of moral assessment altogether or embrace a revisionist solution. Bernard Williams, for example, recommends that we draw a distinction between two kinds of assessment, moral and ethical. While affirming the truth of the control principle on which people cannot be morally assessed for what is due to factors beyond their control, Williams argues that people can yet be ethically assessed for what is due to factors beyond their control. Furthermore, he contends that ethical assessment is the more important of the two kinds of assessment. 4

Although none of these solutions seems entirely satisfactory, one of them must be correct.

1  Nagel 1976, 138.

2  For examples of this response, see Adams 1985, Walker 1991, Wolf 1993, and Fischer and Ravizza 2000.

3  For examples of this response, see Richards 1986, Sverdlik 1988, Zimmerman 2002, and Enoch and Marmor 2007.

4  Williams 1993.

Adams, Robert Merrihew. “Involuntary Sins.” The Philosophical Review 94, no. 1 (1985): 3-31.

Enoch, David and Andrei Marmor. “The Case against Moral Luck.” Law and Philosophy 26, no. 4 (July 2007): 405-436.

Fischer, John Martin and Mark Ravizza. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Nagel, Thomas. “Moral Luck.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 50 (1976): 137-151.

Richards, Norvin. “Luck and Desert.” Mind 95, no. 378 (April 1986): 198-209.

Sverdlik, Steven. “Crime and Moral Luck.” American Philosophical Quarterly 25, no. 1 (January 1988): 79-86.

Walker, Margaret Urban. “Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure Agency.” Metaphilosophy 22, nos. 1-2 (January 1991): 14-27.

Williams, Bernard. “Postscript.” Moral Luck . Ed. Daniel Statman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. 251-258.

Wolf, Susan. Freedom Within Reason . New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Zimmerman, Michael J. “Taking Luck Seriously.” The Journal of Philosophy 99, no. 11 (November 2002): 553-576.

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About the Author

Jonathan Spelman is an assistant professor of philosophy at Ohio Northern University. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado Boulder, and he specializes in normative ethics and metaethics. When he’s not doing philosophy, he enjoys playing golf, taking photos, and spending time with his family. JonathanSpelman.com  

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Moral luck and the unfairness of morality

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• Published: 18 September 2018
• Volume 176 , pages 3179–3197, ( 2019 )

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Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control positively affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Kinds of moral luck are differentiated by the source of lack of control such as the results of her actions, the circumstances in which she finds herself, and the way in which she is constituted. Many philosophers accept the existence of some of these kinds of moral luck but not others, because, in their view, the existence of only some of them would make morality unfair. I, however, argue that this intermediary approach is unstable, because either morality is fair in ways that rule out resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck (and this leads to moral responsibility skepticism), or morality is unfair in ways that permit the existence of those kinds of moral luck. Thus, such intermediary approaches lack the motivation that their proponents have long taken them to have. In the appendix, I point to ways in which morality is unfair concerning the scope of moral responsibility, moral obligation, moral taint, being a good or bad person, and flourishing.

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Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control positively affect the degree of praise or blame she deserves. Footnote 1 Kinds of moral luck are differentiated by the source of lack of control such as the results of her actions, the circumstances in which she finds herself, and the way in which she is constituted (Nagel 1979 , p. 28). Footnote 2 Many philosophers allow some of those three kinds of moral luck to exist but not others, and a popular reason why is that if certain kinds of moral luck were to exist, morality would be unjust or unfair (Statman 1993 , pp. 2, 3). I, however, argue that this intermediary approach is unstable, because either morality is fair in ways that rule out resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck (and this leads to moral responsibility skepticism), or morality is unfair in ways that permit the existence of all three kinds of moral luck. But then, the most common positions in the moral luck debate—namely, the positions that affirm some kinds of moral luck and deny others—cannot appeal to the unfairness objection to motivate their denial of only some kinds of moral luck. Thus, such intermediary approaches lack the motivation that their proponents have long taken them to have.

I proceed as follows. In the first two sections, I define and illustrate the canonical kinds of moral luck, and present the strongest version of the unfairness objection to moral luck. After these explications, I present a more precise outline of my argument. In the next three sections, I consider several intermediary positions on moral luck and argue that each is unmotivated with respect to the ideal of fairness. I offer some concluding thoughts, and, subsequently, I provide an appendix on several ways in which morality is unfair with respect to moral properties other than degree of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness.

1 Categories of moral luck

Thomas Nagel’s ( 1979 , p. 28) taxonomy of moral luck includes resultant, circumstantial, constitutive, and causal moral luck. Footnote 3 Resultant moral luck occurs when an agent performs an action or omission with a consequence that is at least partially beyond her control and that consequence positively affects her praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. By ‘positively affects’, I mean that the luck at issue does not undermine praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. Footnote 4 Here is an example. Killer, our first character, is at a party and drives home drunk. At a certain point in her journey, she swerves, hits the curb, and kills a pedestrian who was on the curb. Merely Reckless, our second character, is exactly like Killer in every way, but, when she swerves and hits a curb, she kills no one. There was no pedestrian on the curb for her to kill. The difference between Killer and Merely Reckless is a matter of luck. Is Killer more blameworthy—that is, does she deserve more blame—than Merely Reckless? If Killer is more blameworthy, this would be a case of resultant moral luck, and if they are equally blameworthy, this would not be a case of resultant moral luck.

Circumstantial moral luck occurs when it is outside of the agent’s control whether she faces a morally significant challenge or opportunity, and it positively affects her praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. Here are two more examples. No Start, our third character, gets drunk and gets into her car in exactly the same way as our first two characters, but the difference is that her car does not start. As a result, she has to call a cab to take her home. But if No Start’s engine had turned over, she would have driven drunk just as they did. By stipulation, it is beyond No Start’s control that her car fails to start, and it is outside of Merely Reckless’s control that her car does start. Works Tonight, our fourth character, has the same moral character as Killer, Merely Reckless, and No Start, and so Works Tonight would have gotten drunk and driven home if she had gone to the party as she had planned. Works Tonight, however, was called in to work, and was thereby saved from disgrace. Of course, it is a matter of luck that Works Tonight was called into work, and that the other three were not. Are No Start and Works Tonight as blameworthy as Merely Reckless? Footnote 5 If Merely Reckless is more blameworthy than No Start and No Start is more blameworthy than Works Tonight, then circumstantial moral luck would exist in both cases, because luck in opportunity would make a moral responsibility-relevant difference. If, however, all three of them are equally blameworthy, then circumstantial moral luck would not exist in these cases; and all three would be exactly as blameworthy as Killer too if resultant moral luck also does not exist.

