Pre-script — I wrote the following for my graduate school applications this autumn (drawn partially from some undergraduate papers I’d already written on Nagel). It’s a little on the long side for a blog-post, but if you’d like to read it, well here it is. Many thanks to the patient and astute soul who looked over several drafts (of varying cogency), if you happen across this.
I. Introduction
In his well-known essay “Moral Luck”[1] Thomas Nagel expounds on an apparent paradox raised by Bernard Williams:[2] that much of our, and our actions’, moral worthiness is a product of sheer luck, rather than of choice or agential virtue. He orders the ways in which our moral worthiness is affected by luck into three main categories, as well as a fourth involving causal determinism. The first is one’s circumstance, or the opportunities that arise for one to take actions of moral significance; the second is the result of one’s action, how well or badly one’s projects turn out; the third is one’s constitution, the formation of one’s character by events outside of one’s control. The problem is that the inability to control our morally evaluable traits and actions illegitimates, prima facie, many if not all of our moral judgments regarding persons and their behavior, since it is insensible to hold one blameworthy for something over which one has no control. It is with the central three categories that I will be concerned; while a complete mechanistic determinism is intuitively plausible, it remains a matter of debate; on the other hand, it is simple fact that one does not have full control over one’s own person, circumstances and success or failure.
Nagel’s essay suffers from two overarching difficulties. Firstly, it relies heavily on the assumption that readers will share Nagel’s moral intuitions, both generally and regarding the specific examples he lays out; these intuitive beliefs are neither defended, nor explicitly identified as his own. Secondly, Nagel does not closely examine his intuitions to determine their exact object and nature, defining them by example if at all, and often using interchangeably a variety of terms including “moral assessment” and “hold responsible.” After briefly summarizing Nagel’s argument in Section II, in Section III I will examine and categorize the sorts of attitudes and imperatives which come under the umbrella of “moral assessment” and “responsibility.” Having rendered a more detailed account of our possible moral intuitions, in Section IV I will apply this account to the sorts of situations that Nagel believes are problematized by moral luck. I will thereby show that when our distinct moral intuitions about a situation are not oversimplified into a single judgment, often for the purposes of justifying retribution, the “paradox” evaporates.
In Section V, I will examine whether the solution I propose responds to the problem as Nagel conceived of it. My solution may require an abandonment of some part of Nagel’s framework, leaving both theoretical and practical questions about how this parting from his, and perhaps from our own, intuitions is to be accomplished.
II. Nagel’s “Moral Luck” in Summary
Nagel begins with a quotation from Kant: “If there remained only the good will (not as a mere wish but as the summoning of all the means in our power), it would sparkle like a jewel in its own right, as something that had its full worth in itself. Usefulness or fruitfulness can neither diminish nor augment this worth.”[3] Though this is precisely the notion that Nagel will problematize by introducing luck into the moral arena in apparently salient ways, he agrees that “Prior to reflection it is intuitively plausible that people cannot be assessed for what is not their fault, or for what is due to factors beyond their control.”[4] This claim is best understood not just as a statement regarding Nagel’s own viewpoints, or even, only, as a supposition that “we-in-general” see moral events in such a way (which I do also take him to mean), but also as a point of demarcation for the conversation: all that follows hinges upon the asserted “plausible intuitiveness” of the belief that one must be able to control those attributes and actions for which one is morally assessed. If the intuitive appeal is wholly lost on the reader, the remainder of Nagel’s paper will be nothing other than a hypothetical brainteaser.
This intuition that luck should not affect one’s moral worth can be elicited by example: If one were, in making tea for a friend, to accidentally spill boiling water on him, it would be very peculiar for him to find one morally blameworthy; it is unlikely that the person spilled upon would change his opinion of the other’s moral worth based on the incident. On the other hand, it would be very understandable that if one were to hurl boiling water at another, this act should affect one’s moral standing; this is, on the face of it, because assault with hot water is indicative of deliberate harm, whereas the dropping of tea is indicative of, if anything, (foiled) kindness.
Take, for a second example of the same intuition at work, a child with antisocial and violent tendencies caught in the act of harming a family pet. If it is clear that he would have done serious harm, and that the only thing saving the animal was the intervention of a parent, it seems unlikely that the parent would react by saying, “Well no serious harm done. That’s fine.” It is more likely that the parent would have a sense of moral horror coupled with a strong sense that their child must be morally re-educated if possible.
