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Moral Luck: A Partial Map

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Michael J. Zimmerman
Michael J. Zimmerman*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC27402-6170, USA
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Extract

Luck varies from person to person, for two reasons. First, for something to occur as a matter of luck is for it to occur beyond the control of someone, and what is beyond one person's control may not be beyond another's. Second, luck may be either good or bad (or neutral — but in that case it is not very interesting), and what is good luck for one person may be bad luck for another.

Moral philosophers have paid a good deal of attention to luck in an effort to determine its relevance to moral judgments of various sorts. We may distinguish three broad classes of such judgments: aretaic judgments, having to do with moral virtue and vice; deontic judgments, having to do with moral Obligation; and what I will call hypological judgments, having to do with moral responsibility. In the wake of Harry Frankfurt's ground-breaking discussion of the claim that moral responsibility requires control, most of the attention that has been devoted in recent years to moral luck has concerned hypological judgments in particular; deontic judgments and aretaic judgments have been given relatively short shrift.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 585 - 608
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2006

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References

1 The term is drawn from the Greek bnoXoyoc,, meaning ‘held accountable or liable.'

2 See Harry G. Frankfurt, ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility/ Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969) 829-39.

3 It would be more plausible to tie laudability to fulfilled rather than unfulfilled obligations, but if there is such a link (which I doubt, for reasons analogous to those concerning the possibility of ‘accuses/ regarding which see the remarks that immediately follow), it is not at all straightforward. First, it seems clear that one can fulfil an obligation in such a way that one is not laudable — i.e., one does not deserve any praise — for doing so. Second, in some contexts laudability has essentially to do with supererogation — going beyond one's obligation — rather than simply fulfilling an obligation.

4 See, for example, G.E. Moore, Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1965), 82; Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984), 25; Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘Self-Defense,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991), 295; Ishtiyaque Haji, Appraisability: Puzzles, Proposals, and Perplexities (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), 146.

5 In Deontic Morality and Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), Ishtiyaque Haji pursues in detail certain implications of the logical independence of responsibility and obligation. I endorse much, though not all, of what he says. However, he says little about the issues that I will raise in this paper (although see note 32 below).

6 Note that among these consequences may be the development (or maintenance) of certain traits of character. In this way, an agent may have an obligation to become (or remain) a certain kind of person. Even in such a case, though, the judgment that the agent has the obligation in question may be said to be ‘act-based’ rather than ‘agent-based,’ in that the focus is not on how the agent is to be evaluated but on how the agent ought to behave.

7 I have done so in Michael J. Zimmerman, ‘Another Plea for Excuses/ American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (2004) 259-66, and Michael J. Zimmerman, ‘A Plea for Accuses/ American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997) 229-43.

8 See Michael J. Zimmerman, An Essay on Moral Responsibility (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield 1988), 61-2.

9 This idea applies straightforwardly to judgments about culpability, but it applies to judgments about laudability too. To hold someone laudable for something he could not control is unfair, even if it is not unfair to that person (in that it does not constitute an adverse judgment about him).

10 Contrast R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1994), ch. 4.

11 See Zimmerman, Essay, 113-19, and Michael J. Zimmerman, ‘Taking Luck Seriously/ journal of Philosophy 32 (2002), 569-70.

12 See Michael J. Zimmerman, The Concept of Moral Obligation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), ch. 3.

13 See Zimmerman, Essay, 24-6, in which I used instead the terms ‘strict’ and ‘broad.'

14 It may be that no one ever has fully comprehensive control over his behavior. Whether this is so depends on just what types of pressures should be thought to compromise such control.

15 Cf. Alfred R. Mele, ‘Agents’ Abilities/ Nous 37 (2003), 448-9, on the distinction between having a ‘simple’ ability and being able to do something ‘intentionally.’ Cf. also Elinor Mason, ‘Consequentialism and the “Ought Implies Can” Principle,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 40 (2003), 321. The claim that you cannot open the safe intentionally is controversial. I base it in part on the fact that you have no justification for believing that you have a ‘realistic’ chance of success if you attempt to open it. Such a connection between intentional action and belief has been challenged. (See Kirk Ludwig, ‘Impossible Doings,’ Philosophical Studies 65 (1992) 257-81.) If the challenge succeeds, it remains the case that lack of ‘know-how’ entails lack of a certain kind of control; it is just that such control must be accounted for in some other way.

16 These terms, introduced by John Martin Fischer, have become well known. See his The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell 1994), 132-4 and 204. See also Zimmerman, Essay, 32-3, in which I used instead the terms ‘standard’ and ‘curtailed.'

