ethics & morality · new to this edition
the luck of the road
two people do exactly the same thing. one of them gets unlucky. do they deserve different blame?
It sounds obvious that we should be praised and blamed only for what is up to us. Yet almost every real judgment of blame we make depends on how things happened to turn out. Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams, in a pair of famous 1976 papers, called this moral luck. Walk four cases and see how often your verdict follows the consequence rather than the choice.
further reading
- moral luck stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
- moral luck wikipedia