moral luck
MOR-ul LUK
ˈmɒrəl lʌkListen
Pick from 16 AI voices across American and British accents, and adjust playback speed to hear each syllable clearly. Every voice is generated once per term and cached for instant replays.
Syllable breakdown
Dictionary meaning
the philosophical problem, identified by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams in parallel 1976 papers, that factors beyond a person's control — their genetics, upbringing, the circumstances they encounter, and random chance — significantly influence both their actions and how others judge them morally, despite the intuition that moral responsibility should attach only to what is genuinely within one's control; a drunk driver who kills a pedestrian is judged more harshly than one who reaches home safely through identical behaviour and identical luck; Nagel identified four types: resultant luck (outcomes), circumstantial luck (situations faced), constitutive luck (character and dispositions), and causal luck (prior causes); the problem challenges retributive justice, desert-based theories of responsibility, and the assumption that moral assessment can be cleanly separated from fortune