Constitutive moral luck occurs when an agent’s dispositions or capacities are not voluntarily acquired, and they positively affect her praiseworthiness or blameworthiness for a trait or an action. Scarred Childhood, our fifth character, had a father who was killed by a drunk driver, and she subconsciously developed the policy never to drive drunk. If that traumatic experience had not occurred, however, Scarred Childhood would have had a different character and would have formed the intention to drive drunk at the party as the others do. Of course, it is outside Scarred Childhood’s control that she had this traumatic experience, and it is outside of Killer, Merely Reckless, No Start, and Work Tonight’s control that they never had that kind of traumatic experience. Is Scarred Childhood as blameworthy as the others? If Merely Reckless and No Start are each more blameworthy than Scarred Childhood, then constitutive moral luck would exist in this case. But if all five of our characters turn out to be equally blameworthy, then there would be no constitutive moral luck (and no circumstantial and resultant moral luck either). Footnote 6

Causal moral luck occurs when the laws of nature and past states of affairs that are outside of a person’s control causally determine what she does, and thereby positively affect her praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. Footnote 7 The question of whether causal moral luck could exist is the same question as whether an action’s having been causally determined is compatible with being morally responsible for that action, which is a standard topic in the free will literature. The moral luck debate proper, however, is about resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck, because these are the kinds of luck that make the problem of moral luck a distinctive problem. Footnote 8 Although it can be illuminating to consider whether causal moral luck exists alongside these three (see Hartman 2017 , pp. 53–55, 71–80), I ignore this complexity about causal moral luck for the time being, and return to it at the conclusion of the essay.

2 The absolute fairness objection to moral luck

The strongest version of the unfairness objection to moral luck is that it is unfair for any one of Killer, Merely Reckless, No Start, Works Tonight, and Scarred Childhood to be more blameworthy than any of the others, because the salient difference between them is a matter of luck and morality must be protected from all kinds of luck. Footnote 9

The nature of this absolutely fair conception of morality involves a requirement for total equality of moral opportunity and a kind of pure agency. Footnote 10 According to Bernard Williams’s ( 1981 , p. 21) description of that conception, “The successful moral life … is presented as a career open not merely to the talents, but to a talent which all rational beings necessarily possess in the same degree.” Thus, bad upbringings, tumultuous circumstances, and tragic consequences are not factors that foreclose opportunities to live successful moral lives; they do not even make it more difficult to do so. As Williams asserts,

Anything which is the product of happy or unhappy contingency is no proper object of moral assessment, and no proper determinant of it, either ( 1981 , p. 20). There is pressure within it [our conception of morality] to require a voluntariness that will be total and will cut through character and psychological or social determination, and allocate blame and responsibility on the ultimately fair basis of the agent’s own contribution, no more and no less ( 1985 , p. 194).

On this absolutely fair view, the moral praise and blame that we deserve cannot be conditioned by lucky factors outside of our control such as our genetic make-up, moral training, social pressure, opportunity, results, and the like. Footnote 11 It seems very plausible to think that an agent can be morally responsible on this view only if she created herself out of nothing, because it is only then that her agency would be pure in the right kind of way and everyone would have the very same moral opportunities to deserve praise and avoid blame, at least with respect to their interior constitution. This strong self-creation condition on morally responsible agency, however, cannot possibly be satisfied (see Strawson 1994 ). So, the absolutely fair conception of morality not only implies that no resultant, circumstantial, or constitutive moral luck exist, but also that it is impossible for anyone to be morally responsible for anything.

Williams rejects the absolutely fair conception of morality, regarding the impossibility of satisfying it as a reductio. Other philosophers such as Nagel and Galen Strawson, however, accept these fairness-based requirements as a deliverance of common sense. On the one hand, Nagel ( 1979 , p. 34) endorses a paradox, because he affirms these requirements that are impossible to satisfy and still believes that we are morally responsible for at least some of what we do. On the other hand, Strawson ( 1994 ) straightforwardly concludes from those requirements that it is impossible to be morally responsible for anything (cf. Levy 2011 ; Waller 2011 ).

Most philosophers in the moral luck debate part ways with Nagel and Strawson precisely because they believe that it is at least metaphysically possible for us to be morally responsible agents without affirming a Nagelian paradox. These philosophers allow at least some kinds of moral luck to exist in order to support morally responsible agency, but many of them deny that certain other kinds of moral luck exist on the grounds that their existence would make morality unfair. Over the next three sections, I argue that the fairness-based justification for such intermediary views is unstable, because there is no fairness-relevant difference between the kinds of moral luck that they accept and the kinds that they reject. If my argument is successful, then the proponents of these intermediary views should either (1) embrace absolute fairness as the standard of morality, and so embrace responsibility skepticism or the Nagelian paradox, or (2) agree that there is no good objection to constitutive, circumstantial, or resultant moral luck on grounds of fairness. In Hartman ( 2017 , forthcoming), I argue against taking the first horn (see also Sher 2005 ; Russell 2008 , 2017 ). If philosophers who occupy these intermediary positions take the second horn, at least some of them will have good motivation to abandon their positions, because a common motivation for rejecting moral luck is on grounds of fairness. Footnote 12

3 Allowing only essential constitutive moral luck

A central feature of Michael Zimmerman’s ( 2002 , pp. 560, 561) response to the problem of moral luck distinguishes between the “degree” and “scope” of moral responsibility (cf. Peels 2015 , p. 74). The degree of moral responsibility is about how much praise or blame a person deserves, and this kind of moral responsibility is luck-free. But the scope of responsibility concerns the events for which an agent is morally responsible, and this sense of moral responsibility is not luck-free. Zimmerman uses the degree/scope distinction as well as true subjunctive conditionals of freedom to eliminate all resultant and circumstantial moral luck and almost all constitutive moral luck. Footnote 13

Let us start with the way in which Zimmerman uses the degree/scope distinction to eliminate resultant moral luck. Because the only difference between Killer and Merely Reckless is a matter of luck and luck is irrelevant to degree of moral responsibility, the degree of their moral responsibility is the same (Zimmerman 2002 , pp. 560–562; cf. Enoch and Marmor 2007 , pp. 408–420; Peels 2015 , p. 83). But the scope of their moral responsibility differs, because only Killer is morally responsible for the death of a pedestrian. Killer is morally responsible for more things, but they are equally blameworthy. Thus, no resultant moral luck exists in this case, because the actual results of a person’s actions that are outside of her control do not affect her degree of praiseworthiness or blameworthiness.

