Nagel's nonsensical Moral Luck

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy introduces its article on 'Moral Luck' as follows- 

Moral luck occurs when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment despite the fact that a significant aspect of what she is assessed for depends on factors beyond her control.

If there is a set of protocols by which an agent assesses another agent as having or lacking some property, the question arises as to whether that quality could also be predicated of the assessing agent. For example we might say 'only cool dudes can correctly say so and so is cool' or 'only a toff can recognize another toff'.  The advantage here is that there can be a chain of certification and, given a meta-protocol of an arbitrary type, a class can be defined. Indeed it may be a partially ordered set. 

One thing one might say is- 'it is only correct to assess another as having moral luck if you have moral luck'. But this is a bit like 'only the judgmental can say who is truly judgmental' or 'only moral philosophers can correctly identify other moral philosophers' or 'only blathershites can correctly identify other blathershites so blathershiterry can flourish.' 

Does it matter whether the property- e.g. that of having moral luck or being a blathershite- is or is not under the agent's control? Not really. After all, the fact of being or ceasing to be an agent is not- generally speaking- under any agent's control which is why many people who don't want to die nevertheless do so whereas my daughter, the secret-agent super-model, doesn't exist. 

Put this way, we see that though 'moral luck' is not necessarily meaningless, nevertheless it isn't particularly informative. It's just one of those things people sometimes say is all.

Bernard Williams writes, “when I first introduced the expression moral luck, I expected to suggest an oxymoron” 

Though anything at all could be said to be moral or be lucky or correspond to moral luck. But this is equally true of words like 'cool' and 'blathershite' and 'cool blathershite'.  

Indeed, immunity from luck has been thought by many to be part of the very essence of morality.

the irrelevance of luck, rather than immunity from it, is all that would be required.  One could say 'a person whose every act has been moral but who has never really been 'tested'- i.e put in a situation where he would have a strong reason to do something immoral- may not actually be moral. He has just been lucky and thus must abide our question. But, equally, we could give him the benefit of the doubt. 

And yet, as Williams (1976) and Thomas Nagel (1979) showed in their now classic pair of articles, it appears that our everyday judgments and practices commit us to the existence of moral luck.

Nonsense! Everyday stuff doesn't commit us to shit. Why not suggest that taking a dump commits us to evacuating blathershites if they become a pain in our arse?  

The problem of moral luck arises because we seem to be committed to the general principle that we are morally assessable only to the extent that what we are assessed for depends on factors under our control (call this the “Control Principle”).

This is an arbitrary assertion. There is no general principle here. There may be a specific qualification or exemption of an ideographic or pragmatic sort. Thus, as a general principle, I may agree that we should not employ very very thin models as part of our advertising campaign. However, we might make an exception for a model who comes from a part of the world where people tend to be exceptionally slender and gracile. The same is true of 'black-face' except when Rishi Sunak does it.  

At the same time, when it comes to countless particular cases, we morally assess agents for things that depend on factors that are not in their control.

Perhaps because we can't do otherwise. Not everything is under our control. However, we can tell moral philosophers to fuck off.

And making the situation still more problematic is the fact that a very natural line of reasoning suggests that it is impossible to morally assess anyone for anything if we adhere to the Control Principle

No. A thing may be possible though shitty. We can morally assess rocks or trees or anything else. It's just we might be shit-faced when doing so. Fuck you rock- you lazy sod! Get a fucking job

The idea that morality is immune from luck finds inspiration in Kant:

No. A thing may be independent of another thing but not always wholly immune to it. Kant was actually quite careful not to deviate too far from 'common sense'- which was a Scottish school of philosophy back then.

'A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, because of its fitness to attain some proposed end, but only because of its volition, that is, it is good in itself…

That follows from the concept or definition of 'will' as relating to things within an agent's power 

Even if, by a special disfavor of fortune or by the niggardly provision of a step motherly nature, this will should wholly lack the capacity to carry out its purpose—if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the good will were left (not, of course, as a mere wish but as the summoning of all means insofar as they are in our control)—then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has its full worth in itself. Usefulness or fruitlessness can neither add anything to this worth nor take anything away from it (Kant 1784 [1998], 4:394).

