Moral Luck

Edited by Nick Smyth (Fordham University, Fordham University)
About this topic
Summary Moral luck occurs when the features of action which generate a particular moral assessment lie significantly beyond the control of the agent who is so assessed.  It is very difficult to deny that we seem to assess persons for things that they do not control: we punish the successful murderer more harshly than the person who unsuccessfully attempts the act. The problem appears more and more formidable as we consider the myriad of ways in which the results of our actions lie beyond our control.
Key works In Williams & Nagel 1976, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams initiated the modern discussion of moral luck.  They differed in their aims: Nagel thought that the phenomenon provided an important clue to the nature of the "objective" and "subjective" perspectives we can take on our own agency, whereas Williams thought that moral luck was a kind of "oxymoron" which showed that the institution of morality fails to be all that it aims to be.   Kant's Groundwork For the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 2011) remains the classic attempt to "purify" moral judgment, locating it solely in the character of an agent's intentions and (apparently) divorcing such judgment from the contingent effects of our actions.  Daniel Statman's Moral Luck is a well-known collection of essays which deal with the problem.  See also Andre 1983 and Jensen 1984.
Introductions Dana Nelkin's Moral Luck provides an excellent review of the issue and of the literature that has arisen in response to the problems.
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Contents
321 found
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1 — 50 / 321
  1. on Luck, the Attribute.Paul Bali - manuscript
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  2. Linguistic Luck beyond Loar Cases.Axel Barceló - manuscript
  3. Stoic Lessons in Liberation: Epictetus as Educator.William O. Stephens - manuscript
    My project examines the pedagogical approach of the Stoic Epictetus by focusing on seven vital lessons he imparts. This study will deepen our understanding of his vocation as a Stoic educator striving to free his students from the fears and foolishness that hold happiness hostage. These lessons are (1) how freedom, integrity, self-respect, and happiness interrelate; (2) real versus fake tragedy and real versus fake heroism; (3) the instructive roles that various animals play in Stoic education; (4) athleticism, sport, and (...)
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  4. Falibilidad y Normatividad.Axel Arturo Barceló Aspeitia (ed.) - forthcoming - Madrid, España: Cátedra.
    La falibilidad es una condición ubicua de nuestras empresas, la cual emana del hecho de que, comúnmente, las cosas que más nos interesan, como el descubrir la verdad, referirnos a cosas que de hecho existen, evitar dañar a los otros, etc., escapan nuestro alcance y, sin embargo, no dejamos de hacer grandes esfuerzos para conseguirlas. Es posible que hagamos todo lo que está en nuestras manos para actuar de manera cuidadosa y responsable y aun así nuestros actos tengan consecuencias negativas; (...)
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  5. Intuition about Justice: Desertist or Luck Egalitarian?Huub Brouwer & Thomas Mulligan - forthcoming - The Journal of Ethics:1-24.
    There is a large and growing body of empirical work on people's intuitions about distributive justice. In this paper, we investigate how well luck egalitarianism and desertism--the two normative approaches that appear to cohere well with people's intuitions--are supported by more fine-grained findings in the empirical literature. The time is ripe for a study of this sort, as the positive literature on justice has blossomed over the last three decades. The results of our investigation are surprising. In three different contexts (...)
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  6. Circumstantial and Constitutive Moral Luck in Kant's Moral Philosophy.Robert J. Hartman - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.
    The received view of Kant’s moral philosophy is that it precludes all moral luck. But I offer a plausible interpretation according to which Kant embraces moral luck in circumstance and constitution. I interpret the unconditioned nature of transcendental freedom as a person’s ability to do the right thing no matter how she is inclined by her circumstantial and constitutive luck. I argue that various passages about degrees of difficulty relating to circumstantial and constitutive luck provide a reason to accept a (...)
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  7. Legal Luck.Ori Herstein - forthcoming - In Rutledge Companion to the Philosophy of Luck. Rutledge.
    Explaining the notion of legal luck and exploring its justification. Focusing on how legal luck relates to moral luck, legal causation and negligence, and to civil and criminal liability.