Next, consider the way in which Zimmerman uses the degree/scope distinction and true subjunctive conditionals of freedom to eliminate circumstantial moral luck. Because the salient difference between Merely Reckless, No Start, and Works Tonight is a matter of luck with respect to whether the car starts or having to work, the degree of their moral responsibility is the same; all three are equally blameworthy (Zimmerman 2002 , pp. 564, 565; cf. Enoch and Marmor 2007 , pp. 420–425; Peels 2015 , pp. 79, 80). Nevertheless, the scope of their moral responsibility differs. Merely Reckless is morally responsible for driving drunk, and No Start is morally responsible for forming the intention to drive drunk. But Works Tonight is not morally responsible for anything related to drunk driving. How, then, can Works Tonight be as blameworthy as the others? Zimmerman’s ( 2002 , pp. 564, 565) answer is that Works Tonight is blameworthy “tout court” or simpliciter in virtue of the fact that she would have freely driven drunk as Merely Reckless does if she had not been called into work. Thus, no circumstantial moral luck exists in these cases, because which of the circumstances outside of their control are actual does not affect their degree of praiseworthiness or blameworthiness.

Finally, consider the way in which Zimmerman’s view eliminates most constitutive moral luck. Because the salient difference between Merely Reckless and Scarred Childhood is luck in formative history, they are equally blameworthy (Zimmerman 2002 , pp. 574, 575). Even though Scarred Childhood’s moral responsibility has no scope, she is blameworthy in virtue of what she would have freely done if she had had a different formative history in which her parent was not killed by a drunk driver. So then, no constitutive moral luck exists in this case, because which of an agent’s constitutive properties outside of her control are actual does not affect her degree of praiseworthiness or blameworthiness.

Zimmerman appeals to fairness to motivate this ethical outlook (Hanna 2014 , pp. 692–694). Zimmerman ( 2002 , p. 559) contends that the following general principle is intuitively attractive: “[T]he degree to which we are morally responsible cannot be affected by what is not in our control. Put more pithily: luck is irrelevant to moral responsibility.” Morality would, after all, be unfair if the degree to which we are morally responsible were determined by something other than what is under the agent’s control. As Zimmerman writes,

If there is unfairness in the differential judgments [for example, Merely Reckless is more blameworthy than Works Tonight]—as I believe there is … then this unfairness … [consists] in ascribing moral responsibility to one … but not ascribing it to the other ( 1987 , p. 382; italics mine; see also his 1988 , p. 136). I think there may be a (perhaps metaphorical) sense in which it would be unfair if Bill were more culpable than Ben [Bill and Ben are snipers, only one of which kills his mark due to luck] ( 2015 , p. 156; italics mine).

Likewise, Zimmerman would say that it would be unfair if Merely Reckless were more blameworthy than Scarred Childhood due to features of their formative history outside of their control. Let us refer to the conception of fairness operative here as subjunctive fairness . If persons S and S* are actually or subjunctively exactly alike with respect to some event x except regarding factors that are outside of their control, then it would be unfair if they were to be praiseworthy or blameworthy to different degrees with respect to x . Footnote 14

Zimmerman ( 2002 , p. 575), however, concedes that his use of subjunctive conditionals of freedom may not be able to eliminate all constitutive moral luck, because at least some of our personal characteristics may be essential to us. That is, Zimmerman recognizes that we cannot coherently appeal to what a particular person would freely do in circumstances in which she does not have a particular essential property or in which she has different essential properties in order to neutralize her essential constitutive moral luck, since it would not be her if she lost an essential property or had different essential properties. Thus, essential constitutive moral luck cannot be eliminated, and essential features of a person’s character outside of her control can affect the praise and blame she deserves by inclining her to perform and forgo various kinds of action. If different persons have different essential constitutive luck, it is impossible for everyone to be in the same counterfactual circumstances, which implies that there is no absolute equality of moral opportunity.

Zimmerman offers no proposal for eliminating essential constitutive moral luck. Nevertheless, there is good reason to think that he is committed to denying even this undeniable kind of constitutive moral luck. Since contingent constitutive luck involves a kind of lack of control that is pernicious with respect to the fairness of morality and since essential constitutive luck involves a similar lack of control, we should expect that essential constitutive luck is also pernicious in a similar way.

One might object that a relevant difference between these kinds of constitutive luck is that there is no luck involved in the so-called ‘essential constitutive luck’, because lucky states of affairs must be contingent (see Rescher 1993 , pp. 155–157). But this reply cannot help. Zimmerman ( 2002 , p. 559, cf. 2015 , p. 136) uses the lack of control definition of luck, and both contingent and essential properties may be outside of the agent’s control in the relevant sense. Furthermore, I argue in Hartman ( 2017 , pp. 23–31) that we should use the lack of control conception of luck in the moral luck debate, because it is only this conception that generates the distinctive puzzle involved in the problem of moral luck (see also Anderson forthcoming; Statman forthcoming). Footnote 15

One might also object that there can be no unfairness about which essential properties a person has, and this consideration points to a relevant difference between these modal varieties of constitutive luck. Zimmerman, however, would not agree. He thinks, for example, that the capacity to act freely is an essential property ( 2002 , p. 575) and that it is “unfair” that “an unfree object (whether animate or not) never has the opportunity to distinguish itself (or to disgrace itself) in such a way as to deserve praise (or blame)” ( 1987 , p. 385n25). This is precisely the sort of response we should expect of someone who aims to neutralize luck from affecting degree of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness.

Finally, one might object that because it is not metaphysically possible to eliminate essential constitutive moral luck, it poses no threat to the fairness of morality. This objection, however, cannot be right either, because the argument contains only a metaphysical reason that explains why essential constitutive moral luck cannot be eliminated. The argument does not give fairness-relevant moral reasons why essential constitutive moral luck does not need to be eliminated to preserve the fairness of morality, while contingent constitutive moral luck must be. Allow me to motivate these claims. Suppose, as I have argued in Hartman ( 2017 , pp. 71–82), that Zimmerman is committed to the truth of subjunctive conditionals of freedom that are metaphysically contentious in order to eliminate circumstantial and contingent constitutive moral luck. If it turned out that all such conditionals are necessarily false, we would not thereby conclude that circumstantial and contingent constitutive luck to which agents would still be subject can affect moral responsibility, because those kinds of luck should still be irrelevant to moral responsibility; they would still be pernicious to moral evaluation. By analogous reasoning, even if the subjunctive conditionals of freedom that would be able to neutralize essential constitutive moral luck are necessarily false, essential constitutive luck would still be problematic. Footnote 16

Therefore, it seems plausible that there is no fairness-relevant moral reason to affirm the subjunctive fairness conception of morality and to deny the absolute fairness conception of morality on the assumption that at least some of our personal characteristics are essential to us. Footnote 17 Thus, the motivation for Zimmerman’s account is unstable in this way. Footnote 18 Either he should embrace the absolute fairness conception of morality and so embrace moral responsibility skepticism or the Nagelian paradox, or he should accept that morality is unfair in a way that permits the existence of contingent constitutive moral luck. Over the next two sections, however, I argue that the latter option also involves agreeing that morality is unfair in ways that allow for the existence of circumstantial and resultant moral luck.