So it is reasonable to generalize that intent, or “will,” has a significant effect on our moral evaluation of other persons and their actions, regardless of how those actions turn out. Nonetheless, Nagel provides examples to the opposite effect, suggesting that circumstances out of one’s control can indeed change or determine the moral worth of one’s character or behavior. “There is a morally significant difference,” holds Nagel, “between rescuing someone from a burning building and dropping him from a twelfth-storey window while trying to rescue him.”[5] Nagel does not elaborate on what that difference might be; it is imaginable, however, that the person involved in this example would indeed receive different moral attention from others based on these outcomes. If he successfully rescued someone from a burning building, his courage would likely be praised; there would be profuse thanks and congratulations on his possession of such a superior character that he was willing to risk his own life to save that of a stranger. If, however, he dropped somebody while trying to save them, it is much more likely that he would not receive praise to the credit of his character, nor would his action be commended, because he would not have completed the commendable action. It is even plausible that he would be considered for removal from the fire brigade. This is an example from the category of actions the moral value of which changes because of the way they turn out, because of their results, one of Nagel’s central three kinds of moral luck. Also in this category is Nagel’s example involving negligent vehicular homicide: many people drive recklessly and might injure a pedestrian as a result, but by luck many of them avoid doing so because there was nobody crossing at the intersection they sped through; some negligent drivers do, however, strike pedestrians, and the usual assessment of those individuals is rarely, “Oh well. Bad luck.”
Of course, some actions reflect an obviously ill intent. Yet, it is only by a certain set of circumstances, another core variety of moral luck, that this intent is awakened and results in morally evaluable action. Observes Nagel, “What we do is also limited by the opportunities and choices with which we are faced, and these are largely determined by factors beyond our control.
Someone who was an officer in a concentration camp might have led a quiet and harmless life if the Nazis had never come to power in Germany.”[6] The flip side of this is that living among us could be a tremendous number of persons who, had they lived in Germany when the Nazis came to power, would themselves have been officers or obedient soldiers in concentration camps. The famous obedience experiments by Stanley Milgram seem to suggest just this – that many people would do as told by an authority figure, even if it violated their deep moral convictions. Nonetheless, we do not excuse the actions of Nazi soldiers, nor certainly do we alter our moral evaluations of those actions, on this basis. Sending thousands of helpless persons to their deaths in no less repugnant for the fact it might have been our friends or ourselves doing the deed – though this may be a cause for even greater horror.
The third major way in which luck can impact moral affairs, as presented by Nagel, is the constitution of moral actors. There are many factors that influence the sort of moral agent we become. It is necessarily a mixture of personal choice, genetic pre-disposition and experience that determines both the moral outlooks of agents as well as their pre-reflective behavioral inclinations. For example, most persons do not have the inclinations of serial killers; yet we have no trouble condemning these individuals’ actions and the vices from which those actions flow as if the killers had consciously chosen their own character. We do not hesitate to respond that the actions of Jeffrey Dahmer were morally reprehensible; indeed, we might hold that having these urges at all is the essence of an evil character. Nagel reminds us, “we are morally condemned for such qualities, and esteemed for others equally beyond the control of the will.”[7] At the same time, we praise as virtuous those whose first thought is of the well-being of others, and we are appalled if such good people come to bad ends – but why should they reap praise or benefit from a constitution which comes naturally to them? We appear to be stuck with two sets of equally resonant intuitions, and they are often mutually contradictory.
Nagel also introduces the problem of causal determinism; yet it is less independently pressing a difficulty for two reasons. Firstly, debate remains as to whether the causal determinist account of being is an accurate one. The universe may not operate according to the clean and simplified mechanistic principles of high-school physics, with instead, subatomic particles passing from points A to C without ever passing through B, and other such confusions. The more general three moral effects of luck outlined above, however, reflect definite facts of the world. Secondly, our person, our success and the moral circumstances to which they apply, when taken all together in every case already include all possible determinants of our moral action; therefore, adding that “everything is pre-determined” adds nothing substantive to the outlook, and if we can make space for moral evaluation in the shadow of Nagel’s three categories we will have done the same for the mechanistic universe of causal determinism.
III. Varieties of Evaluation and Responsibility
I shall detour now from Nagel’s argument with the promise of a return. As mentioned in Section I, Nagel is not specific as to what he means by “assessment” or “responsibility.” This vagueness prevents him from giving a detailed account of what intuitions, exactly, become infeasible in each example he gives. There are a variety of ways in which we assess a moral situation or “hold responsible” an agent; each of these constitutes a distinct intuition, and having given a general catalogue of these (III-A – F), I will continue in Section IV to show that moral luck only becomes problematic when the picture is oversimplified, particularly in order to justify punishment.
