Moral Luck: When Ethics Meet Chance
Two drivers leave the same bar on the same Saturday night. Both have had four beers over two hours. Both are above the legal limit. Both decide to drive home rather than call a cab. Both take the same route through a residential neighborhood at the same speed, with the same impaired reaction time.
Driver A makes it home without incident. She parks in her driveway, stumbles inside, and wakes up the next morning with a headache and mild guilt.
Driver B, taking the same road five minutes later, encounters a child who darts out from between parked cars chasing a ball. With impaired reflexes, Driver B cannot stop in time. The child dies.
Here is the philosophical puzzle that has troubled ethicists for decades: both drivers made identical decisions with identical levels of recklessness and identical moral culpability at the moment of choosing to drive. The only difference between them is luck--the entirely random factor of whether a child happened to be in the road. Yet we judge them profoundly differently. Driver A gets a hangover. Driver B gets charged with vehicular manslaughter, faces years in prison, and carries the weight of having killed a child for the rest of her life. Our legal system treats them differently. Our moral intuitions treat them differently. We feel that Driver B did something worse, even though the decision--the only thing either driver actually controlled--was identical.
This is the problem of moral luck: the phenomenon whereby factors entirely beyond a person's control affect the moral judgment we make of their actions, character, or responsibility. First named and rigorously analyzed by the philosophers Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel in independent essays published in 1976, moral luck exposes a deep tension at the heart of our moral thinking that no philosopher has fully resolved. We believe people should only be held responsible for what they can control. Yet we routinely praise and blame people for outcomes shaped by factors far beyond their control. Both of these commitments feel rationally compelling. They cannot both be fully correct. And abandoning either one threatens to unravel how we think about justice, responsibility, and desert altogether.
The problem is not a philosopher's parlor game. It permeates every aspect of how we assign praise and blame, structure legal systems, distribute rewards and punishments, and evaluate the moral worth of ourselves and others. If moral luck is real and pervasive, it threatens the foundations of moral responsibility itself. If we try to eliminate it, we may find there is very little left for which anyone can genuinely be praised or blamed.
The Control Principle: The Bedrock Under Threat
Before examining the varieties of moral luck, it is worth understanding what makes the problem so threatening. The issue is that moral luck violates what philosophers call the Control Principle--one of the most deeply held intuitions in Western moral thought.
The Control Principle states: people should be morally assessed only for what is within their control.
This principle feels almost self-evidently correct. Blaming someone for something they could not have prevented seems fundamentally unfair. Praising someone for an outcome they achieved by accident seems undeserved. The control principle underwrites our commitments to fairness in punishment, proportionality in reward, and the basic idea that moral responsibility requires agency.
Immanuel Kant articulated this idea most forcefully. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant argued that the only thing unconditionally good is a good will--the intention to do what is right. Outcomes, Kant insisted, are irrelevant to moral worth. A person who tries to save a drowning child and fails is morally equivalent to one who tries and succeeds. What matters is the quality of the will, not the result. "Even if, by some especially unfortunate fate or by the niggardly provision of a stepmotherly nature, this will should be wholly lacking in the power to accomplish its purpose," Kant wrote, "it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself."
If Kant is right, moral luck should not exist. The quality of a person's moral character and the rightness of their decisions should not depend on factors outside their control. Yet the evidence from our actual moral practices suggests otherwise.
The Anatomy of Moral Luck: Nagel's Four Categories
Thomas Nagel, in his landmark 1976 essay "Moral Luck," identified four distinct types of luck that influence moral evaluation. Each reveals a different way that factors beyond our control shape moral judgments--and each grows progressively more troubling for the control principle.
Resultant Luck
Resultant luck concerns the outcomes of our actions--how things happen to turn out as a consequence of what we do, where the outcome depends partly on factors we do not control.
The drunk driver example is the paradigmatic case. Two people make the same reckless decision, but chance determines whether that recklessness produces catastrophic harm. We judge the one who causes harm far more harshly, even though both agents exercised identical control over the only thing they could control: the decision to drive while impaired.
Resultant luck operates pervasively across many domains of life. A surgeon performs a risky but medically appropriate procedure. Whether the patient survives depends partly on luck--anatomical variation, susceptibility to infection, the patient's resilience under anesthesia. A surgeon whose patients survive builds a stellar reputation; one whose patients die at higher rates faces malpractice suits and whispered doubts about competence, even when their skill and judgment were identical to those of the celebrated surgeon down the hall.
