Moral luck occurs whenever luck makes a moral difference in two or more cases. The problem of moral luck arises from a conflict between the widely held intuition that moral luck should not occur in moral judgment with the fact that it is arguably impossible to prevent it from happening.
Before getting into the problem which luck occurs and makes a moral difference, let’s look at a case to test an intuition. Suppose, there is a person A behind me who is tripped by the uneven floor, and the person pushed me without any harmful intention. I failed onto the ground and accidentally triggered the switch of the sluice to let all the water to flood down, causing death of some people and millions of government fund. Will I be held morally responsible? …show more content…
However, does this mean that human agency has absolutely no control over his or her decisions? I believe that it is true that we can act freely or exercise free will even if the circumstances are already laid in front of us. We, moral agents, can have control over certain actions by adopting freedom and responsibility even if we do not control the causal factors. In the initial example: there are two over speed drivers, one is held responsible for killing a pedestrian who suddenly popped up and the other one is not held responsible for anything. The conflict is that they are acting the same except there is a pedestrian in the “unlucky” case, therefore the “unlucky” one is blamed much worse than the “lucky” one. However, is it true that the so-called “unlucky” over speed driver has absolutely no control? The over speed driver could certainly choose not to drive his or her car over the speed limit. Therefore even the pedestrian suddenly appears, it would give the driver enough time to stop the car, and the pedestrian would not die. In the over speed driver case, it is true that the appearance of the pedestrian is not under the control of the driver, but it is also true that choosing to go over speed or not is under the driver’s control. What I am trying to say here is that there are many factors contribute a certain event or situation. Just because one of those factors is out of the person’s control does not prove that the outcome of the event is due to
Before getting into the problem which luck occurs and makes a moral difference, let’s look at a case to test an intuition. Suppose, there is a person A behind me who is tripped by the uneven floor, and the person pushed me without any harmful intention. I failed onto the ground and accidentally triggered the switch of the sluice to let all the water to flood down, causing death of some people and millions of government fund. Will I be held morally responsible? …show more content…
However, does this mean that human agency has absolutely no control over his or her decisions? I believe that it is true that we can act freely or exercise free will even if the circumstances are already laid in front of us. We, moral agents, can have control over certain actions by adopting freedom and responsibility even if we do not control the causal factors. In the initial example: there are two over speed drivers, one is held responsible for killing a pedestrian who suddenly popped up and the other one is not held responsible for anything. The conflict is that they are acting the same except there is a pedestrian in the “unlucky” case, therefore the “unlucky” one is blamed much worse than the “lucky” one. However, is it true that the so-called “unlucky” over speed driver has absolutely no control? The over speed driver could certainly choose not to drive his or her car over the speed limit. Therefore even the pedestrian suddenly appears, it would give the driver enough time to stop the car, and the pedestrian would not die. In the over speed driver case, it is true that the appearance of the pedestrian is not under the control of the driver, but it is also true that choosing to go over speed or not is under the driver’s control. What I am trying to say here is that there are many factors contribute a certain event or situation. Just because one of those factors is out of the person’s control does not prove that the outcome of the event is due to