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Luck
Luck is an essential part of any discussion of moral responsibility. Some critics have tried to mistakenly make it an
objection to libertarian free will.
Since the world contains irreducible chance, many unintended consequences of our actions are out of our control.
Nevertheless, we are often held responsible for actions that were intended as good, but that had bad consequences.
Similarly, we occasionally are praised for actions that were either neutral or possibly blameworthy, but which had
good consequences.
In a deterministic world, it is hard to see how we can be held responsible for any of our actions.
Counterintuitively, semicompatibilist philosophers hold that whether determinism or indeterminism is true, we can still
have moral responsibility.
At the other end of the spectrum, some libertarians are critical of any free will model that involves chance, because the
apparent randomness of outcomes would make such free will unintelligible. They say it would be a matter of luck.
This is the Luck Objection to free will.
Unfortunately, much of what happens in the real world contains a good deal of luck. Luck gives rise to many of the
moral dilemmas that lead to moral skepticism.
Whether determinist, compatibilist, semicompatibilist, or libertarian, it seems unreasonable to hold persons responsible
for the unintended consequences of their actions, good or bad. In many moral and legal systems, it the person's
intentions that matter first and foremost.
And in any case, actions need not have moral consequences to be free, that would commit the ethical fallacy.
Free will is a prerequisite for responsibility. Whether a free action involves moral responsibility is a question for the
ethicists.
To be responsible for our actions, they must have been caused by something within us, they must "depend on us" (the
Greeks called this ). Modern "agent-causal" theorists demand that something in the agent's mind - perhaps a
uniquely mental substance - gives us the power to cause our actions.
In our Cogito model, responsibility comes from an adequately determined will choosing from among randomly
generated alternative possibilities.
But to the extent that the alternative possibilities included randomly generated ones that allowed us to do good things,
can we properly take credit for them if luck played a role in their generation?
And when we admit some indeterminism into our decision, by flipping a mental coin, can we take responsibility for
whichever choice we have made at random?
Four modern philosophers have grappled with the problem of "Moral Luck." They include Thomas Nagel, Bernard
Williams, and Alfred Mele, and Nicholas Rescher.
The Luck Objection
Luck is only a problem for moral responsibility. Some critics have mistakenly made it an objection to libertarian free
will.
Since the world contains irreducible chance, many unintended consequences of our actions are out of our control.
Unfortunately, much of what happens in the real world contains a good deal of luck. Luck gives rise to many of the
moral dilemmas that lead to moral skepticism.
Whether determinist, compatibilist, semicompatibilist, or libertarian, it seems unreasonable to hold persons responsible
for the unintended consequences of their actions, good or bad. In many moral and legal systems, it the person's
intentions that matter first and foremost.
Nevertheless, we are often held responsible for actions that were intended as good, but that had bad consequences.
Similarly, we occasionally are praised for actions that were either neutral or possibly blameworthy, but which had
good consequences.
Some thinkers are critical of any free will model that involves chance, because the apparent randomness of decisions
would make such free will unintelligible. They say our actions would be a matter of luck. This is the Luck Objection to
free will.
Thomas Nagel on Moral Luck
In his 1979 essay "Moral Luck," Nagel is pessimistic about finding morally responsible agents in a world that views
agents externally, reducing them to happenings, to sequences of events, following natural laws, whether deterministic
or indeterministic. Free will and moral responsibility seem to be mere illusions.
Moral judgment of a person is judgment not of what happens to him, but of him. It does not say merely that a certain
event or state of affairs is fortunate or unfortunate or even terrible. It is not an evaluation of a state of the world, or of
an individual as part of the world. We are not thinking just that it would be better if he were different, or did not exist,
or had not done some of the things he has done. We are judging him, rather than his existence or characteristics. The
effect of concentrating on the influence of what is not under his control is to make this responsible self seem to
disappear, swallowed up by the order of mere events.
What, however, do we have in mind that a person, must be to be the object of these moral attitudes? While the concept
of agency is easily undermined, it is very difficult to give it a positive characterization. That is familiar from the
literature on Free Will.
We cannot simply take an external evaluative view of ourselves - of what we most essentially are and what we do. And
this remains true even when we have seen that we are not responsible for our own existence, or our nature, or the
choices we have to make, or the circumstances that give our acts the consequences they have. Those acts remain ours
and we remain ourselves, despite the persuasiveness of the reasons that seem to argue us out of existence.