An entrepreneur makes a bold business decision based on careful analysis. Whether it succeeds depends on market conditions, competitor behavior, regulatory changes, and a thousand other factors outside anyone's control. Success brings admiration for vision and boldness. Failure brings criticism for recklessness and poor judgment. The decision was the same; only luck differed.
A military commander orders an attack based on the best intelligence available. Whether it succeeds depends on weather, enemy movements, equipment reliability, and the uncountable contingencies of battle. Victorious commanders become national heroes whose statues fill public squares. Defeated commanders become cautionary tales studied in military academies for what they did wrong--even when what they "did wrong" was simply being unlucky.
In each case, the moral evaluation tracks the outcome, not the quality of the decision at the time it was made with the information available.
Circumstantial Luck
Circumstantial luck concerns the situations, challenges, and moral tests a person happens to face in life. Some people encounter severe moral tests that reveal or shape their character. Others, through no virtue of their own, simply never face those tests.
The most powerful examples emerge from history. Consider ordinary German citizens living during the Nazi era. Some found themselves in positions where they could shelter Jewish neighbors at enormous personal risk. A few did so heroically--Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, the countless less famous individuals who hid families in their attics and basements. Others, facing the same circumstances, collaborated with the regime or looked away in frightened silence. These two groups faced the same moral test and responded differently, and we can meaningfully judge their choices.
But what about the German who happened to live in a rural area where no Jewish families resided? What about the one who emigrated to Argentina in 1930 for economic reasons, years before anyone could have foreseen what was coming? What about the person who was simply too young during those years to be confronted with adult moral choices? These people were never tested. Their moral character--whether they would have been heroes, collaborators, or bystanders--was never revealed because circumstances never demanded it.
Are these untested people morally equivalent to those who actually sheltered persecuted neighbors at risk to their own lives and their families' safety? Something feels wrong about saying yes. But the untested person has no way of knowing what they would have done. And the fact that they were never tested is pure luck--the accident of where they were born, when they lived, and what circumstances they encountered.
Circumstantial luck also operates in less dramatic but equally pervasive everyday ways. A person born into material comfort never faces the temptation to steal to feed their children. A person raised in a stable, loving family never has to overcome the psychological wounds that lead others toward violence or self-destruction. A person living in a peaceful, well-governed society never confronts the moral compromises that war, famine, or state collapse force upon people. We credit these fortunate individuals with virtues--honesty, non-violence, civic decency--that were never genuinely tested by circumstances that would have revealed whether those virtues were real or merely the comfortable default of an easy life.
Constitutive Luck
Constitutive luck is perhaps the most philosophically radical category. It concerns the traits, dispositions, temperament, and character that constitute who you are as a moral agent--factors that make you you--but which are themselves substantially shaped by forces beyond your control.
Your temperament is partly determined by genetics. Whether you are naturally patient or easily frustrated, empathetic or emotionally detached, impulsive or deliberate, prone to anxiety or constitutionally calm--these traits are influenced by neurobiology you had no say in receiving. A person born with strong empathic capacity and good impulse control has a substantial advantage in moral life compared to someone born with diminished empathy and poor emotional regulation. The first person will find it comparatively easy to be kind, patient, and generous. The second will have to fight against their own neurology to achieve the same moral outcomes--and will fail more often, not because of weaker moral commitment, but because of harder biological starting conditions.
Beyond genetics, your character is profoundly shaped by upbringing, early experiences, education, culture, economic circumstances, and social environment--none of which you chose. The child raised by loving, morally thoughtful parents in a safe neighborhood with good schools has enormous developmental advantages compared to the child raised by neglectful or abusive parents in a violent, economically devastated community. We routinely praise the first person's good character and blame the second person's moral failures, even though the foundation upon which each person's character was built was laid entirely by forces outside their control.
Constitutive luck raises the deepest questions because it challenges the very concept of a moral agent who stands independent of their circumstances and freely authors their own character. If your character is itself largely a product of luck--genetic luck, developmental luck, social luck--then judging people for their character amounts to judging them for something they did not create.
Causal Luck
Causal luck concerns the broadest question of all: the degree to which all human actions are causally determined by prior events stretching back before any individual was born. If determinism is true--if every event, including every human decision, is the inevitable result of prior causes operating according to natural law--then in the deepest sense, everything about moral life involves luck. You did not choose the initial conditions of the universe, the causal chains that produced your particular brain, or the specific combination of genes and experiences that shaped every decision you have ever made.
