Kant’s Philosophy of Moral Luck

The Moral of Moral Luck

Moral Luck

The good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes or because of its adequacy to achieve some proposed end; it is good only because of its willing, i.e., it is good of itself And, regarded for itself, it is to be esteemed incomparably higher than anything which could be brought about by it in favor of any inclination or even of the sum total of all inclinations. Even if it sho...

A problem for moral luck

The present paper poses a new problem for moral luck. Defenders of moral luck uncritically rely on a broader theory of luck known as the control theory or the lack of control theory. However, there are are two other analyses of luck in the literature that dominate discussion in epistemology, namely the probability and modal theories. However, moral luck is nonexistent under the probability and ...

Forthcoming: The Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy The adaptive logic of moral luck

Moral luck is a puzzling aspect of our psychology: Why do we punish outcomes that were not intended (i.e. accidents)? Prevailing psychological accounts of moral luck characterize it as an accident or error, stemming either from a reevaluation of the agent’s mental state or from negative affect aroused by the bad outcome itself. While these models have strong evidence in their favor, neither can...

The psychology and philosophy of luck

There has been a great deal of interest in the concept of luck in the recent psychological and philosophical literature. In philosophy, this interest has tended to focus not upon luck simpliciter but rather upon the role that luck plays in ethical and epistemological debates concerning (respectively) moral and epistemic luck. In psychology, in contrast, a number of studies have explicitly exami...