Moral Luck
Moral luck is the scandal that our judgments of character depend on chance: we praise and blame people for what they do, yet the world keeps altering what those doings mean.
Quick Facts
- Period
- 1976 – 1976
- Region
- Europe
- Key Figures
- Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit, G. E. M. Anscombe +3 more
Key Figures
Bernard Williams
Originator
Analytic philosophy; ethicsBernard Williams was one of consequentialism’s most formidable critics because he attacked it at the level of moral psyc...
Derek Parfit
Successor
Oxford philosophy; ethics and personal identityDerek Parfit was the rare philosopher whose life seemed organized around a single, enormous question: what, if anything,...
G. E. M. Anscombe
Interlocutor
Analytic philosophy; philosophy of actionG. E. M. Anscombe helped reopen the question of intentional action at a time when moral philosophy often seemed preoccup...
Immanuel Kant
Interlocutor
Critical philosophy; German idealismImmanuel Kant gives beauty one of its most influential modern formulations in the *Critique of Judgment*, but the force ...
Judith Jarvis Thomson
Critic
Harvard University; moral philosophyJudith Jarvis Thomson was not merely a philosopher of crisp distinctions; she was a philosopher who seemed almost anatom...
Thomas Nagel
Originator
New York University; analytic philosophyThomas Nagel occupies a singular place in modern philosophy because he refused one of the discipline’s most comforting h...
The Story
This narrative combines documented history with dramatized scenes for storytelling purposes.
The World That Made It
By the middle of the twentieth century, moral philosophy in the English-speaking world had become unusually tidy. It wanted responsibility to be as clean as law...
The Central Idea
The phrase “moral luck” names a scandal and a diagnosis. The scandal is easy to feel: how can we properly blame or praise someone for what depends on factors ou...
The System
Once moral luck is admitted, it stops being a single paradox and becomes a framework for rethinking ethics from the ground up. Nagel’s essay is especially power...
Tensions & Critiques
The most direct objection to moral luck is simple and powerful: if luck is outside control, then it should not affect blame. This is not a technical quibble; it...
Legacy & Echoes
Moral luck did not end as an argument between two philosophers in the late 1970s. It became a permanent irritant in ethics, the kind of idea that cannot be comf...
Timeline
Birth of Bernard Williams
**1929-09-21** — Bernard Williams was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex. His later resistance to reductive moral theory would make him one of the decisive critics of mid-century ethical abstraction, and eventually one of the co-originators of the moral luck debate.
Birth of Thomas Nagel
**1937-11-04** — Thomas Nagel was born in Belgrade, then in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His later work on objectivity, subjectivity, and the view from nowhere would give moral luck its most famous analytical articulation.
Anscombe’s Modern Moral Philosophy
**1958** — G. E. M. Anscombe’s essay attacked the prevailing moral vocabulary and helped shift attention back toward action, intention, and virtue. Although it does not formulate moral luck, it helped prepare the philosophical terrain by making intention central again.
Williams’s essay on moral luck
**1976** — Bernard Williams circulated and published the essay that would help name the phenomenon. His treatment of Gauguin and related cases showed that luck can enter moral assessment through the success or failure of action itself.
Nagel’s “Moral Luck” published
**1979** — Thomas Nagel’s essay “Moral Luck” appeared and gave the problem its canonical form. The essay distinguished several kinds of luck and argued that responsibility is haunted by the gap between control and judgment.
Mortal Questions appears
**1979** — Nagel’s book Mortal Questions brought the moral-luck essay into a wider collection on subjectivity, death, and ethical reflection. The publication helped establish the issue as central rather than marginal in contemporary moral philosophy.
Moral Luck collection published
**1981** — Williams’s essay collection Moral Luck gathered his major reflections on responsibility, integrity, and contingency. The book became one of the touchstones for later debates about whether morality can ever be purified of luck.
Parfit’s Reasons and Persons
**1984** — Derek Parfit’s book widened the philosophical background for debates about responsibility, identity, and rational concern. Its treatment of the self helped make the moral-luck problem part of a broader rethinking of persons over time.
Responsibility and control debates intensify
**1990** — Work in moral psychology, legal philosophy, and action theory increasingly focused on control conditions and luck-sensitive judgment. The idea moved from a striking paradox to a standard problem in the theory of responsibility.
Thomson and others refine responsibility distinctions
**2001** — Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century work sharpened distinctions between blame, desert, liability, and social response. These refinements did not eliminate moral luck, but they made its implications more precise and more contested.
Death of Bernard Williams
**2003** — Williams’s death closed the life of the thinker most associated with the idea’s moral depth. His influence continued through ethics, classics, political theory, and the persistent debate over how much luck enters responsibility.
Moral luck in contemporary ethics and public discourse
**2020** — By the early twenty-first century, discussions of criminal justice, medical ethics, and public blame regularly invoked moral luck, even when the term was not used. The concept had become part of the basic vocabulary for thinking about agency under contingency.
Sources
- primary_textBernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Classic collection containing Williams’s key essays on responsibility, integrity, and luck.
- primary_textThomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 1979)
Includes the essay “Moral Luck,” the canonical analytic statement of the problem.
- referenceStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Moral Luck
Reliable overview with bibliography and scholarly framing.
- referenceInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Moral Luck
Accessible secondary survey of the debate and its variants.
- primary_textThomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Vol. 50 (1976)
Original article version of Nagel’s argument.
- primary_textBernard Williams, “Moral Luck,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Vol. 50 (1976)
Original article version of Williams’s argument.
- scholarly_articleSusan Wolf, “Moral Responsibility and Luck,” Philosophical Topics 14, no. 2 (1986)
Important development and critique of the original debate.
- scholarly_bookDerk Pereboom, Living Without Free Will (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Influential later work that reconfigures responsibility in light of luck and determinism.
- scholarly_bookR. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Harvard University Press, 1994)
Major account of blame and responsibility in relation to control and moral appraisal.
- scholarly_bookMichael J. Zimmerman, The Concept of Moral Obligation (1996) and related essays on moral luck
Representative of later analytic work refining the debate.
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