This category connects moral luck to the ancient philosophical problem of free will and determinism. If our actions are products of causal chains we did not initiate and cannot fully control, then moral responsibility as traditionally understood may rest on foundations that are more fragile than they appear. Moral luck, in this most radical form, threatens not just to complicate moral responsibility but to dissolve it entirely.
Why This Matters: Moral Luck Across Life Domains
The philosophical problem of moral luck is not an academic curiosity. It shapes real institutions, real judgments, and real lives. The following comparison illustrates how moral luck operates across different areas of human experience:
| Domain | What We Judge | Role of Luck | How Judgment Differs Based on Luck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Criminal justice | Completed crime vs. attempt | Whether attempt succeeds depends on factors beyond the agent's control | Murder carries heavier sentence than attempted murder despite identical intent |
| Medical practice | Surgeon's competence | Patient outcomes depend on anatomy, infection risk, comorbidities | Same procedure by same surgeon: praised when patient lives, questioned when patient dies |
| Military history | Commander's strategic ability | Weather, intelligence gaps, enemy decisions, equipment failure | Victory earns hero status; defeat earns blame for "poor judgment" |
| Business | Entrepreneur's vision | Market timing, competitor moves, regulatory changes, macroeconomic shifts | Success proves "genius"; failure proves "recklessness" |
| Parenting | Quality of upbringing | Child's temperament, peer influences, random experiences, neurological factors | Parents of well-adjusted children praised; parents of troubled children blamed |
| Everyday morality | Strength of character | Genetic temperament, childhood stability, economic security, social support | Fortunate people credited with virtues never genuinely tested |
If moral luck were a minor edge case--a rare exception to an otherwise sound system of moral evaluation--it could be treated as a minor theoretical inconvenience. But as the table makes clear, luck penetrates every domain of moral judgment. Nagel himself observed that the more carefully we examine the conditions under which people can be held genuinely responsible, the more those conditions seem to shrink under the influence of luck, until disturbingly little remains that can truly be attributed to the agent alone.
Philosophical Responses: Five Ways to Handle the Problem
Philosophers have responded to moral luck in fundamentally different ways, each with distinctive strengths and characteristic blind spots.
Response 1: Denial -- Moral Luck Does Not Really Exist
Some philosophers, following Kant, argue that genuine moral evaluation should be immune to luck. On this view, the fact that we do judge people differently based on outcomes does not mean we should. The drunk driver who kills a child is not morally worse than the one who arrives home safely. Our different reactions reflect an emotional response to the horror of visible tragedy, not a sound moral judgment about the quality of the decision.
Defenders of this position argue that moral assessment should focus exclusively on what is within the agent's control: their intentions, decisions, and efforts. Two people who make identical decisions with identical information and identical intent are morally equivalent, full stop, regardless of what happens afterward.
The strength of this position is its perfect consistency with the control principle. Its weakness is that it demands we revise deeply held moral intuitions and restructure legal systems that currently take outcomes into account. It feels deeply, viscerally wrong to say that the driver who killed a child bears no greater moral weight than the one who arrived home without incident. The Kantian denial may be philosophically rigorous, but it conflicts with something fundamental in how human beings actually experience moral life.
Response 2: Acceptance -- Moral Luck Is Real and Inescapable
Bernard Williams argued that moral luck is a genuine and ineliminable feature of ethical life, not an error to be corrected through better philosophy. Williams held that the Kantian aspiration to make morality immune to luck reflects a misguided attempt to place ethics outside the contingent, messy, luck-saturated world in which human beings actually live.
Williams illustrated this with the example of the painter Paul Gauguin, who abandoned his wife and children to pursue art in Tahiti. If Gauguin had failed as an artist--if he had produced mediocre work and died in obscurity--his abandonment of his family would appear straightforwardly immoral: a selfish man neglecting his most basic responsibilities for a delusion of grandeur. But Gauguin succeeded brilliantly, producing masterworks that transformed Western art and enriched human culture permanently. This success does not erase the harm he caused his family. But it does affect the overall moral meaning of his life and his decision. The moral significance of his choice depended on an outcome he could not guarantee at the time he made it. And Williams argued that this dependence is not a flaw in moral thinking but an honest reflection of the human condition.
On this view, life is inherently risky, and moral life inherits that riskiness. We make choices under profound uncertainty, and the consequences of those choices legitimately shape their moral significance. Trying to build a morality that is perfectly insulated from luck is trying to build a morality disconnected from the actual conditions of human existence--and the result would be a morality too thin and abstract to guide real lives.