III-A. Condemnation or Praise of an Action
We may say of any given action that it was right or wrong. If I kill somebody after being handed the wrong change, this is a morally wrong action: the action is of a sufficiently terrible quality that it ought not to be done. On the other hand, if somebody becomes stranded at a train station because they are a dollar short of the train-fare, it is plausibly a moral right to provide them with the dollar for the fare. Sometimes moral theories disagree about whether a specific action is right or wrong. For a strict utilitarian, if the person I shot for giving me the wrong change would have become the orchestrator of a genocide this action might have been a good one (unless somebody who died in that genocide would otherwise have gone on to perpetrate some even worse crime, and so forth), whereas in the context of an absolute moral theory the action of killing somebody would always be wrong; nevertheless, both theories agree that there is an evaluation to be made of the action.
Some actions and events are neither right nor wrong, despite being either wonderful or terrible, because they simply are. There is no point in referring to a destructive tornado as “wrong,” because no conscious being resolved to unleash rather than contain the tornado based on the harm it would do to the neighborhood; there was no resolution, no decision to be assessed as correct or incorrect, upon a certain action. Similarly, an attack by a dog on a child is tragic, but we do not consider the attack either right or wrong, because the dog is not an agent capable of specifically resolving upon its actions in light of determinations of rightness or wrongness; however, if the dog’s human owners knew that it was dangerously aggressive then it was wrong that the dog was left outside where it could harm somebody, as the owners are agents whose actions can be resolved upon by the determinations “right” and “wrong.” The criterion, then, for applying these terms is that there is an agent capable of considering them in application to his decision.
Again, there is nothing that prevents us from describing an action that is neither right nor wrong as “better” or “worse.” Without speaking of “right” or “wrong” we may reasonably say, “it would have been better, vastly better, had there been no tornado.” Even where there is no agent, we may still make evaluations of good and bad in this sense.
III-B. Condemnation of a Vice, Praise of a Virtue
Depending on the situation, we may praise somebody’s virtue or condemn their vice. For instance, John Wayne Gacy was a vicious person in that he was so constituted to derive satisfaction from harming others; medieval popes were vicious in their lack of compassion for the peasants they tithed in order to fund their own decadent practices. On the other hand, we might praise volunteer firefighters for their courage or philanthropists for their caring disposition.
As to why we should consider the assessment of a person’s virtue separate from that of their action, the most obvious reason is that one poor choice does not make a devil. Occasionally a generally decent person may do something that is clearly and altogether morally wrong, but it would be peculiar to think that this renders the person clearly and altogether vicious. Of course, this one-time wrong may be motivated by a usually suppressed vice; persons are morally complex, and may possess both significant vices and virtues, but we cannot make these evaluations without first morally separating the person from his actions.
There are also cases in which a person manages to do the right thing for not only wrong, but reprehensible, reasons. One plausible example of this is the character Dexter from the Showtime drama of the same name. Dexter is a serial killer who hunts other killers, specifically those who have been acquitted of murder and will kill again; he does so in order to fulfill an immoral desire to harm others. Arguably, he is doing good, preventing these people from harming other innocent individuals in situations where the legal system has failed to do so; certainly from a utilitarian perspective, and perhaps other less formalized moral outlooks, he is maximizing positive outcomes by preventing additional suffering. Still, he is motivated not by compassion for the individuals whose injury he prevents, or an abstract sense of justice, but by an intense and compulsive desire to inflict suffering and death on helpless persons in, as another character describes it, “some kind of sick ritual.”[8] We might, therefore, conclude that while on some moral schemes Dexter’s actions are morally approvable in themselves, he is nonetheless a vicious individual, and that his character is not worthy of moral praise.[9]
III-C. An Individual’s Being as Efficient Cause for Good or Bad
In a complete description of some action under moral evaluation, we may also give a non-moral account of the action, an account of the goodness or badness, though not the rightness or wrongness, of a person’s existence. We may say, for instance, that it would have been better if Ted Bundy had never existed. This is an evaluation wholly of the good and the bad, and is an extension of the above examples involving a tornado. It does not preclude an evaluation of Ted Bundy as vicious, nor of his actions as wrong; it is simply additional description.
An evaluation comparable to, but more moderate than, one about the value of one’s existence-at-all would be of one’s existence-as-such. This is a spectrum wherein a very significant difference in a person’s existence-as-such is required for a good outcome and consequently the necessary change to that person’s existence-as-such is equivalent to the superiority of his non-existence. He would be so different as to no longer plausibly be the same person. Again, such assessments do not reduce persons to lumps of matter; they can occur alongside evaluations concerning right or wrong action.
III-D. Requisite Guilt or Pride
We often have an intuition that persons should feel guilt for moral failings, be these failings vices or vicious actions. For example, most of us would agree that the battery of a child or a desire to torment zoo animals is a fair basis for the experience of guilt. As an analogue, we might think if someone performs a morally admirable action that they should take pride in it, and perhaps even think that there is something deficient in them if they are totally unable to do so.
