For justice we intuit a Principle of Control, by which we attribute moral responsibility or blame only in those situations where the person concerned was in control of his actions. Unfortunately it is easy to show that we seldom adhere to this principle. Often we proportion blame to the outcome of an action, for example whenever a child is killed, when in fact that serious outcome may have been the result more of bad luck than of wrongful behaviour. Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel in the late 1070's identified moral luck as an important problem in philosophy, because it seriously undermines the idea that the application of reason might be as successful when applied in the contexts of justice and human behaviour as it has been, spectacularly, in the context of understanding the physical world.

 

Material: three short videos on moral luck, as starters for discussion:

Video 1 (9.44 minutes). Moral Luck. Crash Course Philosophy

Video 2 (6.11 minutes): The Problem Of Moral Luck. Wireless Philosophy

Video 3 (4.32 minutes)  What Is Moral Luck. Philo-notes

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