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  8. Nonaccidental Rightness and the Guise of the Objectively Good.Samuel J. M. Kahn - forthcoming - Journal of Early Modern Studies:Vol. 13, Issue 2, 2024.
    My goal in this paper is to show that two theses that are widely adopted among Kantian ethicists are irreconcilable. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first, I briefly sketch the contours of my own positive view of Kantian ethics, concentrating on the issues relevant to the two theses to be discussed: I argue that agents can perform actions from but not in conformity with duty, and I argue that agents intentionally can perform actions they take to (...)
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  9. Moral Luck.Andrew C. Khoury - forthcoming - In David Copp, Connie Rosati & Tina Rulli (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Normative Ethics. Oxford University Press.
    The problem of moral luck arises due to a particular tension in our thought. On the one hand, we seem readily inclined to endorse the principle that moral responsibility, that is, one’s praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, cannot be affected by luck, that is, by factors over which one lacks control. But, when we examine our actual practices, we find that our moral judgments are highly sensitive to luck. This resulting tension between principle and practice is the problem of moral luck, and (...)
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  10. Externalism Explained.Clayton Littlejohn - forthcoming - In Luis R. G. Oliveira (ed.), Externalism about Knowledge. Oxford University Press.
    This is a defence of externalism about knowledge and also about justification. In this paper, I argue that an important virtue of externalism about these notions is that externalism about justification helps to explain the value of (i.e., importance of) knowledge. I also develop and expand upon some of my earlier arguments for externalism that drew upon what's now known as 'morally loaded cases'. The virtue of externalism is that it's the only view that can both allow for certain kinds (...)
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  11. Moral Luck.Dana K. Nelkin - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  12. Moral Principles: A Challenge for Deniers of Moral Luck.Anna Nyman - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    On a common characterization, moral luck occurs when factors beyond agents' control affect their moral responsibility. The existence of moral luck is widely contested, however. In this paper, I present a new challenge for deniers of moral luck. It seems that some factors beyond agents’ control – such as moral principles about blame- and praiseworthiness – clearly affect moral responsibility. Thus, moral luck deniers face a dialectical burden that has so far gone unnoticed. They must either point to a relevant (...)
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  13. The Reason View and "the Morality System".Paul Russell - forthcoming - In Michael Frauchiger & Markus Stepanians (eds.), Themes from Wolf. Berlin:
    This paper examines Susan Wolf's accout of "the Reason View" of moral responsibility as articulated and defended in 'Freedom Within Reason' (OUP 1990). The discussion turns on two questions about the Reason View: -/- (1) Does the Reason View aim to satisfy what Bernard Williams describes as “morality” and its (“peculiar”) conception of responsibility and blame? -/- (2) If it does, how successful is the Reason View judged in these terms? -/- It is argued that if the Reason View aims (...)
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  14. Taking Responsibility.Paulina Sliwa - forthcoming - In Ruth Chang & Amia Srinivasan (eds.), Conversations in Philosophy, Law, and Politics.
    What is it to take responsibility for a moral failure? This chapter investigates taking responsibility for wrongdoing. It starts by considering a prominent view in the literature: that to take responsibility for a wrong is to blame oneself for it. Contrary to the self-blame account, it is argued that taking responsibility and self-blame can come apart in various ways. Instead, the normative footprint account is defended. It is suggested that wrongdoing changes the normative landscape in systematic ways: it can create (...)
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  15. Fortunately Forgiven.Daniel Telech - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics.
    Proceeding from the assumptions that forgiveness is at least sometimes elective and that it changes the normative relations between victims and wrongdoers, this paper argues that our practices of forgiveness are subject to an overlooked form of moral luck, forgiveness-luck. Forgiveness-luck is introduced via reflection on ‘differential forgiveness’, wherein of two equally culpable and remorseful agents, one is forgiven and the other not, and both justifiably so. In being forgiven—at least if forgiveness is normatively significant— one undergoes a positive alteration (...)
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  16. Blame Transfer.Jan Willem Wieland & Philip Robichaud - forthcoming - In Philip Robichaud & Jan Willem Wieland (eds.), Responsibility - The Epistemic Condition. Oxford University Press.