Response 3: The Social Practice View
A third approach treats moral responsibility not as a discovery about the metaphysical structure of the universe but as a social practice that serves indispensable human functions. Associated with P.F. Strawson's influential 1962 essay "Freedom and Resentment" and developed by contemporary philosophers like Susan Wolf and T.M. Scanlon, this view holds that practices of praising and blaming people serve crucial purposes--reinforcing prosocial behavior, deterring harmful behavior, expressing community values, coordinating expectations, and maintaining relationships of mutual accountability--even if the metaphysical foundations of desert and responsibility are less solid than we might wish.
From this perspective, the existence of moral luck is not a devastating objection to the practice of moral responsibility but a reminder that our practices are practical social instruments, not perfectly calibrated devices for distributing cosmic justice. We judge the driver who kills more harshly than the driver who arrives safely because doing so reinforces the norm against drunk driving more viscerally and effectively. The terrible outcome makes the moral lesson impossible to ignore or rationalize away. This is not metaphysically pure, but it serves a genuine and important social function that any realistic moral system needs to perform.
Response 4: The Epistemic Explanation
Some philosophers have argued that apparent moral luck is actually an epistemic phenomenon--a matter of what we know about agents rather than what is genuinely true about their moral standing. On this view, outcomes do not change moral facts; they change our access to moral facts by providing evidence about the quality of decisions that we would not otherwise have.
When Driver A arrives home without incident, it is psychologically easy to minimize the recklessness: "She wasn't that far over the limit," "It was a short drive," "Nothing happened, so it must not have been that dangerous." When Driver B kills a child through identical recklessness, the minimization becomes impossible. The catastrophic outcome forces us to confront the true level of recklessness that was present all along in both cases.
On this analysis, we are not judging Driver B more harshly because of the outcome; we are judging Driver A too leniently because the absence of harm allows us to avoid confronting the genuine danger. The outcome provides evidence, not moral difference.
This is an elegant solution, but critics argue it cannot account for all cases. Sometimes we genuinely do hold people more responsible for worse outcomes, not merely more aware of risks they took. Our legal systems, our emotional responses, and our considered moral judgments all treat outcomes as mattering in themselves, not merely as evidence about intentions.
Response 5: Moral Responsibility as Degree, Not Binary
A more recent philosophical approach suggests that moral responsibility is not all-or-nothing but comes in degrees that appropriately reflect the complex mixture of agency and luck in any particular case. On this view, both drunk drivers bear substantial moral responsibility for the reckless decision. The driver who kills a child bears additional responsibility--not equal to the difference between a parking ticket and manslaughter, but genuinely more than zero--because becoming causally connected to a terrible outcome changes one's moral situation in ways that matter.
This graduated approach avoids the stark choice between denying moral luck entirely (the Kantian position) and accepting it without reservation (the Williamsian position). It acknowledges that outcomes matter morally while insisting that the degree to which they matter should be calibrated to the degree of control the agent had.
Moral Luck in Legal Systems
Legal systems provide a fascinating case study in how societies institutionally manage moral luck, precisely because law must make practical decisions about punishment, liability, and responsibility that philosophy can leave unresolved in academic debate.
The Attempt-Completion Gap
Nearly every legal system on earth punishes completed crimes more severely than attempted crimes. Attempted murder carries a substantially lighter sentence than murder, even when the intent, planning, preparation, and effort were identical and the only difference was whether the gun jammed, the victim moved, or the ambulance arrived in time. The assassin whose weapon misfired faces less prison time than the assassin whose weapon fired true, despite identical culpability at the moment of pulling the trigger.
This gap has been debated by legal theorists for centuries. Some argue it reflects a sound moral intuition that actual harm matters over and above the intention to cause harm--that the world really is worse when someone dies than when they merely could have died, and punishment should track the actual badness of outcomes. Others argue the gap is a pragmatic concession to enforcement realities: punishing attempts as severely as completed crimes would require extensive surveillance to detect and prove attempts, would remove the incentive for would-be criminals to abandon plans before completing them, and would strike most juries as disproportionate. The gap persists because it serves multiple functions simultaneously, even if none of those functions can be fully justified philosophically.
Negligence, Strict Liability, and Tort Law
Civil liability systems embed moral luck even more explicitly. Under strict liability doctrines in product liability law, a manufacturer can be held financially responsible for harm caused by its products even without any negligence whatsoever. If a properly designed and manufactured product causes injury through sheer bad luck--an unforeseeable interaction, an improbable failure mode--the company bears the cost. Two companies using identical processes with identical safety records face radically different financial consequences depending entirely on whether luck produces a harmful incident.
