My Baseline Ethics: Thomas Nagel's Moral Luck

My Baseline Ethics
How I define my own ethics is deciding what is wrong and right in a fair manner and making moral decisions. I do not judge what is right or wrong with things such as culture, religion, others actions, but what I try to focus on is myself on how to be a better person. I feel everyone strives to be happy, so I strive to be a good person and treat everyone in a nice, fair manner, even if they do not treat me the same in return. I feel if I continually practice ethical practices daily this will become an everyday part of my life and spread to others as well, because I feel we learn and grow from observing one another and if I act ethically then others might also. I think we learn to be ethical, we need to want to take the …show more content…
Some people might think that luck is not able to have any power over how a person makes moral decisions, but sometimes people are forced into situations that are not in their control and that person cannot be judged morally by others since it was not their fault. Thomas Nagel discusses four different types of moral luck, constitutive luck, the luck of a person’s circumstances they are in, how a person’s luck is determined due to antecedent circumstances, and the luck in how things turn out. The first type of moral luck that Thomas Nagel discusses is constitutive luck, or luck that is inside a person or what is at the heart of a person, because a person cannot control the type of culture or family, they were born into, or whether or not they were born naturally with a cool or hot temperament. An example I have personally seen is in animal abuse, the people that abuse animals might have been just more controlling or strict, and show more patience to their pets if they had been born with a more cool and docile temperament and not so hot and short tempered, and perhaps these people during child development were affected by outside forces out of their control, such as having hot temperamental parents as well, to become more hot tempered instead of teaching the child patience and taking them on a path of kindness. So, because of how the child was brought up in a family that had bad temperaments and were abusers, then the child then became an abuser. The child’s constitutive bad moral luck of having a hot temperament was caused due to what they had to go through while growing