    Many philosophers accept derivative blameworthiness for ignorant conduct – the idea that the blameworthiness for one’s ignorance can ‘transfer’ to blameworthiness for one’s subsequent ignorant conduct. In this chapter we ask the question what it actually means that blameworthiness would transfer, and explore four distinct views and their merits. On views (I) and (II), one’s overall degree of blameworthiness is determined by factors relevant to one’s ignorance and/or one’s subsequent conduct, and transfer only involves an increase in scope. On views (...)
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  17. Responsibility for Forgetting To Do.Thor Grünbaum - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):755-776.
    Assuming that an agent can be morally responsible for her forgetting to do something, we can use recent psychological research on prospective memory to assess the psychological assumptions made by normative accounts of the moral responsibility for forgetting. Two accounts of moral responsibility (control accounts and valuative accounts) have been prominent in recent debates about the degree to which agents are blameworthy for their unwitting omissions. This paper highlights the psychological assumptions concerning remembering and forgetting that characterise the accounts. The (...)
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  18. “Responsibility After ‘Morality’: Strawson’s Naturalism and Williams’ Genealogy”.Paul Russell - 2024 - In Audun Bengtson, Benjamin De Mesel & Sybren Heyndels (eds.), P.F. STRAWSON AND HIS LEGACY. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 234-259.
    “Responsibility After ‘Morality’: Strawson’s Naturalism and Williams’ Genealogy” -/- Although P.F. Strawson and Bernard Williams have both made highly significant and influential contributions on the subject of moral responsibility they never directly engaged with the views of each other. On one natural reading their views are directly opposed. Strawson seeks to discredit scepticism about moral responsibility by means of naturalistic observations and arguments. Williams, by contrast, employs genealogical methods to support sceptical conclusions about moral responsibility (and blame). This way of (...)
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  19. Why history matters for moral responsibility: Evaluating history‐sensitive structuralism.Taylor W. Cyr - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):58-69.
    Is moral responsibility essentially historical, or does an agent's moral responsibility for an action depend only on their psychological structure at that time? In previous work, I have argued that the two main (non‐skeptical) views on moral responsibility and agents’ histories—historicism and standard structuralism—are vulnerable to objections that are avoided by a third option, namely history‐sensitive structuralism. In this paper, I develop this view in greater detail and evaluate the view by comparing it with its three dialectical rivals: skepticism about (...)
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  20. Responsibility Internalism and Responsibility for AI.Huzeyfe Demirtas - 2023 - Dissertation, Syracuse University
    I argue for responsibility internalism. That is, moral responsibility (i.e., accountability, or being apt for praise or blame) depends only on factors internal to agents. Employing this view, I also argue that no one is responsible for what AI does but this isn’t morally problematic in a way that counts against developing or using AI. Responsibility is grounded in three potential conditions: the control (or freedom) condition, the epistemic (or awareness) condition, and the causal responsibility condition (or consequences). I argue (...)
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  21. Il rincrescimento dell'agente di Bernard Williams: un confronto con la colpa, il rimorso e altre forme di rincrescimento.Simone Gasparoni - 2023 - Thaumàzein 11 (2):217-247.
    This essay explores Bernard Williams’ notion of agent-regret, comparing it with guilt, remorse, and other forms of regret. I first highlight some features of the intentional structure of guilt (also in relation to shame) and remorse, and then proceed to the analysis of regret. I discuss several examples of regret, including Williams’ discussion of the truck driver who accidentally runs over a child. In agreement with Williams, I argue that agent-regret has a moral significance not captured by either guilt or (...)
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  22. Free Will and Moral Luck.Robert J. Hartman - 2023 - In Joseph Campbell, Kristin M. Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.), A Companion to Free Will. pp. 378-392.
    Philosophers often consider problems of free will and moral luck in isolation from one another, but both are about control and moral responsibility. One problem of free will concerns the difficult task of specifying the kind of control over our actions that is necessary and sufficient to act freely. One problem of moral luck refers to the puzzling task of explaining whether and how people can be morally responsible for actions permeated by factors beyond their control. This chapter explicates and (...)
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  23. Free Will and the Moral Vice Explanation of Hell's Finality.Robert J. Hartman - 2023 - Religious Studies 59 (4):714-728.
