Nagel On Moral Luck Essay

Nagel’s view on Moral Luck is closely based around the idea that we often treat people as objects of moral judgement, which can also be referred to as moral luck. Although this concept is something that is difficult to wrap one’s head around, throughout his piece, Nagel describes in clear terms an explanation, as well as his personal stance. Moral luck can be either good or bad. As Nagel states, everything we do seems to involve factors beyond our control, and we often assign Praise or Blame upon individuals especially when said factors are out of the control of the person, thus are labelled as external factors. This begs the question, if people are simply morally lucky or unlucky, because the external factors of their actions are out of their control, what scope is there for assigning praise or blame? The idea that humans are not necessarily agents of their actions essentially undermines all arguments for moral judgement. The erosion of moral judgement seems to be a natural consequence of the basic idea of moral assessment, when we take a step back and focus primarily on the facts. Nagel argues that the idea that moral luck is entirely paradoxical is not …show more content…
This does not yet constitute bad moral luck. For it to be bad moral luck, it must be taken a step further; if the driver had been looking down at their phone, not watching the road, and that negligence resulted in the death of the dog, the driver will not only feel guilty, but will blame themselves for the death. This is an example of moral luck because the negligence on it’s own of using ones phone while driving without damage, would only result in small blame being placed on oneself, however, the situation arose in which an animal died, thus making it bad moral luck. This would cause the driver to feel completely responsible for the