Guilt should be separated from simple emotional flagellation; as Greenspan points out in his paper “Virtue and Guilt,” “it is not enough [to satisfy our expectation of remorse] that somebody be made to feel terrible simply because of an intensely vocal reproach by others;” moreover, “we would not be assessing him negatively for [wrong action] in emotional terms, but…insisting that he so assess himself.”[10] Along similar lines, holds William Neblett, “Where, and to what degree, we feel guilt identifies for us…what we really feel about the various matters of morality.”[11] Greenspan’s and Neblett’s comments suggest that guilt, and its corollary, moral pride, are either constitutive, or directly reflective, of our ability to appreciate the moral sense and gravity of our actions and person. In this sense, it is a virtue to feel the appropriate assessive sentiment for our morally significant resolutions and character traits. It is a vice, or at least the absence of a virtue, if we are unable to do so.
III-E. Punishment or Reward
Another intuition we often have regarding actions and characters of moral note is that the wicked should suffer while the noble flourish. What is interesting about this set of intuitions is that it suggests that inflicting suffering upon others is not only sometimes acceptable, but morally required. On some moral theories, it is acceptable to harm others to promote a greater good, but in such cases the harm is only a practical measure intended to achieve a good distinct from it, whereas in cases of moral punishment the harm done is seen as right in itself. As summed up neatly in Arbetman and O’Brien’s Street Law, our society administers legal penalties for four reasons: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation.[12] Of course, we may punish persons for more than one of these purposes, but only retribution involves an intuition that it is inherently right to harm somebody.
I suggest now that there is no particular rational foundation for our intuitions in favor of punishment and reward. After all, the “just” punishment for a given crime seems to follow more closely the current system of legal efficiencies than anything else; to a person in another culture or another time, it would seem perfectly just to partially dismember a thief as it would to us now to incarcerate them, and it is not clear that there is any particular rule governing either of these intuitions to keep the degree of suffering comparable. Whether or not we generally accept the intuition that the vicious should be made to suffer while the virtuous be allowed or helped to thrive, we should accept that there is no special justice that correlates rationally a certain punishment with a certain act, and moreover that “choice” has nothing at all to do with the perceived justice of the punishment; we insist on punishing criminals out of a sense of anger and hatred (be it a virtue or not to hate the vicious) and reward the virtuous for our private or public gratitude (or sometimes grudgingly from a sense of quasi-formal obligation). Any attempt to elevate our actions with the language of justice and responsibility is only conceptually retrospective.
III-F. Owing & Reparations
Owing is notable as it can arise from non-moral as well as morally significant action, whereas the moral assessment of character or action, as well as the impulses to guilt and retributive justice, only occurs with regard to morally significant situations. For instance, one could come to owe somebody $500,000 either for a mortgage on a house, or as a result of a DUI incident in which one struck him head on and sped away. While this DUI incident would be morally condemnable, the offender does not owe the victim specifically because the offender acted in a way that was morally wrong, but specifically because he has resolved upon an action which took something from the victim. Whether the action in which a debt originates is of a dubious moral quality, the point of the recompense is to restore or keep fairness. If I strike a person while driving drunk, I will not owe him $500,000 dollars because I am a vicious or a callous person, though this may have been the efficient cause, but because he will have significant medical bills to cover and may lead a permanently impoverished life. Genuine owing has this characteristic of being a transactional means of maintaining fairness.
There are situations in which we might speak of “owing” in a sense that is not so transactional. For instance, if a driver strikes and kills somebody’s child, he might owe them an apology.[13],[14] An apology, however, is not so much owed in the true sense, as it is morally laudable or required depending on the circumstances, primarily the effect that it will have on the parents in question, which could vary widely. It is the driver who must do this not because he owns his action, irrespective of whether there is a sense in which he does, but because there is no point in anybody else doing so, as nobody else could provide an intuitively appropriate object for the parents’ sentiments. It is also worth noting that the parents would likely receive many expressions of regret from friends and family; one does not have to own an action in order to feel and express deep regret for it.
Similarly, there may be cases in which retribution masquerades as owing. If the parents in the situation described above replied to an apology by claiming that the driver did not owe them a display of remorse but his own mortal screams, this should be classed as an intuition toward punishment, for it lacks the transactional quality of true owing.
IV. A Closer Look at Nagel’s Examples
Having examined several separate intuitions which contribute to our moral judgments, we may now apply these parameters of assessment to the examples given by Nagel, and in doing so we will discover that when our various moral judgments are not conflated into a single intuition, moral luck is no longer the dire problem that it first appears.
IV-A. Luck of Circumstances
Nagel’s most striking case-study for morally unlucky circumstances is that of the ordinary citizen in Nazi Germany, who “had a great opportunity to behave heroically, [as well as] an opportunity to behave badly.”[15] Nagel correctly concludes that “Most of them behaved very badly.”[16] The problem for Nagel is that while the members of most other countries were put to no such test, “we judge people for what they actually do…not just for what they would have done had circumstances been different.”[17]
Let us begin with a moral assessment of the action involved: the support of a fascist regime responsible for the twentieth century’s most well-known genocide, as well as the instigation of World War II. Assuming that we properly find such a series of actions reprehensible there is nothing in the poor luck of the German citizen that prevents us from making this judgment. It is bad that this happened, and moreover, as the actions that brought it about were made by conscious beings, these actions were wrongly resolved upon.
The difficulty begins when we inquire as to how we should morally assess these persons themselves. It is clear that the reluctance to work against such a malicious regime as the Third Reich constitutes a vice; all these persons who, as Nagel puts it, behaved badly were of sufficiently flawed moral character to allow atrocities to be perpetrated by their own government, rather than risk their lives and livelihoods. That they, and not the citizens of the United States or Britain, were put to this test in WWII does not negate the vice – however, it would be nothing less than dishonest to suppose that such a difference in circumstances signifies the absence of this vice in the citizens of the Allied powers. If the majority of Germans living through World War II and the rise of the Nazi Party were indifferent, cowardly, or taken in, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that most Americans are not likewise indifferent, cowardly or gullible. Let the morally average individual in any country ask himself whether he would risk opposition to a regime that could with impunity have him shot to death, hung from a lamp-post, or quietly taken away in the night. Then let him judge whether he is of a higher moral character than the citizens of the Third Reich. None of this makes the average German citizen less vicious; he possesses exactly the same vice the rest of the world was lucky enough to hide.
There is, moreover, room for the Germans who stood by during the Holocaust to experience some form of self-reproach, for they ought to recognize their very being as the efficient cause of human suffering; it is no small burden to realize that the world might have been better if one had never existed. A measure of guilt, also, is appropriate for it constitutes the intuitively salient recognition that one’s action was wrong; perhaps it is the last signifier of a hidden virtue.
There is the conviction that the communities affected by Nazi Germany’s collective action, or perhaps the world-community in general, were owed an apology by the German state, whereas they were not owed an apology by Canada, because the citizens of Canada did not support a genocide in the 1940s. The importance of such an apology is not as a literal case of owing (as discussed above); rather, the apology is significant in that it reassures the world that Germany does not support the policies of the Third Reich. It indicates that members of the state, and of that generation of Germans, have reflected with appropriate guilt to signify genuine regret; in this sense, it is as much a way for them to show their own virtue as to “give something” to the victims.
What we take from this example, then, is the importance of separating judgments of persons’ vices from the judgments of the actions flowing from them, as well as judgments about the simple goodness or badness of persons’ existences. By making such separations, we can analyze the situation in sufficient detail to generate a series of distinct and therefore non-paradoxical moral assessments. We do not, contrary to Nagel’s position, have to evaluate persons themselves as vicious or virtuous in light of their actual actions, because these are the objects of different intuitions.
IV-B. Lucky & Unlucky Results
Nagel discusses a number of situations in which we are inclined to adjust our moral assessment of a person, or to hold him differently responsible, based on the success or failure of some action. There are situations in which an otherwise laudable intention turns out poorly, as does that of the fireman who accidentally drops somebody many stories, or the parent who forgets to turn off the water while an infant sits in the bathtub. It is a curious intuition that one should be assessed in a morally negative way for either of these outcomes, one that may not be universally shared.[18] Perhaps it was one to which Nagel himself could not fully assent as he writes, “if the baby had drowned, one has done something awful, whereas if it has not one has merely been careless.”[19] It is notable that, while Nagel claims in regard to his firefighter that such a difference is “morally significant,” here he shies away from moral language, describing the potential result as “awful.” It is also interesting that he adds “merely” to “careless,” as in this case there is nothing “mere” about the failure of attention.
A detailed analysis of Nagel’s situation involving the infant should begin with the observation that while, in the event of the baby’s drowning the outcome would indeed be awful, it cannot be meaningfully described as a right or wrong action, because there was no decision attributable specifically to it: the parent did not resolve, correctly or incorrectly, to let the baby drown. As far as the moral character of the parent is concerned, there is no basis, at least given the sparse details of the situation, on which to describe them as vicious or malicious. Of course, it is possible that a vice did contribute to the parent’s inattention, or that they made a certain resolution which led indirectly to the baby drowning. They might not have cared especially for the child, and as such resolved to turn the television up even though it could drown out any sounds of distress made by the infant; this is one way in which a vice might have resulted in a wrong action and the infant’s drowning. These possibilities may explain why we feel some intuition to condemn the parent. Nevertheless, if it was sheer accident, a one-time and deeply unlucky lapse of attention, however awful the outcome it cannot be considered a morally wrong action, nor does a morally negative assessment of the parent follow.