    According to the Free Will Explanation of a traditional view of hell, human freedom explains why some people are in hell. It also explains hell’s punishment and finality: persons in hell have freely developed moral vices that are their own punishment and that make repentance psychologically impossible. So, even though God continues to desire reconciliation with persons in hell, damned persons do not want reconciliation with God. But this moral vice explanation of hell’s finality is implausible. I argue that God (...)
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  24. Virtue Ethics and the Morality System.Matthieu Queloz & Marcel van Ackeren - 2023 - Topoi:1-12.
    Virtue ethics is frequently billed as a remedy to the problems of deontological and consequentialist ethics that Bernard Williams identified in his critique of “the morality system.” But how far can virtue ethics be relied upon to avoid these problems? What does Williams’s critique of the morality system mean for virtue ethics? To answer this question, we offer a more principled characterisation of the defining features of the morality system in terms of its organising ambition—to shelter life against luck. This (...)
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  25. Resultant moral luck and the scope of moral responsibility.Matthias Rolffs - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (8):2355-2376.
    Resultant moral luck occurs whenever aspects of an agent’s moral responsibility are affected by luck pertaining to the outcomes of their actions. Many authors reject the existence of moral luck in this sense, but they do so in different ways. Michael Zimmerman argues that resultant luck affects the scope of moral responsibility, but not its degree. That is, it affects what agents are responsible for, but not how responsible they are. Andrew Khoury takes a more resolute approach, arguing that both (...)
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  26. Moral Luck and Unfair Blame.Martin Sand & Michael Klenk - 2023 - Journal of Value Inquiry 57 (4):701-717.
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  27. Moral Guilt without Blameworthiness.Jaeha Woo - 2023 - Southwest Philosophy Review 39 (1):201-208.
    I examine a particular case in which moral guilt seems to be incurred even though the agent cannot be said to be blameworthy in any way. I argue that the agent-regret induced by one’s causal involvement in bringing about the bad state of affairs is not always sufficient to account for the extent of guilt, and I suggest that the sense of failure in terms of fulfilling tasks that arise from role-responsibilities that have been taken on must be considered as (...)
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  28. T.M. Scanlon’s account of responsibility and the problem of moral luck.М. В Гаврилов & А. Т Юнусов - 2023 - Philosophy Journal 16 (3):178-194.
    Thomas M. Scanlon is one of the most prominent modern moral philosophers, and his theory of moral responsibility is one of the most influential theories of this kind in mod­ern ethics. In the present article we set out the main features of this theory and then deal in detail with one of the problems this theory faces, the moral luck cases. Despite several plausible approaches to this problem being available within the framework of theories of broadly Scanlonian type, Scanlon himself (...)
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  29. Review of Gerald Lang's Strokes of Luck: A Study in Moral and Political Philosophy[REVIEW]Olle Blomberg - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (5):899-901.
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  30. Against resultant moral luck.Huzeyfe Demirtas - 2022 - Ratio 35 (3):225-235.
    Does one’s causal responsibility increase the degree of one’s moral responsibility? The proponents of resultant moral luck hold that it does. Until quite recently, the causation literature has almost exclusively been interested in the binary question of whether one factor is a cause of an outcome. Naturally, the debate over resultant moral luck also revolved around this binary question. However, we have seen an increased interest in the question of degrees of causation in recent years. And some philosophers have already (...)
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  31. Unlucky on Twin Earth.Jeff Engelhardt & Patrick Mayer - 2022 - Journal of Philosophical Research 47:1-22.
    This paper proposes that there is a kind of moral luck that hasn’t been recognized in the philosophical literature: luck in the ‘wide’ contents of one’s concepts. We will treat moral luck as occurring when an agent is morally responsible for X—when X is a matter of luck for that agent. If moral luck is possible and content externalism is true, then there is a heretofore unrecognized kind of moral luck. We call it “conceptual moral luck.” This new kind of (...)
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  32. A puzzle about meaning and luck.Matthew Hammerton - 2022 - Ratio 35 (2):123-132.