4 Denying some circumstantial and constitutive moral luck

Rik Peels ( 2015 , 2017 ) argues for a modest version of Zimmerman’s view in which no resultant moral luck exists, and only some kinds of circumstantial and constitutive moral luck do not exist. Footnote 19 Peels ( 2017 , p. 220) agrees with Zimmerman to the extent that at least some kinds of resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck would make morality “unfair” (cf. 2017 , p. 222). The modesty in Peels’s ( 2015 ) view, however, comes from a desire to avoid what he sees as an absurd implication of Zimmerman’s account—namely, that a person can be blameworthy in virtue of what she would freely do in modally distant circumstances even with character traits different from those she has in the actual world.

To avoid this implication, Peels ( 2015 , p. 77) appeals to an account of luck that augments the lack of control account in the following way: an event e is lucky for a person if and only if (1) e is significant for her, (2) she lacks control over e , and (3) e could easily have failed to occur (cf. Peels forthcoming). To put condition (3) more precisely, an event e satisfies this modal condition if and only if e occurs in the actual world but fails to occur in a broad range of close possible worlds in which the relevant initial conditions are the same. For simplicity, let us refer to Peels’s tripartite account as ‘luck*’ and the standard lack of control account as ‘luck’. The modal condition limits lucky* events to those that occur in the actual world and nearby possible worlds. Since, then, it is not a matter of luck* what an agent would be or do in a distant possible world, Peels’s account does not imply that an agent can be blameworthy with respect to counterfactual free actions in a distant possible world. In concrete terms, Peels’s view implies that Merely Reckless and No Start are equally blameworthy, and that both are more blameworthy than Scarred Childhood. It is a matter of luck* that No Start fails to find herself in Merely Reckless’s circumstance, but it is not a matter of luck* that Scarred Childhood fails to find herself in Merely Reckless’s situation. The possible world in which Scarred Childhood is in a circumstance like Merely Reckless or No Start is not close to the actual world at that particular time given all the character and historical changes that would be required to put her in the same circumstance.

Peels’s view of moral responsibility, then, eliminates all circumstantial and constitutive moral luck*, but it leaves a lot of circumstantial and constitutive moral luck intact. After all, most of the situations in which it is possible for us to be are situations in distant possible worlds. For this reason, Peels’s view eliminates only a very small proportion of cases of circumstantial and contingent constitutive moral luck in comparison with Zimmerman’s view.

Importantly, Peels uses the modal condition in his account of luck*—and so appeals to a metaphysical reason—to distinguish the circumstantial and constitutive moral luck* that cannot exist from the remaining circumstantial and constitutive moral luck that morality does permit. He, however, offers no fairness-relevant moral reason to justify this division (cf. Hartman 2017 , pp. 25–29; 65, 66); after all, what fairness-relevant moral reason could he appeal to in order to justify differential blameworthiness between Merely Reckless and No Start, on the one hand, and Scarred Childhood, on the other? Peels’s distinction between problematic circumstantial and constitutive moral luck* and benign circumstantial and constitutive moral luck, then, is unmotivated with respect to the ideal of fairness. Although I have my doubts about whether there is any plausible way to motivate Peels’s distinction, my point here is merely that appealing to fairness cannot do it.

5 Denying only resultant moral luck

The most popular position in the moral luck debate is that circumstantial and constitutive moral luck do exist but that resultant moral luck does not. Footnote 20 Call this position the Asymmetry View. In concrete terms, the view is that Killer and Merely Reckless are equally blameworthy. Nevertheless, Merely Reckless is more blameworthy than No Start, because only Merely Reckless drives drunk; and No Start is more blameworthy than Works Tonight and Scarred Childhood, because only No Start intends to drive drunk. According to this view, there is a morally significant difference between the kinds of luck that rule out two agents from performing the same kind of action or omission and the sort of luck that operates after two agents perform the same kind of action or omission.

A common justification for the Asymmetry View is that it would be unjust or unfair for Killer to deserve more blame than Merely Reckless but not for Merely Reckless to deserve more blame than Works Tonight (Swenson manuscript; Wolf 2001 , p. 6, 18). Footnote 21 On this actualist fairness conception of morality , if persons S and S* are actually exactly alike with respect to some event x except regarding factors that are outside of their control, then it would be unfair if they were to be praiseworthy or blameworthy to different degrees with respect to x . So, because Killer and Merely Reckless actually operate their vehicles in the same way, it would be unfair if they were to deserve different degrees of blame. Footnote 22

One might argue for the claim that the fairness of morality rules out only resultant moral luck in part by showing that extant circumstantial and constitutive moral luck is compatible with total equality of moral opportunity. That is, there is no deep unfairness in accepting circumstantial and constitutive moral luck because all persons enjoy equality of moral opportunity, but there would be such unfairness in accepting resultant moral luck (Swenson manuscript). Roger Crisp ( 2017 , p. 17) explores this idea by suggesting that it is always open to agents to do the right thing, and the degree of a person’s praiseworthiness or blameworthiness for an action is in part determined by the difficulty involved in doing the right thing:

A harder choice may be more praiseworthy, so to this extent the circumstantial bad moral luck of the man who stayed in [Nazi] Germany was counterbalanced by the greater moral opportunities available to him. And as it becomes more difficult to make the correct choice, so it becomes a lesser wrong [and the agent less blameworthy] not to make it.

So, the person who faces bad circumstantial or constitutive luck finds herself in higher stakes situations in which it is harder to do the right thing. And because the likelihood of her doing the right thing is generally lower in higher stakes situations all other things being equal, she will be more praiseworthy if she does the right thing and less blameworthy if she does the wrong thing. The opposite, of course, holds in lower stakes situations . Since the likelihood of her doing the right thing is generally higher in circumstances in which it is easier to do the right thing all other things being equal, she will be less praiseworthy if she does the right thing and more blameworthy if she does the wrong thing. So, one might think that this kind of equality of moral opportunity shows that there is no unfairness involved in accepting circumstantial and constitutive moral luck (Swenson manuscript). Footnote 23

