Abstract
Nagel’s constitutive moral luck is one important type of moral luck, but discussions of it have tended to focus on temperament. Luck in how aware a person is of morally relevant aspects of her situation—awareness luck—though similar in some ways, also raises different issues. Luck in temperament impacts how difficult a person finds it to behave well, while awareness luck impacts whether she even recognizes that the situation is making a moral demand on her. For this reason, awareness luck raises some unique challenges for those who would deny the existence of moral luck.
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Notes
Bernard Williams noted the same contradiction at about the same time. (Williams 1981). Unlike Williams, however, much of Nagel’s paper is devoted to categorizing specific types of moral luck. For this reason, in what follows I will be addressing Nagel’s writings, rather than Williams’.
Questions have recently been raised about whether the problem of moral luck might be better addressed by taking seriously the issue of what the word “luck” means in this context. Almost all writers have assumed, generally in a rather loose way, that to say an agent has bad (or good) moral luck is to say that part of what determines the agent’s blameworthiness (or praiseworthiness) was beyond her control. I will continue in this tradition, but for alternatives and reasons to consider them, see: Hales (2015); Whittington (2014); Driver (2013); and Pritchard (2014).
Nagel calls these, respectively: (1) luck in consequences, (2) luck in circumstances, (3) luck in how one is constituted, and (4) luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstances.
Being unusually oblivious to the morally relevant aspects of situations can also be a matter of luck, and discussion of this also properly falls under the heading of awareness luck. The issues raised by unusual obliviousness are somewhat different from those raised by exceptional awareness, however, and I will leave them for another time.
How we classify awareness luck is, to some extent, a matter of choice. Having the disposition to be especially aware of the morally relevant aspects of a situation is part of how one is constituted. This gives us a good reason for classifying awareness luck as a kind of constitutional luck. Nonetheless, there are important ways in which the relevant disposition is unlike those Nagel discusses under that heading. (See below.) For this reason, I prefer to classify awareness luck as a distinct type of moral luck. But one might easily make a different choice. For instance, Nafsika Anthanassoulis observes that how we react to the circumstances in which we find ourselves shapes our character. Thus she combines circumstantial luck and constitutive luck under the broader heading of “developmental luck”. Athanassoulis (2000).
A 2013 Boston Globe article describes the experiments, and what scientists think about them fifty years later. (Shea 2013) Although the article raises a variety of questions about the original experiment, its demonstration of the extent to which ordinary persons may be coerced into acting in ways that they themselves see as immoral remains disturbing. The Stanford Prison Experiment similarly seems to show how context can induce individuals to behave immorally. (Zimbardo 2016)
The August 2015 story about the thwarting of an apparent attempted terrorist attack on a Paris train describes men who had good moral luck in how they were constituted. (Chrisafis 2015)
This is not the first time that an additional type of moral luck has been suggested. For instance, Herdova and Kerns contrast situations which differ only in ways that are morally insignificant, but in which the behavior of individuals nonetheless varies predictably in morally significant ways: putting a drawing of eyes on a sign that prohibits some kind of behavior (such as littering) increases the probability that people will refrain from the prohibited behavior. Herdova and Kerns call this specific type of circumstantial moral luck, “situational luck”. (Herdova and Kerns 2015) See also Athanassoulis (2005).
This is not yet to say he will act badly. Whether or not he’s judged to have acted badly will depend on the extent to which his ignorance is seen as excusing.
As noted above, I prefer to highlight the difference by calling awareness luck a distinct type of moral luck. But we might also say that it is a heretofore unacknowledged type of constitutional luck.
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Gert, H.J. Awareness Luck. Philosophia 46, 131–140 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9901-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9901-5