    This article raises a puzzle about luck and meaning in life. The puzzle shows that, in certain cases involving luck, standard intuitions about the meaningfulness of various lives conflict with basic theoretical assumptions about the nature of meaning. After setting out the puzzle, several options for resolving it are developed and evaluated.
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  33. The Myth of Luck: Philosophy, Fate, and Fortune. [REVIEW]Jesse Hill - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (3):782-785.
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  34. The Shaken Realist: Bernard Williams, the War, and Philosophy as Cultural Critique.Nikhil Krishnan & Matthieu Queloz - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):226-247.
    Bernard Williams thought that philosophy should address real human concerns felt beyond academic philosophy. But what wider concerns are addressed by Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, a book he introduces as being ‘principally about how things are in moral philosophy’? In this article, we argue that Williams responded to the concerns of his day indirectly, refraining from explicitly claiming wider cultural relevance, but hinting at it in the pair of epigraphs that opens the main text. This was Williams’s solution (...)
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  35. Fortune.Tyler Porter - 2022 - Erkenntnis 10.
    Abstract: In this paper I argue that luck and fortune are distinct concepts that apply to different sets of events. I do so by suggesting that lucky events are best understood as significant events that are either modally fragile or improbable (depending on whether you accept a modal account or a probability account of luck), whereas fortunate events are best understood as significant events that are outside of our control. I call this the Pure Control Account of Fortune. I show (...)
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  36. Is Morality Immune to Luck, after All? Criminal Behavior and the Paradox of Moral Luck.Evangelos D. Protopapadakis - 2022 - In Evangelos D. Protopapadakis & Georgios Arabatzis (eds.), Modernity and Contemporaneity. pp. 161-180.
    Both the genetic endowment we have been equipped with, and the environment we had to be born and raised in, were not – and never are – for us to choose; both are pure luck, a random ticket in this enormously inventive cosmic lottery of existence. If it is luck that has makes us the persons we are, and since our decisions and choices depend largely on the kind of persons we are, it seems that everything we do or fail (...)
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  37. The Essential Superficiality of the Voluntary and the Moralization of Psychology.Matthieu Queloz - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1591-1620.
    Is the idea of the voluntary important? Those who think so tend to regard it as an idea that can be metaphysically deepened through a theory about voluntary action, while those who think it a superficial idea that cannot coherently be deepened tend to neglect it as unimportant. Parting company with both camps, I argue that the idea of the voluntary is at once important and superficial—it is an essentially superficial notion that performs important functions, but can only perform them (...)
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  38. Free Will and the Tragic Predicament: Making Sense of Williams.Paul Russell - 2022 - In Andras Szigeti & Matt Talbert (eds.), Morality and Agency: Themes from Bernard Williams. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 163-183.
    Free Will & The Tragic Predicament : Making Sense of Williams -/- The discussion in this paper aims to make better sense of free will and moral responsibility by way of making sense of Bernard Williams’ significant and substantial contribution to this subject. Williams’ fundamental objective is to vindicate moral responsibility by way of freeing it from the distortions and misrepresentations imposed on it by “the morality system”. What Williams rejects, in particular, are the efforts of “morality” to further “deepen” (...)
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  39. Freedom in Uncertainty.Filippos Stamatiou - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Copenhagen
    This work develops a philosophically credible and psychologically realisable account of control that is necessary for moral responsibility. We live, think, and act in an environment of subjective uncertainty and limited information. As a result, our decisions and actions are influenced by factors beyond our control. Our ability to act freely is restricted by uncertainty, ignorance, and luck. Through three articles, I develop a naturalistic theory of control for action as a process of error minimisation that extends over time. Thus (...)
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  40. Equal Moral Opportunity: A Solution to the Problem of Moral Luck.Philip Swenson - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):386-404.
    ABSTRACT Many of our common-sense moral judgments seemingly imply the existence of moral luck. I attempt to avoid moral luck while retaining most of these judgments. I defend a view on which agents have moral equality of opportunity. This allows us to account for our anti-moral-luck intuitions at less cost than has been previously recognized.
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  41. Moral Luck, Free Will Theodicies, and Theological Determinism.Philip Swenson - 2022 - In Leigh Vicens & Peter Furlong (eds.), Theological Determinism: New Perspectives. New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press. pp. 184-194.