I, however, challenge the claim that there is equality of moral opportunity even if we suppose that agents can always do the right thing and that degrees of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness are sensitive to degrees of difficulty. First, higher and lower stakes circumstances involve different kinds of moral risks. And as Linda Zagzebski ( 1994 , p. 409) argues, “[w]e do not get to decide initially how much of a risk we want to take,” because it is often not up to us whether we find ourselves in higher or lower stakes circumstances. Someone who finds herself in certain higher stakes circumstances by luck may make choices that result in her being overall more praiseworthy and/or less blameworthy than if she had made choices in particular lower stakes circumstances. Likewise, someone who finds herself in certain lower stakes circumstances by luck may make choices that result in her being overall more praiseworthy and/or less blameworthy than if she had made choices in particular higher stakes circumstances. Herein lies a remaining source of unfairness. Second, I am dubious that weighting difficulty in proportion to degrees of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness could ever be precise enough to grant everyone equal moral opportunities (Zagzebski 1994 , p. 409). To be clear, I am not saying that it is impossible to do the math; I am expressing doubt that degrees of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness are as fine-grained as the math requires. Thus, the suggestion that accepting circumstantial and constitutive moral luck as well as difficulty-weighted praiseworthiness and blameworthiness generates universal equality of moral opportunity is not a promising suggestion. I conclude that this kind of partial fairness-based justification for the Asymmetry View fails.

Let us turn to consider my positive argument for why there is no good fairness-based justification for the Asymmetry View. The basic argument is that the features that make circumstantial and constitutive moral luck benign with respect to morality are also present in cases of resultant moral luck, which makes it benign too. It is helpful to think through this claim concretely with Killer and Merely Reckless as the case of resultant luck, and Merely Reckless and Works Tonight as the case of circumstantial luck. Footnote 24

There are two plausible moral principles that provide a minimal kind of core fairness that is required for moral responsibility, and both principles are asymmetrically satisfied in a way that differentiates the blameworthiness of Merely Reckless and Works Tonight.

Here is the principle of dependence :

An agent is praiseworthy or blameworthy for an event only if the occurrence of that event at least partially depends on her free action or omission.

The event of Merely Reckless’s driving drunk is an event that depends at least in part on her free choices or omissions. Even if Merely Reckless is too cognitively impaired to freely operate her vehicle at the time she is driving drunk, her moral responsibility for driving drunk plausibly traces back to (and so depends on) an earlier omission to make plans about how to get home safely. Of course, since Works Tonight does not drive drunk, no such event depends on her free action or omission, which precludes her blameworthiness for driving drunk. So, the principle of dependence provides a reason to think that Merely Reckless may be more blameworthy than Works Tonight, because it provides a necessary condition on moral responsibility that is satisfied in one case but not the other.

Here is the principle of fair opportunity :

An agent is praiseworthy for an exemplary action or blameworthy for a wrong action only if she had a fair opportunity to avoid performing the action. Footnote 25

I leave it open whether we should understand ‘fair opportunity’ in a compatibilist way to include merely the agent’s having normative competence and situational control (cf. Brink and Nelkin 2013 ) or in an incompatibilist way to include the agent’s also having alternative possibilities at the moment of choice (cf. Otsuka 1998 , 2009 ). We may stipulate that Merely Reckless had the relevant kind of fair opportunity to avoid driving drunk, because she could have freely chosen in the relevant sense to make different transportation preparations or not to drink at all. Since, however, Works Tonight does not have an opportunity to drive drunk, she does not have a fair opportunity of the relevant kind to avoid driving drunk, which rules out being blameworthy for driving drunk. (Of course, the more natural explanation for why Works Tonight is not blameworthy is that Works Tonight does not drive drunk. The point here is that there is an asymmetry with respect to a necessary condition on moral responsibility.) So, the principle of fair opportunity also provides a reason to think that Merely Reckless may be more blameworthy than Works Tonight.

Plausibly, satisfying these principles is what makes cases of circumstantial moral luck consonant with a fairness core of morality. It seems plausible that anyone moved by the fairness-based justification for the Asymmetry View would agree.

Importantly, the basic ideas in the principles of dependence and fair opportunity are satisfied also in the comparative case of Killer and Merely Reckless in such a way that they leave open the possibility of resultant moral luck. The event of killing the pedestrian by drunk driving depends on Killer’s choice to drive drunk or traces back to a relevant past free action or omission, and thus Killer’s deadly consequence satisfies the core idea behind the principle of dependence. And since Merely Reckless does not kill a pedestrian, no such event depends on her free action or omission; thus, Merely Reckless cannot be additionally blameworthy for killing a pedestrian. Furthermore, Killer had a fair opportunity to avoid killing the pedestrian in part because she had a fair opportunity to avoid driving drunk; another part of what makes her opportunity to avoid killing the pedestrian a fair one is that the consequence of killing a pedestrian is a foreseeable result of drunk driving. But then, the same basic considerations that make circumstantial and constitutive moral luck benign on the Asymmetry View should also make foreseeable resultant moral luck benign too. Footnote 26 Thus, if the principles of dependence and fair opportunity are what make circumstantial and constitutive moral luck fair in a certain way with respect to morality, then there is no good unfairness objection to foreseeable resultant moral luck, because the basic ideas behind those principles are satisfied also in cases of foreseeable resultant moral luck.

Furthermore, resultant moral luck does not involve involuntary moral risk in the way that circumstantial and constitutive moral luck do. Recall that because the agent often does not choose whether she finds herself in higher or lower stakes circumstances owing to her circumstantial and constitutive luck, the agent does not decide how much of a moral risk she wants to take with respect to doing the right thing. Footnote 27 This kind of involuntary moral risk is not present in cases of resultant moral luck. Killer, for example, could easily have avoided being subject to the moral risk of causing the death of a pedestrian via drunk driving by forgoing the consumption of alcohol or by making foolproof plans to avoid driving. In general terms, if someone wants to avoid the moral risk involved with bad resultant moral luck, then she can avoid performing morally bad actions that have foreseeable bad consequences, and if a person wants a chance to have good resultant moral luck, then she should perform morally good actions that have foreseeable good consequences. Unlike in cases of circumstantial and constitutive moral luck, it is up to the agent what kinds of risks she takes with respect to resultant moral luck.

6 Concluding thoughts

I have argued that various intermediary positions in the moral luck debate—that is, positions that allow some kinds of moral luck to exist but deny others—are unmotivated according to the ideal of fairness, because there is no fairness-relevant moral reason to allow certain kinds of moral luck to exist and to deny others. The upshot is that philosophers who hold such intermediary views on grounds of fairness should either (1) embrace absolute fairness as the standard of morality, and so embrace either responsibility skepticism or Nagelian paradox, or (2) agree that there is no good objection to the existence of constitutive, circumstantial, and resultant moral luck on grounds of fairness. If philosophers who occupy these intermediary positions take route (2), then at least some of them will have motivation to abandon their positions, because a prominent motivation for rejecting moral luck is on the grounds of fairness. And if they take route (2)—as I think they should—they would have reason to think that morality is not absolutely, subjunctively, or actually fair in the ways defined in this paper.