The justification is pragmatic rather than philosophical: strict liability encourages maximum caution, ensures victims receive compensation even when fault is difficult to prove, and distributes risk efficiently. But it represents an explicit institutional decision to let resultant luck determine legal and financial consequences.
Sentencing and Mitigation
Criminal sentencing practices increasingly acknowledge circumstantial and constitutive luck through mitigation factors. A judge who considers that a defendant grew up in crushing poverty, suffered childhood abuse, has untreated mental illness, or grew up in a community saturated with violence is implicitly recognizing that the defendant's moral development was profoundly shaped by constitutive and circumstantial luck they did not choose.
This recognition creates deep tension. Acknowledging that unchosen circumstances substantially shaped someone's criminal behavior seems to undermine criminal responsibility itself. If the defendant's actions were largely produced by forces beyond their control, in what sense are those actions theirs in the way that responsibility requires? Legal systems navigate this tension pragmatically rather than resolving it philosophically--adjusting sentences to reflect mitigating circumstances without eliminating responsibility entirely. The result is a compromise that satisfies no theoretical position completely but functions reasonably well in practice.
Moral Luck in Everyday Life
The philosophical problem of moral luck does not live exclusively in dramatic courtroom scenarios and thought experiments. It saturates ordinary moral experience in ways we rarely stop to notice.
The Illusion of Earned Character
People who have lived morally decent lives naturally attribute their decency to strength of character, sound values, and good choices. They look at those who have failed morally--criminals, addicts, people who have betrayed trust or caused harm--and feel a measure of moral superiority. The thought is rarely articulated so bluntly, but it operates constantly beneath the surface: I would never do that. I am better than that.
Constitutive and circumstantial luck raise an uncomfortable question about this self-congratulation: How much of your moral decency is genuinely your achievement, and how much is the result of favorable conditions you did nothing to earn? If you have never stolen, perhaps that partly reflects the luck of never having been truly desperate. If you have never been violent, perhaps that partly reflects the luck of a stable neurobiology and a childhood free from the trauma that rewires developing brains toward aggression. If you have been generous, perhaps that partly reflects the luck of having more than you needed. If you have been patient, perhaps that reflects the luck of a calm temperament you were born with rather than one you laboriously constructed through moral effort.
This is not to say that moral achievement is meaningless. People genuinely do make moral efforts, exercise real discipline over natural impulses, and develop character through deliberate practice over years. But acknowledging the role of luck should temper the confidence of moral self-congratulation with humility. The philosopher John Rawls built his entire theory of justice on the recognition that many of the advantages people enjoy are "morally arbitrary"--products of genetic, social, and economic lotteries that no one can claim to deserve.
Parenting and the Luck of Outcomes
Parents experience moral luck with particular acuteness. Two families can employ substantively identical parenting approaches--the same values, the same rules, the same expressions of love, the same discipline style, the same investment of time and attention--and produce children with vastly different moral outcomes. One child internalizes the family's values and grows into a compassionate, responsible, thoughtful adult. The other, influenced by peer groups, neurological differences, a single traumatic event, or the sheer randomness of developmental trajectories, follows a darker path.
Parents of children who turn out well receive social credit and feel justified pride. Parents of children who struggle morally receive social blame and feel crushing shame. Both attributions substantially overlook the degree to which outcomes depend on factors no parent can control. The most devoted, skillful, loving parents cannot guarantee their children's moral development because too many variables lie beyond parental reach. Recognizing this should temper both the self-congratulation of the fortunate and the self-blame of the less fortunate.
Professional Reputation and Outcome Bias
In professional life, moral luck shapes reputation relentlessly. A financial advisor who recommends an investment that happens to perform well is regarded as wise, trustworthy, and skilled. One who recommended an equally well-reasoned investment that happens to lose money is regarded as reckless, incompetent, or dishonest. A project manager whose initiative succeeds because market conditions happened to be favorable receives credit for judgment, leadership, and vision. One whose identically managed project fails because market conditions shifted receives blame, demotion, or termination.
Psychologists call this outcome bias--the systematic tendency to evaluate the quality of a decision based on its outcome rather than on the quality of the reasoning process at the time the decision was made. Outcome bias is one of the most robust findings in behavioral psychology, and it represents the cognitive mechanism through which resultant moral luck operates in everyday judgment. Organizations that recognize and actively counteract outcome bias--evaluating decisions by the quality of the process rather than by results alone--tend to make better long-term decisions. But fighting outcome bias requires sustained institutional effort because the human tendency to equate good outcomes with good decisions is deeply ingrained.