The case of the fireman is comparable; while it is true that he has not completed the morally laudable action of rescuing somebody, and so we cannot praise him for that right action, it is still morally praiseworthy to attempt to help someone if one believes it to be within the scope of one’s abilities.[20] The primary reason not to do so would be to avoid reminding this fireman of the rescue-victim’s death, since his being is, not withstanding rightness or wrongness of action, the efficient cause of that person’s demise.
In either of these examples, it is insensible for the person to feel moral guilt (though intense regret would be understandable), because they made no moral error which they must then recognize as a wrong resolution. Likewise, it is hard to reason any sort of genuine owing or retributive justice as morally advisable, though it might be highly therapeutic for the firefighter to apologize and receive forgiveness.
There are other situations in which explicit vice or wrong action only sometimes results in some greater harm. Nagel’s example involving a negligent driver (the trucker who fails to check his brakes) striking a child is an apt one. Contrary to our pre-reflective intuitions, however, the actual striking of the child should not be considered a wrong (or right) action, as it was not specifically resolved upon; telling the trucker that one should not try to run over children would have had no bearing upon his decision to not get his brakes checked. On the other hand, pointing out to him that failing to check his brakes could result in serious harm to himself or somebody else would have borne significantly upon his decision to check or not check his brakes; therefore, while striking the child was an awful event of which he was the efficient cause, it was the failure to inspect his vehicle[21] that constituted the moral wrong.
This brings us, of course, to Nagel’s paradox: there are many drivers who make a similar moral failure, but we judge only the one who actually commits vehicular manslaughter. This may have something to do with the fact that we do not know who has and has not given their vehicle proper attention until their negligence results in harm; we cannot point to and judge every truck-driver who gives sub-par care to his profession. If this were the case, there is no doubt that we would hold such persons in moral contempt, considering them the vicious perpetrators of wrong action.
This leaves us, still, with the issue of retributive justice; we can imagine feeling it just to punish the trucker who does strike somebody, while only holding in contempt those who may strike somebody. If anything, this suggests the intellectual vacuity and the caprice of retribution as a moral practice. Perhaps what occurs is that in the public consciousness the very existence of the unlucky negligent trucker becomes inextricably linked with the image of a mangled child’s body, that his existence appears monstrous in some primitively poetic sense, and this justifies the exaction of vengeance – It is the ritual burning of an effigy, made palatable to modern eyes by a distancing institutionalization. This I contend is closer to the actual thought-process involved in justifying punishment, and it is no more or less rational with the effect of moral luck than without. If we place aside as an intuition all-its-own the concept of just punishment, this vastly simplifies discussions of moral responsibility: We do not feel so compelled to evaluate the unlucky negligent driver differently from the lucky one if it is not pressing on us to “justify” our retribution.
It remains that we might feel it just if a negligent driver causes another to incur medical bills that the negligent driver repay the cost of those, possibly along with “pain and suffering.” This is a case of genuine transactional owing intended to restore the balance of fairness as much as is possible in any society: the negligent driver gained certain perceived advantages (extra time while speeding, for instance) at the expense of the victim. Perhaps, though, it would be more fair, and a better restoration of balance, if all negligent drivers apprehended, whether or not they harmed somebody, were required to pay into a fund to support those injured in cases of vehicular negligence. When looked at in this larger scope, such owing is not a matter of the driver’s moral ownership of his actions, but an effort to guard against the extreme imbalances of fairness that occur – albeit within the framework of a society regulated by concepts of ownership and monetary valuation.
Touching in brief upon a third sort of result-themed moral luck – What of the individual who intends to commit a wrong action but whose efforts are interrupted? – Nagel describes a situation in which an assassin’s bullet is intercepted by a bird such that he becomes only an attempted murderer, rather than a full-fledged killer. To reiterate the above point, if we put aside the intuitions to retributive justice as non-rational if not altogether irrational, the issue becomes much clearer. The attempted assassin is guilty of the same vice as the successful one. While he does not complete the morally wrong action of murder, he does commit the wrong action of attempting murder, and it is not clear that one of these is less morally reprehensible than the other, though the former may be more awful.[22]
IV-C. Lucky & Unlucky Constitution
The additional problem of lucky and unlucky moral constitution could also have been brought up in some of Nagel’s examples concerning the results or circumstances of action; it might be said that the persons apathetic to the risks of vehicular negligence, or those who stood by while the Nazis gathered and kept power, had the poor luck to be constituted as less than fully moral individuals. It certainly must be easier for some persons to act bravely, or act caringly, than for others. After all, one’s morally significant inclinations, just like any other element of one’s person, come to one largely from a combination of genetic predisposition and experience; there is no reason to think that nature would make a special exception in this regard.