Even if morality is unfair in these ways, morality can retain a fairness core if some version of compatibilism or libertarianism is true. Compatibilism, the view that an action’s being causally determined by past states of affairs and laws of nature does not itself rule out acting freely or responsibly, fits nicely with the position that constitutive, circumstantial, and resultant moral luck exist, because compatibilism amounts to the claim that causal moral luck is not incoherent. One interesting example of this is Paul Russell’s ( 2017 ) work. It is, however, less obvious that accepting constitutive, circumstantial, and resultant moral luck fits well with incompatibilism, which implies that causal moral luck cannot exist. Footnote 28 Could there be a fairness-relevant moral reason for the incompatibilist to deny causal moral luck, and yet affirm constitutive, circumstantial, and resultant moral luck? There may be such a reason if alternative possibilities at the moment of choice are required to furnish the agent with a fair opportunity to avoid performing certain actions. I am merely pointing to what may be a fairness-relevant moral reason for why causal moral luck cannot exist but constitutive, circumstantial, and resultant moral luck can. In future work, I will explore the idea that libertarians should accept the unfairness of morality, and so accept resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck. Footnote 29

Moral luck is often defined in a broader way such that it occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control affect her moral status (Anderson 2011 , p. 373; Nagel 1979 , p. 26; Hanna 2014 , p. 683). Philosophers writing on moral luck, however, tend to focus on the particular moral status of deserved praise and blame. For expositional simplicity, I have defined moral luck to focus on this particular moral status. Importantly, however, there are other kinds of moral luck where the ‘moral’ refers to moral obligation, virtue, flourishing, or some other moral property, and I consider several of these other moral properties in the appendix.

I consider Nagel’s fourth kind of moral luck involving causal determinism in the next section.

The term ‘resultant luck’ is from Zimmerman ( 1987 , p. 376), and ‘causal luck’ is from Statman ( 1993 , p. 11).

This part of my definition is in keeping with the italicized part of Nagel’s ( 1979 , p. 26) own idea: “[A] significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, [and] yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment ” (italics mine). One way in which my definition departs from Nagel’s is that it focuses on praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and not praising and blaming.

Why use two cases of circumstantial luck? Whether the case of Merely Reckless and No Start is a case of circumstantial or resultant luck depends on what actions are (see Nelkin 2013 ). If actions are purely mental events, it would be a case of resultant luck; they performed the same mental actions with different consequences. If actions are overt bodily actions, it would be a case of circumstantial luck, because they would have performed the same actions in the same circumstances but were not in the same circumstances.

I take this claim to be compatible with the skeptical position that none of them are blameworthy for anything. See, for example, Levy ( 2011 ), Strawson ( 1994 ), and Waller ( 2011 ).

Causal luck could be defined in a broader way to include also the indeterminism highlighted by the luck objection to libertarianism (cf. Mele 2006 ; van Iwagen 2002 ). I ignore this complexity.

For more about the distinctiveness of these problems, see Hartman ( 2017 , pp. 4–9).

It is not uncommon for philosophers to appeal to fairness as a norm that governs desert, blameworthiness, and being responsible (Levy 2014 , p. 126; Rosen 2002 ; Wallace 1994 ). For a challenge to Wallace ( 1994 ) and Rosen ( 2002 ), see Graham ( 2014 ).

The term “absolutely fair” is from Russell ( 2008 , p. 316). And as Otsuka ( 2009 , p. 374) recognizes, ‘morality’ in this context refers only to praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and not also to other moral properties such as moral virtue and vice.

Not everyone in the moral responsibility literature accepts the assumptions about control that animate the problem of moral luck. See, for example, Smith ( 2005 ) and McKenna ( 2008 ).

My argument is similar in various ways to Moore’s ( 1997 ) argument for resultant moral luck. Here is Moore’s argument: if resultant moral luck does not exist, then circumstantial, constitutive, and causal moral luck do not exist either. Nevertheless, at least circumstantial, constitutive, or causal moral luck exists. Therefore, resultant moral luck also exists. Moore ( 1997 , p. 237) justifies the conditional by claiming that “luck is luck, and to the extent that causal fortuitousness is morally irrelevant anywhere it is morally irrelevant everywhere.” My argument differs from Moore’s in at least three ways. First, my argument better captures the dialectic of the problem of moral luck, because I make impossibilism the extreme luck-free position, whereas Moore suggests that it is incompatiblism. Second, my argument makes no dubious assumption that there is no morally relevant difference between any kinds of luck (see Coffman 2015 , pp. 110–111; Hartman 2017 , p. 105). Third, my weaker conclusion is that denying only some kinds of moral luck due to unfairness is untenable, whereas Moore’s stronger conclusion is for the existence of moral luck.

In Hartman ( 2017 , pp. 71–80), I offer an argument that subjunctive conditionals of direct libertarian freedom are necessarily false, and show that different kinds of subjunctive conditionals of freedom that might be true are ill-suited for Zimmerman’s account of moral responsibility.

This principle is a revised version of one presented in Greco ( 1995 , p. 89). Notably, Greco rejects the principle, and affirms resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck (see Hartman 2017 , Ch. 6).

For explication and defense of various conceptions of luck including the lack of control account, see Church and Hartman (forthcoming).

Why not just think that Zimmerman is defending a luck-free view insofar as it is consistent with possibilism? According to the dialectic, however, this is not a legitimate approach without an argument for possibilism (and Zimmerman provides no such argument), because my argument is that the view that luck is irrelevant to moral responsibility inevitably leads to impossibilism or the Nagelian paradox.

Coffman ( 2015 , pp. 104–115) nicely argues that Zimmerman’s account of moral responsibility presupposes the falsity of what I am calling the absolutely fair conception of morality.

For a similar point, see Rosell ( 2015 , pp. 128–129).

Enoch and Marmor ( 2007 ) also espouse a modest version of Zimmerman’s view, but do so in a way that differs from Peels in particular ways. Interestingly, Enoch and Marmor do not motivate their view by any explicit appeal to fairness; elsewhere, Enoch ( 2010 , p. 46) suggests that appealing to fairness is merely a colorful way of stating the general anti-moral luck intuition.

The denial of resultant moral luck has been called “the Standard View” (Mackenzie 2017 , p. 95) and “the Orthodox View” (Ferrante 2009 , p. 276), and their assessment is corroborated by my own catalogue of published opinions (see Hartman 2017 , p. 129).