17 See Moore, Ethics, 81-2.

18 The case is made, convincingly in my view, by Frank Jackson in his ‘Decisiontheoretic Consequentialism and the Nearest and Dearest Objection/ Ethics 101 (1991) 461-82.

19 Moore himself might demur, saying that his theory concerns only what he calls ‘voluntary acts’ (see Moore, Ethics, 5-7). I do not think that this by itself will avoid the present problem, but I have no room to pursue the point here.

20 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press 1966), 567

21 See Zimmerman, Essay, 54-61.

22 Thomas Nagel, ‘Moral Luck/ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 50 (1976), 143

23 Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1971), 66

24 See Zimmerman, ‘Taking Luck Seriously/ 560.

25 See Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon 1980), 59.

26 At least, this is so as far as it is judgments of moral responsibility that are at issue. Agent-based evaluations that have instead to do with virtues and vices are a different matter. See Zimmerman, ‘Taking Luck Seriously/ 554-5 and 569-70.

27 The term ‘instrumental value’ can also be used to refer to a type of intrinsic value. (See Toni R0nnow-Rasmussen, ‘Instrumental Values — Strong and Weak/ Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5 (2002) 23-43.) I make no such use of it in this paper.

28 There is another way in which doing more good things does not entail doing more good. Suppose that knowledge, as well as pleasure, is intrinsically good, and that, in doing some act A, John brings about both a minor instance of knowledge and a minor instance of pleasure, but that, in doing some other act B, Jane brings about a major instance of pleasure. John does (or brings about) more good things than Jane, but Jane does (or brings about) more good than John. This case is quite different from the case of gift-giving just presented. It is only extrinsic goods that are essentially empty. When it comes to intrinsic goods, the more, the better — even if one good (such as that brought about by Jane) can outweigh two goods (such as those brought about by John).

We can couch the case of John and Jane in terms of reasons. John has more reasons to do A than Jane has to do B, yet Jane has more reason to do B than John has to do A. This does not point to any essential emptiness in the nature of reasons. Nonetheless, I believe that there is such a phenomenon: we can distinguish between direct and indirect reasons, and the latter are essentially empty. (In the gift-giving case, I have a direct reason to cause you pleasure and only an indirect reason to give you a gift or to perform any of the means A-Z that would enable me to accomplish this.) However, as far as I can tell, the terminology of ‘more reasons’ vs. ‘more reason’ cannot be used in any natural way to capture this distinction.

29 This may be a mistake. Perhaps we should say that their direct obligation consists in bringing about some further event/, such as a display of respect for their patients. On the distinction between direct and indirect obligation, see W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1930), 46.

30 See Zimmerman, Concept, 69-70.

31 Contrast H.A. Prichard, Moral Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon 1949), 31-3, and W.D. Ross, Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon 1939), 153-4.1 think both authors are misled in part by their failure to distinguish the distinction between partial and complete control from the distinction between direct and indirect control. (They also make what strikes me as an unwarranted appeal to the knowability of obligation.)

32 See Michael J. Zimmerman, ‘Obligation, Responsibility, and Alternate Possibilities/ Analysis 53 (1993) 51-3, and Zimmerman, Concept, 85-9. Cf. Ishtiyaque Haji, ‘Alternative Possibilities, Moral Obligation, and Moral Responsibility/ Philosophical Papers (1993) 41-50; Appraisability, 53; and Deontic Morality, ch. 3.

33 I consider and reject other kinds of arguments for this claim in Michael J. Zimmerman, ‘The Moral Significance of Alternate Possibilities/ in Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency, eds. David Widerker and Michael McKenna (Aldershot: Ashgate Press 2003) 301-25.

34 Cf., for example, Daniel Statman, ‘Introduction/ in Moral Luck, ed. Daniel Statman (Albany: SUNY Press 1993), 20-1.

35 Recall from the opening paragraph of Section I that it is only overall obligation that is at issue here. Thus I am not dismissing the possibility of conflicts of prima facie obligation. Cf. Zimmerman, Concept, ch. 7. (Note that the arguments apply only to what I there call ‘basic’ dilemmas.)

36 See Zimmerman, ‘Taking Luck Seriously/ section IV, for a fuller rendition of this argument, and sections V and VI for an elaboration and defense of it.

37 For a necessary qualification, see note 26 above.

38 Thanks to members of audiences at the Universities of Reading, Florida, and Calgary for helpful comments. Thanks in particular to John Baker, Randy Clarke, David Copp, John Cottingham, Ish Haji, Bob Kane, Noa Latham, Kirk Ludwig, Al Mele, Mark Migotti, Dennis McKerlie, David Oderberg, Sigrun Svavarsdottir, Jon Tresan, and Andrew Williams. Thanks also to the referees for Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Thanks finally to the National Endowment for the Humanities for support while this paper was written.