    I raise two challenges for theological determinism. The first challenge concerns the accounts of human moral responsibility available to them. The second challenge concerns the responses to the problem of evil available to them. We will also see that the two challenges converge in an interesting way.
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  42. Relation-Regret and Associative Luck: On Rationally Regretting What Another Has Done.Daniel Telech - 2022 - In Andras Szigeti & Talbert Matthew (eds.), Morality and Agency: Themes from Bernard Williams. Oxford University Press. pp. 233-264.
    I argue that the phenomenon underlying Bernard Williams’ (1976) “agent-regret” is considerably broader than appreciated by Williams and others. Agent-regret— an anguished response that agents have for harms they have caused, even if faultlessly— I maintain, is a species of a more general response to harms that need not be one’s fault, but which nonetheless impact one’s practical identity in a special way. This broader genus includes as a species what I call “relation-regret”, a pained response to harm caused by (...)
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  43. A Plea for the Comprehensiveness of the Category of Moral “Luck”.Robert Zaborowski - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (2):345-359.
    The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of the category of moral “luck”. In current debate most often only specific cases of moral “luck” are taken into account. Such restrictions, however, involving a fragmentary picture of moral "luck", are introduced without any rationale for them. In this paper I look for a formal comprehensiveness of the category of moral “luck”. I consider three factors each of which is developed in two scenarios. These are (i) whether the agent’s (...)
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  44. An Update of Tarski: Two Usages of the Word “True”.Zhen Zhao - 2022 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 31 (3):505-523.
    This paper is based on Tarski’s theory of truth. The purpose of this paper is to solve the liar paradox (and its cousins) and keep both of the deductive power of classical logic and the expressive power of the word “true” in natural language. The key of this paper lies in the distinction between the predicate usage and the operator usage of the word “true”. The truth operator is primarily used for characterizing the semantics of the language. Then, we do (...)
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  45. The Moral Luck of Rules.Ondřej Beran - 2021 - Philosophical Investigations 45 (1):21-39.
    Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 1, Page 21-39, January 2022.
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  46. Wealth, Virtue, and Moral Luck: Christian Ethics in an Age of Inequality.Cara Curtis - 2021 - Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 42 (1):241-242.
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  47. The inescapability of moral luck.Taylor W. Cyr - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (4):302-310.
    I argue that any account attempting to do away with resultant or circumstantial moral luck is inconsistent with a natural response to the problem of constitutive moral luck. It is plausible to think that we sometimes contribute to the formation of our characters in such a way as to mitigate our constitutive moral luck at later times. But, as I argue here, whether or not we succeed in bringing about changes to our characters is itself a matter of resultant and (...)
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  48. The Moral Irrelevance of Constitutive Luck.Mihailis E. Diamantis - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):1331-1346.
    One’s constitution—whether one is generous or miserly, temperate or intemperate, kind or mean, etc.—is beyond one’s control in significant respects. Yet one’s constitution affects how one acts. And how one acts affects one’s moral standing. The counterintuitive inference—the so-called problem of constitutive moral luck—is that one’s moral standing is, to some significant extent, beyond one’s control. This article grants the premises but resists the inference. It argues that one’s constitution should have no net impact on one’s moral standing. While a (...)
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  49. Conceptual responsibility.Trystan S. Goetze - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (1-2):20-45.
    Conceptual engineering is concerned with the improvement of our concepts. The motivating thought behind many such projects is that some of our concepts are defective. But, if to use a defective concept is to do something wrong, and if to do something wrong one must be in control of what one is doing, there might be no defective concepts, since we typically are not in control of our concept use. To address this problem, this paper turns from appraising the concepts (...)
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  50. Concomitant Ignorance Excuses from Moral Responsibility.Robert J. Hartman - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (1):58-65.
    Some philosophers contend that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility for wrongdoing. An agent is concomitantly ignorant with respect to wrongdoing if and only if her ignorance is non-culpable, but she would freely have performed the same action if she were not ignorant. I, however, argue that concomitant ignorance excuses. I show that leading accounts of moral responsibility imply that concomitant ignorance excuses, and I debunk the view that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility.
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