Do You Feel Lucky?

Well do you?

No, seriously, today's post, like this one from a few days ago, has to do with the problem of moral luck, which is just when we blame a person for something that isn't under her control. In the last post, it looked like we were blaming Bob more than we were Fred, even though the only difference between their two situations was totally outside their control. To push that same intuition even more, consider this:

When Germany was controlled by the Nazi's in the 1930's, many ordinary citizens were faced with a difficult dilemma: cooperate with the current regime and in some small way aid in their evil acts, or refuse and be persecuted and ostracized from their community. Consider someone, let's call her Mary, who was placed in this situation and made the wrong moral choice: she helped the Nazis.

We're assuming in this case that Mary made the unethical choice (fill in the details how you like to make that true), and as a result she clearly deserves some blame for what she did.

Fair enough. But what do we have to say about the person (calling him Joe) who would have done just as Mary did, but never had to face that difficult moral decision? Mary's certainly to blame--after all, she did something wrong. But do we just let Joe off the hook because he got lucky and never had to make a tough choice in his life? It doesn't seem fair to throw Mary to the wolves but give Joe the Ethical Guy Award if we know he would have done just as Mary did.

Here's what I think: the two are equally blameworthy.

***

Briefly, here's my reasoning: people aren't responsible for their actions per-se--luck plays too large a role in determining what we do--but for their moral character, which is their set of conditional dispositions, a fancy way of saying the way you would act if placed in different situations.

Check out this Wikipedia article if you want to read a bit more about moral luck.