We all recognise that luck is a significant factor in our lives. Let us say provisionally that an event affecting our lives is due to luck if we had no control over its occurrence. Sometimes luck can affect us in small ways – 'The train was a few minutes late in leaving so by luck I caught it' – but it affects us also in fundamental ways.
A friend, now long gone, told me that he had been blinded on the Normandy landings. A bullet had taken out his eyes. If he had been an inch further back it would have missed him; an inch further forward it would have taken his brains out. Was he lucky or unlucky? We sometimes use words such as 'fate' or 'destiny' to refer to the all-pervasive effect of luck. Those of a more spiritual disposition might speak of 'providence'.
As an approach to this all-pervasive sense of luck, I shall examine how it undermines moral responsibility. It is widely held that we can rightly be held morally responsible for our actions but only if we know what we are doing and act freely. There are difficult borderline cases arising over both conditions. For example, did we really know what we were doing? Was it an impulse and we hadn't stopped to think it through? Was our decision largely influenced by others so that it was not really free? These and many other borderline cases and special circumstances do not always or completely remove our moral responsibility but create problems for any attempt to assess it.
That position on moral responsibility is very much the position of Kant. He argues that the only thing of unconditional moral worth is what he calls a 'good will', by which he means doing your duty knowingly and freely just because it is your duty. He readily concedes that many other qualities such as a benevolent nature have value, but their value is not a distinctively moral value. Although he does not use the term 'luck', he classifies these other amiable qualities as deriving from nature and nurture. Only morally right or wrong actions are directly in our control. Kant's position on morality leaves no room for moral luck.
In the generation before Kant, Adam Smith makes much the same point in different language. He writes that: 'Whatever praise of blame can be due to any action must belong… to the intention or affection of the heart from which it proceeds...' (
Theory of Moral Sentiments, II. iii. 1-5).
But Smith goes on to note the difficulty with that position. He writes that while we may be persuaded by the position in the abstract, in particular cases our moral views (and legal views) are influenced less by the intention than by the
actual consequences. For example, suppose an assassin knows that his victim takes an afternoon walk in the woods. The assassin hides, sees a movement in the branches, and fires multiple shots; but he just hits the moving branches. He knew what he was doing and acted freely with intent, but legally he was not guilty of murder since he did not kill anyone. And even from the moral point of view, our condemnation would be less than it would have been had the assassin succeeded.
'Attempted murder' is much less serious in law and in everyday morality than successful murder. But in both cases there is a similar criminal intent. In other words, as Adam Smith says, there is a difference between our moral judgement in the abstract and in actual cases. Luck has affected our moral judgement.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel develops this argument (
Mortal Questions 1979). He identifies various kinds of luck.
Resultant luck is luck in the way things turn out, as with the assassin. Bernard Williams offers a different sort of example of resultant luck. Gauguin dumped his family to become a painter. If his decision had turned out badly – if he hadn't succeeded as a painter – our assessment of him would have been different.
Cases of negligence provide another important kind of resultant luck. Motorist A and motorist B both know that their brakes need to be tightened but have put off doing so. Finally they each decide to drive to the garage. Motorist A gets to the garage without mishap. But in the case of motorist B, a child darts out, B's brakes don't work well enough, and the child is killed. If in these cases we offer different moral assessments, our assessments show the influence of resultant moral luck.
Circumstantial luck is luck in the circumstances in which one finds oneself. Consider Nagel's example of Nazi collaborators in 1930's Germany. They are condemned for committing morally atrocious acts. But their very presence in Nazi Germany was due to factors beyond their control. Had those very people been transferred to America in 1929 by their employers, perhaps they would have led exemplary lives. Circumstantial luck is recognised in the phrase: 'There but for the grace of God go I'.
Constitutive is luck in the traits and dispositions that we have – our very identity. Our genes, parents, peers, education and environment all contribute to making us who we are and we have no control over these. And who we are largely determines what we do. It seems then that our very identity is at least largely a matter of luck. For example, we might blame someone for being cowardly or self-righteous or selfish, but his being so depends on factors beyond his control. This would be a case of constitutive moral luck, and it undermines our everyday position that moral praise or blame requires that action be under our control.
It is not only in unusual cases like that of would-be murderers that people are subject to the various types of luck. Thus, whether any of our intentions
result in successful action or not depends on some factors outside of our control. Again, circumstantial luck affects even our intentions, so it seems that we cannot be assessed in virtue of our intentions; and reflection on constitutive luck can make it seem as though we cannot be properly assessed for anything at all that we do. What is left of the idea of moral assessment? As Nagel puts it (
Mortal Questions 1979):
I believe that in a sense the problem has no solution, because something in the idea of agency is incompatible with actions being events, or people being things. But as the external determinants of what someone has done are gradually exposed, in their effect on consequences, character, and choice itself, it becomes gradually clear that actions are events and people things. Eventually nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised.
Oh dear! I find these arguments deeply unsettling. I am convinced that it is up to me as a moral agent to do A or refrain, and that I am responsible for my decision. But yet the 'luck arguments' suggest that my decision will be determined by the constitutive luck of my brain events, by the circumstances in which I make my decision, and the result of my decision will also be affected by luck.
I have a deeply-rooted belief in myself as an agent, as someone who can make responsible decisions to act or forbear. But the all-pervasive reach of luck seems to undermine that belief. There seems to be an irresolvable conflict in these positions.
There is a kind of comfort from Aldous Huxley who wrote (
Ends and Means): 'Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead'.
But that is the kind of comment that gets a laugh in an after-dinner speech at a Tory donors' event. Well, perhaps not at the moment. Anyway, it is hardly an answer to a fundamental problem about the nature of our existence.
In fact, the problem occurs in a different form in neuroscience. Neuroscience seems to suggest that brain events precede and determine what we think are our freely chosen actions. There must be an answer but I don't know what it is.
Robin Downie is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow
