Today I went to a paper discussion about resultant moral luck. I did not know this would be a roundtable discussion. I thought it’d be a lecture. But it was even better!
I don’t have any background in philosophy. I just dropped in because I wanted to learn more about different types of luck. My hasty notes are below, for my own processing and review later. I’m modifying some of the examples and details used and not referencing the specific paper as from what I understood it is not yet published. So I wanted to focus more on what I learned about the concepts rather than the specifics of the work.
After the session we went out for lunch and I got to learn a bit more about the sessions and the group. It’s mostly philosophy PhDs and they do these sessions every Friday. Next time I’ll actually read the paper in advance ;) When they asked how I found out about the session and I told them about the interesting events I saw on the university calendar, someone said that there are so many non-students living in Uppsala, but many of them don’t drop in on these things or even know they can. Apparently I was the first person who showed up as a non-student for one of their paper review sessions. What a missed opportunity!
Ok, on to the resultant moral luck notes.
What is moral luck?
As I understood it, moral luck is the concept that a person’s blameworthiness or praiseworthiness for their actions can be influenced by factors outside their control.
There are four types of moral luck (resultant, circumstantial, constitutive, causal).
The session focused on resultant moral luck, which is is mostly about the concrete consequenes of an action. Two poachers go deer hunting out of season. Both take aim at their targets and fire. One poacher successfully kills a deer. The other misses because their bullet is deflected by a falling branch. Is the poacher who killed the deer more blameworthy than the one who missed, given that the only difference is a freak branch incident?
What is the control principle?
The control principle is the notion that people can only be held responsible for things that happen within their control.
The Branch Incident
- One view: Poacher controls the outcome by deciding to shoot; external factors like branches shouldn’t count.
- OR: It depends on context—if branches rarely intervene, it feels like the successful poacher has control. But if branches are constantly falling all over the place, the lack of control becomes more obvious.
Internal factors vs. external luck
Someone raised the question: What if the “luck” isn’t external, like a branch, but internal—like one poacher changing their mind at the last minute? It was mentioned that theoretically uncontrollable internal traits (e.g., personality differences) also count as moral luck, but not necessarily resultant moral luck.
Fairness and morality
A few times it came up whether morality can even be described as “fair” or “unfair”. This was interesting and confusing to me because it seemed like, much of the group took for granted that morality is inherently fair. The seeming strength of this sentiment was interesting, since when thinking about these things before I always just assumed that this could very well not be the case? Isn’t the origin of morality humanity (or is it?), and humanity isn’t just fair by default, is it? And it evolves. And is fairness absolute?
“Unfairness” vs “not fairness”
It was suggested that we should distinguish between unfair and not fair.
- Something not fair cannot be defended.
- Something unfair can be criticized.
There was an interesting question about an example scenario: Imagine you are walking home in the middle of the night and see a person in need of help. You are the only one around, so you have to be the one to help them. Is it fair that you are the one in this position and everyone else is asleep? Maybe not. But is it justified? Yes. The writer said that to her, it would seem fair.
If I think about it, it does not seem “fair” for me specifically to be put in this position, but that also just seems like such a fruitless path to go down. It wouldn’t have even crossed my mind if it had actually happened. Like sure, this could have fallen on the shoulders of anyone other than me, but it had to be someone and it was me, and it’s reality. Tomorrow there’ll probably be someone else who is in the same position, or some other “unfair” position that is nevertheless the right thing to do - and one day maybe I’ll be the one who needs help in the middle of the night. But I’m going off on a tangent now, when this was not the point of the question itself.
Intuition and fairness
A lot of the discussion came down to intuition, and here I was not sure if there is another definition of intuition other than my layman’s one because… is it really just about how we ‘feel about stuff’ in the end? As in, we just inherently ‘get’ that something is unfair, and whether we ‘get’ it or not has weight? Is my tendency to overintellectualize emotions leaking?
Knowledge and resultant moral luck
Three people intend to bake a cake for a community fundraiser.
- One successfully bakes and delivers the cake.
- Another successfully bakes and delivers the cake, but unbeknownst to them, the cake is discarded.
- The third slips and falls on the way to the event, and when they wake up the cake is destroyed.
Are the three agents equally praiseworthy, since they all intended to do the same thing, even though only one succeeded? Is there any difference between person two, who thinks they delivered the cake and person three, who intended to deliver the cake but knows it never happened?
(As an aside, it was pointed out that person two is an example of resultant moral luck, but person three is more of an example of circumstantial moral luck.)
Conclusion
This was a super interesting couple of hours and I look forward to crashing more sessions in the future.