Wolf ( 1990 ) affirms the existence of circumstantial and constitutive moral luck in other writings; in fact, the existence of circumstantial and constitutive moral luck is an entailment of her broader compatibilist commitments (see Hartman 2017 , pp. 54, 55). Various other philosophers reject resultant moral luck as unjust or unfair without specifying whether they accept circumstantial and constitutive moral luck (Cushman and Greene 2012 , p. 273; Parker 1984 , p. 274).

A different justification of the Asymmetry View is that attributability accounts of moral responsibility imply the denial of only resultant moral luck (Khoury 2018 ; Talbert 2017 ). See Levy ( 2011 , pp. 180–212) for an argument against attributability views. Yet another justification is that we should accept moral luck if and only if it is required for being morally responsible for actions, and admitting resultant moral luck is not necessary for being morally responsible for actions—but admitting circumstantial and constitutive moral luck is (Rivera-López 2016 ). See Hartman ( 2017 , pp. 107–109) for a response to Rivera-López.

Crisp ( 2017 , p. 18) considers this position, but ultimately rejects it.

I choose Works Tonight instead of No Start to pair with Merely Reckless, because it is more obviously a case of circumstantial luck (see footnote 5).

Philosophers such as Wolf ( 1990 ) and Nelkin ( 2011 ) who endorse an asymmetry in the conditions of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness may revise this principle as follows: an agent is blameworthy for a wrong action only if she had a fair opportunity to avoid performing the action.

In Hartman ( 2017 , pp. 90–93), I argue that all extant resultant moral luck is foreseeable resultant moral luck.

It is plausible that ease and difficulty of circumstances do affect degrees of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness (Nelkin 2016 ), even though they are not weighted precisely enough to provide equality of moral opportunity.

Russell ( 2008 , p. 318) appears to assert that incompatibilism and the absolute fairness conception of morality necessarily go together. But it seems wrong that if one accepts incompatibilism, then one must also affirm the absolute fairness conception of morality.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Joel Archer, Gunner Björnsson, Corey Katz, Rik Peels, Kristin Mickelson, Paul Russell, Philipp Schwind, András Szigeti, Caroline Touborg, and one anonymous referee for this journal for comments on this paper.

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Appendix: The unfairness of morality

There are at least five ways in which morality is unfair concerning moral properties other than deserving praise and blame. First, different luck can generate differences in what people are responsible for, because luck affects the scope of an agent’s responsibility, even if we suppose that luck does not affect her degree of moral responsibility (Peels 2015 ; Zimmerman 2002 ). It is Killer’s bad luck that makes him morally responsible for more events—namely, the killing of a pedestrian—than Merely Reckless. The same goes for Merely Reckless’s being morally responsible for more things than No Start, Works Tonight, and Scarred Childhood, and for No Start’s being morally responsible for more things than Works Tonight and Scarred Childhood. Morality, then, is unfair with respect to that for which an agent is morally responsible. Footnote 30

Second, different luck can generate different deontic or virtue-based imperatives. Even if there is no resultant moral luck, Killer’s bad luck would still create moral obligations or virtuous directives to take responsibility for killing the pedestrian and to repair the moral damage that she has caused as far as it is reasonable and in her power (Hartman 2017 , pp. 92, 93; Enoch 2012 ; Wolf 2001 ). Footnote 31 That is, Killer ought to apologize to the family of the one she killed and to find other ways to make amends. Merely Reckless, of course, does not have these particular obligations, because she does not kill a pedestrian. Thus, morality is unfair with respect to what deontic or virtue-theoretic imperatives an agent has. Footnote 32

Third, different luck can generate differences in moral taint. As Marina Oshana ( 2006 , p. 355, 356) describes, an entity is tainted if it is altered in a way that eliminates some of its valuable features: “One is said to be morally tainted when one’s moral personality has been compromised by the introduction of something that produces disfigurement of the moral psyche.” Consider another variation on the case of the reckless driver. No Fault, a sixth character, performs perfectly behind the wheel, but she kills a child who emerges from a pile of leaves. Clearly, No Fault is not blameworthy for killing the child, because her driving is not faulty in any way. Nevertheless, we expect No Fault to experience guilt, shame, remorse, and regret about killing the child—that is, to feel what Williams ( 1981 , pp. 28, 29) famously calls “agent regret.” No Fault is morally tainted by the way in which killing the child shatters her positive self-image, alienates her from herself, and stigmatizes her as a child killer. Of course, Merely Reckless does not acquire moral taint of this kind or degree, even though it is plausible to say that her blameworthy action taints her in some way (Stump 2004 ). Furthermore, people can acquire moral taint through bad circumstantial and constitutive luck. In the novel Sophie’s Choice , the Nazis force Sophie to make a decision about which of her two children should live, and her refusal to choose would amount to the death of both; she opts to preserve one life and later commits suicide on account of the crushing guilt. Moreover, even innocent children of prominent Nazi officers experienced guilt and shame due to the way in which their practical identities were related to shameful persons and events (Sereny 2001 ). Thus, morality is unfair with respect to whether a person acquires moral taint.

Fourth, different luck can generate differences in being a good or bad person. Nagel ( 1979 , p. 26) provides a famous example of the way in which diachronic circumstantial luck can affect whether we become better or worse persons:

Someone who was an officer in a concentration camp might have led a quiet and harmless life if the Nazis had never come to power in Germany. And someone who led a quiet and harmless life in Argentina might have become an officer in a concentration camp if he had not left Germany for business reasons in 1930.

In fact, recent work in social psychology, the so-called situationist literature, supports the claim that the circumstances in which we find ourselves matter a lot more than we have previously thought for being a good or bad person, because almost all of us would do bad things in certain circumstances (Doris 2002 ; Miller 2013 ). Furthermore, certain kinds of capacity-related constitutive luck can set up people to become bad. A familiar characterization of a psychopath, for example, involves the inability to tell the difference between moral and conventional rules, and a lack of various emotions such as empathy. Thus, psychopaths are not able to appreciate the respective strengths that moral and conventional reasons should have in their deliberations. This lack of normative competence makes them more likely to engage in egoistic behavior and so to become worse persons (Shoemaker 2015 ). Thus, morality is unfair with respect to the degree to which an agent is a good or bad person, and even whether someone is a good or bad person.

Finally, different luck can generate differences in flourishing. Human flourishing involves appreciating beauty, engaging in projects, having good relationships, possessing good character, being free, and having knowledge to name just a few features of the good life. Bad luck can compromise flourishing by depriving a person of the means to participate in those activities; for example, a person might acquire chronic fatigue syndrome and thereby have to withdraw from family, friendships, work, hobbies, and religious activities. Bad luck can also dislodge some of the agent’s valuable properties related to her flourishing. For example, an agent may lose freedom due to enslavement, lose knowledge and self-direction due to amnesia or Alzheimer’s disease, or lose good character due to traumatic events (Nussbaum 2001 , p. 328). Furthermore, different luck can generate differences in desert of flourishing. If we deserve to flourish in proportion to our moral virtue and whether we are morally virtuous is affected by luck, Footnote 33 the degree to which one deserves to flourish is also subject to luck. Thus, morality is also unfair with respect to how well people flourish, and perhaps also how much people deserve to flourish.

