Resultant Luck
Two drivers behave with identical recklessness. One gets home safely. The other hits a child who runs into the road. Should they be judged differently?
Thomas Nagel identified resultant luck in 1979 as one of the central problems in moral philosophy: we hold people responsible for outcomes that were partly or wholly beyond their control. The drunk driver case makes this concrete and uncomfortable.
Nagel, T. (1979). Moral Luck. In Mortal Questions. Cambridge University Press.
The case
Two people drive home drunk. Same blood alcohol level, same speed, same recklessness, same neighborhood. One reaches home without incident. The other rounds a corner and hits a child who has run into the road. The child is killed.
We treat these two people very differently. Legally, one faces vehicular manslaughter charges. The other gets a DUI if caught. Morally, the driver who killed the child feels, and is often held, more responsible. Most people would judge the two drivers differently even knowing the facts of the case.
But their choices, intentions, and negligence are identical. The only difference is resultant luck: whether a child happened to be in the road.
The problem this creates
Standard moral philosophy holds that responsibility tracks control. We should be praised or blamed only for what we actually chose, intended, or could have foreseen. Uncontrolled outcomes should not figure into moral assessments.
If that principle is right, the two drunk drivers are equally culpable. They made the same reckless choice. Neither controlled whether a child would run into the road.
Yet the judgment that they are equally culpable feels wrong to most people, not just legally but morally. The driver who killed a child did something the other driver did not do. That difference seems to matter, even though neither driver controlled it.
Nagel's conclusion
Nagel did not resolve this tension. He argued that moral luck is real and irreducible. Our practices of holding people responsible are shot through with judgments about factors that were not within the agent's control.
This does not mean those practices are irrational. It may mean that moral responsibility is not the tidy, control-based concept we would like it to be. We are not fully in control of who we turn out to be, morally, and our moral assessments of each other reflect that.
The drunk driver case is not an edge case. It is a clear example of something that runs through almost all moral judgment: the outcome matters, even when we know it was partly luck.
Discussion questions
- Should two equally drunk drivers be judged differently if one hits someone and the other does not?
- Is it possible to have a system of moral judgment that tracks choices rather than outcomes?
- How do our actual legal and social practices handle resultant luck?
Take it to the dinner table.
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