moral luck
MOR-ul LUK
ˈmɒrəl lʌkListen
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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
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