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Hartman, R.J. Moral luck and the unfairness of morality. Philos Stud 176 , 3179–3197 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1169-5

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Moral luck emerges when one is treated well or praised regardless of the fact that the outcome of what has led him or her to be praised is dependent on other factors that are beyond his or her control. (Thomas, N. 1979) & (Williams B. 1993) Thomas Nagel in his article of “Moral Luck” (1979) noted that in our day to day activities, moral blame and moral praise are influenced to a greater extent intuitively. He gave an example of two reckless drivers where one causes an accident and the other does not. The fact the driver who has caused accident no matter how he/she has tried to avoid it is more blameworthy than the other driver shows how society’s judgment depends on intuition. He writes that many judgments and practices assumes that one has a full control of the situation and the outcome of what one is blamed of or praised for depends on the factors that are fully in his or her control. Nagel thinks that in reality, it is somehow hard to blame or praise someone going on an assumption of control that the outcome was solely determined by the person’s control. His argument was that, in many cases, the outcome of many occurrences seems to be beyond human control. He outlined four ways in which objects of moral assessment were subject to moral luck. First of all Nagel touched on the issue of luck. This is simply the way situation have turned out. In the case of the above two drivers, they both committed similar offences of reckless driving, but the one who was more blameworthy was the one who caused death by accident. The second thing that he wrote about was the personal factors that determined the behavioral character of someone. He argues that one can be blamed due to his or her behavior without putting into consideration that this behavior was shaped by environment and upbringing which are beyond one’s control. Thirdly, he discusses which was also subject to forces of luck was the responsibilities that are bestowed on someone and of which are subject to factors beyond the control of someone. Finally, he discussed the very actions of will too is subject to forces of luck.

Critical reflection of “Moral Luck”

Moral luck becomes a problem due to inclination of judgments and moral responsibility towards voluntary action rather than the generally applied intuitive judgment. Thomas Nagel in this article of “Moral Luck” did not provide for an effective and faster solution to this problem of moral luck. He goes to suggest that moral luck in a sense has no solution. According to Thomas Nagel’s argument, he strongly suggests that individuals should not receive blame or praise for things that they had no control of. Writing further, he showed ways in which various outcomes depended on external factors that are not under someone’s control. In this way Nagel seems to erode the very basic foundation of judging moral responsibility and his assertion would be dangerous to the society as many deviance behaviors would arise since most of them have certain elements of factors that one would not have any control of. The reality is that there is no course of action that is not under the influential forces of luck. (Walker, M.U 1993) Though Nagel argued that someone ought to be blame free if the outcome were influenced by external forces of luck, the society while judging someone must put into consideration the prevailing circumstances and also the final result of the outcome not simply following the principle of control as Nagel advocated. Personally, I agree with most of Nagel’s suggestions about moral luck. I do not think that is fair for someone to be praised or even be blamed for something that they have absolutely no control over, particularly the latter. The world is very dynamic and unpredictable and it is this dynamism that makes living life so exhilarating. However, it is not fair for one to receive praise or blame for things or outcomes that are consequences of uncontrollable factors. Such things such as an individual’s behavior, no matter how irritating it may be may not actually be someone’s fault. The behavior may have been a consequence of the environment that eh grew up in. the best thing to do would be to “tolerate” rather than “praise” or “blame”. It is however impossible to enact such a notion in this world and this is where the ‘problem’ (which is what I think it is), of moral luck comes into play.

The Absurd is among the articles written by Professor Thomas Nagel (1971). In this article, Nagel tried to explain that the absurdity of life was a kind of perception that was at an individual level, and that differed from one person to another. He further went on to suggest that someone perceives that things are absurd when reality fails to fit congruently into what he or she conceptualizes reality ought to be. Nagel suggests that absurdity arises in life due to inverted priorities of people through taking things that are less important in life very seriously. In this article, he argued that the importance and meaningfulness of things are internally subjective from within a person. In this strongly argued article, Nagel first outlines the various standpoints of thinking that life by itself is absurd and is a journey towards nowhere and clearly disputes the ordinary reasons that have been given for thinking that life is absurd. Nagel in this article rejects the notion held by many that life is absurd because nothing that is done today will matter in the distant future. In response to this, he argues that things of the distant future have nothing to do with the present, and, therefore, is insufficient to point out the absurdity of life. Nagel goes on to attack other reasons that makes people think that life is absurd. Human attributes such as brevity and size as compared to the nature should not be the basis of judging the absurdity of life as Nagel put across. He makes it clear that the human hugeness or infinite life would not reduce the fact of absurdity in life. Nagel goes on to show that life indeed is absurd and its absurdity arises from the fact that people takes life too seriously and there is various mismatch of the reality and what people perceive reality needs to be or their aspirations. Nagel finally advises that absurdity ought not to be taken as a threatening problem

Critical reflection of “The Absurd”

In his article, ‘The Absurd’, Thomas Nagel offers a compelling ground to think that life by itself is absurd. He goes on to assert that absurdity exists when people perceive it. Though absurdity exists, it does not depend on people’s perception as argued by Thomas Nagel. He suggests that it exists only when one perceives it. In this article Thomas Nagel sets out his belief of problems of life’s meaning and argues that the problem of life was the ones that caused absurdity. He further outlines various grounds of what absurdity entailed. Some scholars think that Nagel confused the epistemological problem of meaning of life with metaphysical problem of the meaning life. Nagel makes it clear that absurdity does not result in any form of defiance nor distress. He stresses that since absurdity and the perception of absurdity arises due to people’s interest in knowing it ought not to be a source of stress and other withdrawal behaviors. Nagel notes that there is no way a human being can avoid absurdity in life as long as he or she have the capacity of self-conscious and can contemplate the meaning of his or her life. Personally, I agree with Nagel’s assertions to a certain degree. Life is indeed absurd and this absurdity is attributable to the various problems that plague every single human being. In many occasions human beings go thorough problems some of which appear to have right out of nowhere. It is at such instances that the absurdity of life is exhibited. I am also in agreement with Nagel’s suggestion that in in addition to life problems, absurdity also arises when people take life too seriously. No one knows what the future holds an in light of this, I think that it is only fair that we concentrate on the present. Doing this will definitely make life to be less absurd than it already appears to be!

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