Can Moral Luck Be Eliminated?
Given the philosophical problems moral luck creates, a natural question arises: can we structure our moral thinking and our institutions to eliminate or minimize the role of luck in moral evaluation?
The short answer is: partially, but never completely. And the attempt to eliminate moral luck entirely leads to consequences most people find unacceptable.
If we take the control principle fully seriously and refuse to hold anyone responsible for anything influenced by luck, moral responsibility begins to dissolve. Start removing factors beyond a person's control: outcomes (resultant luck), situations they happened to face (circumstantial luck), character traits shaped by genes and upbringing (constitutive luck), and the causal history that produced their decisions (causal luck). What remains? Nagel described the progressive stripping away as converging on a vanishing point where nothing is left--no residual core of agency untouched by luck that could serve as the proper object of moral evaluation.
This does not mean moral responsibility is an illusion. It means that moral responsibility operates in a world permeated by luck, and our practices of praise and blame must be understood as imperfect, practically necessary tools rather than as precise instruments of metaphysical justice. The most productive response to moral luck may not be trying to eliminate it but rather acknowledging it honestly and adjusting our moral practices accordingly.
Living with Moral Luck: Practical Wisdom
The most important practical insight from the philosophical literature on moral luck is not a solution to the problem but a set of orientations for living thoughtfully within a world where the problem cannot be fully solved.
Cultivate moral humility. Recognizing the pervasive role of luck should make us substantially slower to condemn others and more cautious in our moral self-congratulation. Those who have lived well have benefited from favorable luck alongside whatever genuine virtue they possess. Those who have lived badly have often struggled against unfavorable luck that more fortunate people never faced.
Expand compassion without abandoning accountability. Understanding that moral failure often reflects unfavorable circumstances should increase our capacity for compassion toward those who have failed, without collapsing into the claim that nobody is ever responsible for anything. Compassion and accountability are not opposites. A mature moral perspective holds both simultaneously--recognizing the influence of luck while still expecting people to do the best they can with the circumstances they have.
Focus on structures, not just individuals. If luck substantially shapes moral outcomes, then building social structures that reduce the impact of bad luck--robust safety nets, genuine educational opportunity, accessible mental health care, meaningful second chances after failure--is itself a profound moral imperative. We cannot eliminate moral luck, but we can construct institutions that soften its cruelest effects and give people better starting conditions from which to exercise whatever genuine agency they possess.
Evaluate processes, not only outcomes. Where possible--in courts, in organizations, in personal relationships--evaluating decisions by the quality of the reasoning process rather than by results alone produces fairer, more accurate moral assessments. This is psychologically difficult because outcome bias is deeply wired into human cognition. But deliberately shifting attention from "what happened" to "was the decision reasonable given what was known at the time" represents a concrete step toward reducing the distorting influence of resultant luck.
Take moral risk seriously. Bernard Williams was right that moral life is inherently risky. We make consequential choices under uncertainty with characters we did not fully author in circumstances we did not choose, and what those choices ultimately mean depends partly on how things turn out. Pretending otherwise--pretending that good intentions are sufficient, that outcomes do not matter, that we fully control the moral meaning of our lives--is a comforting fantasy, but it is a fantasy. Living honestly with moral luck means accepting that we are, to a degree that should make us both humble and compassionate, at the mercy of a world that is not fully in our hands.
Moral luck does not destroy moral responsibility. But it reveals that responsibility is more complicated, more fragile, and more dependent on forces beyond individual control than comfortable moral thinking typically acknowledges. The appropriate response is not despair or the abandonment of moral evaluation, but a deepened awareness that every judgment we make about ourselves and others operates within a framework shaped by fortune--and that this awareness should make us more thoughtful, more careful, and considerably more merciful in how we wield the power of moral judgment.
References and Further Reading
Nagel, T. (1979). "Moral Luck." In Mortal Questions, pp. 24-38. Cambridge University Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_luck
Williams, B. (1981). "Moral Luck." In Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980, pp. 20-39. Cambridge University Press. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-luck/
Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice
Strawson, P.F. (1962). "Freedom and Resentment." Proceedings of the British Academy, 48, 1-25. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwstrawson1.htm
Nelkin, D.K. (2021). "Moral Luck." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-luck/
Levy, N. (2011). Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/hard-luck-9780199601387