It is this internal view that we extend to others in moral judgment - when we judge them rather than their desirability or
utility. We extend to others the refusal to limit ourselves to external evaluation, and we accord to them selves like our
own. But in both cases this comes up against the brutal inclusion of humans and everything about them in a world from
which they cannot be separated and of which they are nothing but contents. The external view forces itself on us at the
same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of
what happens.
The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgment that we are parts of the
world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgment shows that we are unable
to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.
Nagel presents the standard two-part argument against free will
The same thing is revealed in the appearance that determinism obliterates responsibility. Once we see an aspect of
what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that
we can judge the doer and not just the happening. This explains why the absence of determinism is no more hospitable
to the concept of agency than is its presence a point that has been noticed often. Either way the act is viewed
externally, as part of the course of events.
The problem of moral luck cannot be understood without an account of the internal conception of agency and its
special connection with the moral attitudes as opposed to other types of value. I do not have such an account. The
degree to which the problem has a solution can be determined only by seeing whether in some degree the
incompatibility between this conception and the various ways in which we do not control what we do is only apparent.
I have nothing to offer on that topic either. But it is not enough to say merely that our basic moral attitudes toward
ourselves and others are determined by what is actual; for they are also threatened by the sources of that actuality, and
by the external view of action which forces itself on us when we see how everything we do belongs to a world that we
have not created.
(Moral Luck, reprinted in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1979, p.37-38)
Bernard Williams on Moral Luck
I entirely agree with [Nagel] that the involvement of morality with luck is not something that can simply be accepted
without calling our moral conceptions into question. That was part of my original point; I have tried to state it more
directly in the present version of this paper. A difference between Nagel and myself is that I am more sceptical about
our moral conceptions than he is.
Scepticism about the freedom of morality from luck cannot leave the concept of morality where it was, any more than
it can remain undisturbed by scepticism about the very closely related image we have of there being a moral order,
within which our actions have a significance which may not be accorded to them by mere social recognition. These
forms of scepticism will leave us with a concept of morality, but one less important, certainly, than ours is usually
taken to be; and that will not be ours, since one thing that is particularly important about ours is how important it is
taken to be.
Alfred Mele on Luck and Free Will
Mele says there is a problem about luck for Libertarians
Agents' control is the yardstick by which the bearing of luck on their freedom and moral responsibility is measured.
When luck (good or bad) is problematic, that is because it seems significantly to impede agents' control over
themselves or to highlight important gaps or shortcomings in such control. It may seem that to the extent that it is
causally open whether or not, for example, an agent intends in accordance with his considered judgment about what it
is best to do, he lacks some control over what he intends, and it may be claimed that a positive deterministic
connection between considered best judgment and intention would be more conducive to freedom and moral
responsibility.
This last claim will be regarded as a nonstarter by anyone who holds that freedom and moral responsibility require
agential control and that determinism is incompatible with such control. Sometimes it is claimed that agents do not
control anything at all if determinism is true. That claim is false.
As soon as any agent...judges it best to A, objective probabilities for the various decisions open to the agent are set,
and the probability of a decision to A is very high. Larger probabilities get a correspondingly larger segment of a tiny
indeterministic neural roulette wheel in the agent's head than do smaller probabilities. A tiny neural ball bounces along
the wheel; its landing in a particular segment is the agent's making the corresponding decision. When the ball lands in
the segment for a decision to A, its doing so is not just a matter of luck. After all, the design is such that the probability
of that happening is very high. But the ball's landing there is partly a matter of luck.
All libertarians who hold that A's being a free action depends on its being the case that, at the time, the agent was able
to do otherwise freely then should tell us what it could possibly be about an agent who freely A-ed at t in virtue of
which it is true that, in another world with the same past and laws of nature, he freely does something else at t. Of
course, they can say that the answer is "free will." But what they need to explain then is how free will, as they
understand it, can be a feature of agents or, more fully, how this can be so where free will, on their account of it,
really does answer the question. To do this, of course, they must provide an account of free will one that can be
tested for adequacy in this connection.
(Free Will and Luck, p.7-9)
Free will is a prerequisite for responsibility. Whether a free action involves moral responsibility is a question for the
ethicists.
But in any case, to the extent that luck is involved in an agent's free actions, that is a problem for moral responsibility.

Chapter 3.7 - The Ergod Chapter 4.2 - The History of Free Will
Part Three - Value Part Five - Problems
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