Nagel reminds the reader, “People are morally condemned for such qualities, and esteemed for others equally beyond control of the will. They are assessed for what they are like…but it makes no sense to condemn oneself or anybody else for a quality which is not in control of the will.”[23] Here, as throughout Nagel’s paper, terms such as “condemn” and “assess” are used rather vaguely, and could refer to anything from verbal criticism or implicit dislike to institutionalized punishment. It is necessary, once again, to more carefully apply to this conundrum the possible ways in which we can morally assess and hold responsible a person.
Beginning with the issue of vice, it is tautological that one is who one is – regardless of one’s degree of choice in the matter. I am short, bookish, and quiet, quite irrespective of whether I sat down at some point and said, “Well, I have decided that I shall grow up to be short, bookish, and quiet.” That I had little choice in the matter does not mean it would not have been better, at least in some circumstances, to become tall, bookish, and gregarious. If this had been the case, on the very rare occasion that a top bookshelf exceeded my reach, I would not be at all shy about asking somebody even taller to reach it for me. By analogy, the naturally envious person is of a jealous character regardless of whether he ever chose this trait; it is simply the fact of the matter, as is the viciousness of this quality on at least certain formulations of the good.
Nagel complicates this situation further by pointing out that, “He can be morally condemned as envious even if he congratulates [others] cordially and does nothing to denigrate or spoil their success.”[24] This intuition is by no means peculiar to Nagel, and also comes up in Thomas Hill’s “Social Snobbery and Human Dignity,”[25] wherein Hill argues that snobbery is a vice whether or not it is expressed. While decorous behavior complicates our assessment of the person in question as vicious, it does not force us to deny that they possess the vice of envy; it does show that they possess another virtue – perhaps that of self-control, or of interpersonal kindness – additionally. As far as guilt is concerned, if we take it to be an intuitively felt knowledge of one’s own defects, it may be appropriate for this person to feel guilt or some more generic self-reproach in regard to his envy, but at the same time it is appropriate for him to feel a degree of pride as the intuitive apprehension of the virtues that allow him to overmaster this vice. The questions remains – Is he then a good or a bad, a virtuous or a vicious person? Perhaps, though, this is not a fruitful question to begin with; it is rather like asking whether a sheet of paper colored with green and blue pencils is “really green or really blue,” when it is neither green nor blue but aquamarine. The moral character of the individual in question, as with most if not all other persons, is a unique mixture of distinct good and bad patterns, reducible to neither. The truth of the matter simply cannot be captured by such an oversimplified question.
Of course, some individuals, whatever hidden complexities they may possess, are not successful, or even interested, in overmastering their vices, and consequently do awful things that we are very much inclined to assess as wrong actions. Now, it is very clear that these actions themselves are bad regardless of whether the person was pre-inclined to them, and that this person is at least the efficient cause of them; equally, it is appropriate for the person to feel guilt in the form of moral reproach toward his being, as indeed it is appropriate for his being to inspire moral reproach in onlookers. It is bad, for instance, for a serial killer to commit murder regardless of whether he feels strongly compelled to do so, an inclination with which most of us do not have to contend. Moreover, it is a wrong action, because the killer resolves consciously upon it with the understanding that it is deeply harmful. We may say of the killer that he is vicious in his intense desire to torment other persons, and he does not possess sufficient redeeming virtues to prevent him from committing murder. So, while perhaps he has some dormant and withered complexities of character, he is mostly vicious; at the risk of sounding flip, some aquamarine is likewise considerably more green than blue, such that it is for all intents and purposes green. If the killer feels no guilt, we may identify this as an additional vice, or at least the absence of even a shred of reflective virtue; if he makes no apology, he denies the grieving families a chance to purge themselves of the experience through forgiveness or refusal.
Despite the influence of moral luck upon these situations – those of the secretly envious and the vicious killer – we are able to give a full moral accounting of the situation in line with most of our intuitions, provided that we do not conflate these intuitions into a single vague “condemnation.” The remaining item unaddressed is that of retributive justice; as before, I hold that the limited role of choice in the matter has no bearing upon the justification of punishment; such justifications do not reflect the true phenomenology of our inclination to retribution, and we may inflict whatever “poetic” justice we will on a monstrously vicious killer. However it is he came to be that way, that is his character, and there is no less justification with the influence of moral luck than without, for there was none to begin with.
