Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

moral luck: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

● anchor · a standalone construct in ethics Nearest construct by meaningfragilitycompare the meanings
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moral luck1 CONSTRUCTMoral luckWILLIAMS · MORAL LUCK

A single standalone construct; nearby constructs are located against it in the Collider. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.

Ethics

Praise or blame for what lies beyond an agent's control

The philosophers Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel introduced moral luck as a named problem in a paired 1976 symposium of the same title (Nagel's version reprinted in his 1979 collection Mortal Questions), describing the situation in which a person is morally praised or blamed for actions and outcomes that depend heavily on factors outside their control. Williams' driver case is the standard illustration: two equally careless drivers differ only in that one happens to strike a child who runs into the road, yet the unlucky driver is judged far more harshly, and often judges himself more harshly, than the lucky one. The construct is distinctive because it sets ordinary moral practice against the control principle, the widely held idea that people are responsible only for what lies within their control, and it sorts the ways luck enters into four kinds: resultant luck in how actions turn out, circumstantial luck in the situations one faces, constitutive luck in one's own temperament and character, and causal luck in how one is shaped by prior events. It names a standing tension in ethics rather than resolving it, and it is invoked wherever judgments of responsibility, blame, and desert must account for the role of chance.[1][2][3]

Unit
A named problem in ethics: the gap between moral judgment and what an agent actually controls
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified in normative and experimental ethics through cases in which praise or blame tracks outcomes or circumstances the agent did not control, weighed against the control principle

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Nearby constructs

akrasia1 fields · 3 citationsanchor · a standalone constructagency6 fields · 12 citationsjingle · one name, six constructscase2 fields · 3 citationsjingle · one word, two constructs

References

  1. Williams, B. A. O. (1976). Moral luck. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 50, 115–135. https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteliansupp/50.1.115
  2. Nagel, T. (1979). Moral luck. In Mortal questions (pp. 24–38). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1976)
  3. Nelkin, D. K. (2021). Moral luck. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

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