V. Conclusions
Though the approach employed above to analyzing apparent situations of moral luck may steer us around Nagel’s paradoxical conclusions, it is possible that Nagel himself would reject it on alternate grounds – that it lacks some quality of a genuine moral theory. Nagel writes of a similarly assessive, or description-driven approach, “the self which acts and is the object of moral judgment is threatened with dissolution by the absorption of its acts and impulses into the class of events…we [mean to be] judging him, rather than his existence or characteristics.”[26] He concludes that “the problem of moral luck cannot be understood without an internal conception of agency…I do not have such an account.”[27] Is it possible, then, that I have simply missed Nagel’s point?
It is dubious to me that there is such a self beyond one’s “existence or characteristics.” After all, absent these it is unclear what would constitute the unique self. Nonetheless, the full case in favor of a materially objective conception of self would constitute an entire further project. May it suffice for the moment that I merely suggest we divorce our moral evaluations from such an abstract self; in the analyses I have given of morally interesting situations, a descriptive morality has proven effective at generating intuitive and nuanced accounts of the situation’s moral status. It may be that the problem of moral luck is incomprehensible without what Nagel calls the “internal conception of agency.” Perhaps, though, by removing such conceptions from the discussion we are able to clarify the issue such that there is no longer a problem at all.
A full account of our inclination to retributive justice would likewise constitute an additional project in moral psychology. If, however, the account of just punishment that I have given is roughly accurate, then it is less necessary to uphold the vision of an independent, abstract moral agent to judge for the purpose of justifying retribution. With these issues aside, it is no longer the case that the absence of choice illegitimates our moral evaluations. The moral evaluations remaining to us (such as those of a person’s action or vice) describe the world as it is, or as we believe it to be in a moral sense, and they do not depend on any preceding choices for their truth.
Distancing from moral evaluations our intuitions about abstract agency and retribution may prove a psychologically difficult movement. If, however, by pressing against these intuitions we arrive at a more coherent, perhaps more true, account of morally significant situations, it will be well worth it. Questions remain – among them, how is it that we can adjust our own pre-rational intuitions? Can we genuinely claim to believe something that is contrary to our present intuitions? Perhaps we must morally re-educate, even retrain, ourselves in order make our intuitions resonant with an alternate approach. The descriptive account I have given leaves hardly fewer loose ends than does Nagel’s paradox, but I suggest that it is nonetheless a step in the right direction.
[1] Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24-38.
[2] Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
[3] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 24.
[4] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 25.
[5] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 25.
[6] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 26.
[7] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 33.
[8] Spoken by Erik King, portraying Sgt. James Doakes, in season 2 of Dexter.
[9] As regards “worthiness of praise for action,” while a specific set of actions that fall under the category of “vigilante justice” might be morally right and worthy of praise, it may also be morally right in practice to praise these actions silently and privately, as praise of specific vigilante action could be misunderstood as praise of vigilante action in general, undermining law and order and leading to greater harm or wrong action.
[10] P.S. Greenspan, “Guilt and Virtue,” Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994): 69.
[11] William Neblett, “The Ethics of Guilt,” Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974): 654.
[12] Lee P. Arbetman and Edward L. O’Brien, Street Law (Chicago: National Textbook Company, 1999), 165.
[13] Much of the discussion of “owing” in this paper stems from reflection on a conversation with my former teacher, Professor Cheshire Calhoun. It was her suggestion in particular that such non-material items as an apology might be owed as a result of moral negligence and that this involved a particular “ownership” of one’s actions.
[14] We could debate separately the merits of a monetary lawsuit to recompense the parents their suffering, and whether this would constitute a restoration of fairness or vicious revenge upon the driver and the currency-equivalence an insult to the child’s memory.
[15] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 34.
[16] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 34.
[17] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 34.
[18] It would be interesting to count the number of novels, films and television programs in which lines such as “you couldn’t have known,” “It was an accident; you can’t blame yourself,” etc. appear.
[19] Nagel, “Moral Luck” 31.
[20] We might judge him differently if he joined the fire-brigade only to publicly display an ill-founded megalomania.
[21] It is fair to assume that he understood that the purpose of such inspections was to prevent harm to himself and others. If this understanding was beyond him, it might have been just as significantly a moral wrong to knowingly hire him for the job.
[22] Possible roles of apology in this situation are discussed above in III-F.
[23] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 33.
[24] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 33.
[25] Thomas Hill, “Social Snobbery and Human Dignity,” in Autonomy and Self-Respect (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 155-173.
[26] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 36.
[27] Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 38.