What's wrong with that? One can define height as being independent of width even if nothing with height lacks width.  

Thomas Nagel approvingly cites this passage in the opening of his 1979 article, “Moral Luck.” Nagel’s article began as a reply to Williams’ paper of the same name, and the two articles together articulated in a new and powerful way

if by 'new and powerful' you mean 'obviously foolish' then, sure.  

a challenge for anyone wishing to defend the Kantian idea that an important aspect of morality is immune from luck, or independent of what is outside of our control.

The way you defend an idea is by pointing to concrete examples of it or showing how it inspired useful actions or scientific breakthroughs.  

To see exactly how the challenge arises, let us begin with the Control Principle:
(CP) We are morally assessable only to the extent that what we are assessed for depends on factors under our control.

This begs the question. Are we morally assessable? Speaking generally, no. You wouldn't let a moral assessor into your house or place of business. If I start morally assessing you, you tend to punch me in the face or tell me to fuck the fuck off. 

True, if there is a morals clause in our contract or something of that sort, we may be subject to some protocol bound assessment. But that is juristic in nature or an ideographic matter. 

It is intuitively compelling, as is the following corollary of it:
(CP-Corollary) Two people ought not to be morally assessed differently if the only other differences between them are due to factors beyond their control

Thus, if it is beyond your control that you are in a coma you should be judged as morally responsible  as the guy who is going around stabbing people. 

Not only are the Control Principle and its corollary plausible in themselves, they also seem to find support in our reactions to particular cases. For example, if we find out that a woman who has just stepped on your toes was simply pushed, then our temptation to blame her is likely to evaporate.

We won't blame her even if she wasn't pushed. She is unlikely to have done the thing deliberately. 

It seems that the reason for this is our unwillingness to hold someone responsible for what is not in her control. Similarly, if two drivers have taken all precautions, and are abiding by all the rules of the road, and in one case, a dog runs in front of the car and is killed, and not in the other, then, given that the dog’s running out was not something over which either driver had control, it seems that we are reluctant to blame one driver more than the other. Although we might expect different reactions from the two drivers, it does not seem that one is deserving of a worse moral assessment than the other.

What the other driver did is irrelevant. Either dog killer couldn't help it or he could have avoided running over the bow wow.

At the same time, it seems that there are countless cases in which the objects of our moral assessments do depend on factors beyond agents’ control. Even though “moral luck” seems to be an oxymoron, everyday judgments suggest that there is a phenomenon of moral luck after all.

Everyday judgments don't suggest shit.  

As Nagel defines it, “Where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control,

he does not exist. Stuff you do is defined as stuff you have control over. If you are doing stuff you have no control over you might be a character in a Stephen King novel. But you don't actually exist.  

yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral luck” (Nagel 1979, 59).

It doesn't greatly matter what you call incompossible objects. They don't fucking exist.

To bring out the conflict with the Control Principle even more starkly, we will understand moral luck as follows:
(ML) moral luck occurs when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment, despite the fact that a significant aspect of what he is assessed for depends on factors beyond his control.

So moral luck only arises in the case of imaginary beings. But such characters may also have shadows made of light and combovers fashioned from frozen tendrils of Time.  

We certainly seem to be committed to the existence of moral luck. For example, we seem to blame those who have murdered more than we blame those who have merely attempted murder,

Fuck off! We blame those who attempt to murder us much more than those who sliced and diced a bunch of serial killers.  

even if the reason for the lack of success in the second case is that the intended victim unexpectedly tripped and fell to the floor just as the bullet arrived at head-height.

Fuck off! A guy who shoots at me is a guy I want to see beaten to death or fed to the wolves. On the other hand, if serving on a jury, I might feel that the 'retribution' portion of the punishment should be less in a case where the victim only suffered a little bruising.  

Since whether the intended victim tripped or not is not something in control of either would-be murderer, we appear to violate the Control Principle and its corollary.

No we don't. On the other hand we may sometimes appear to violate the Don't Masturbate Principle. This is merely a delusive appearance. 

It might be tempting to respond at this point that what people are really responsible for are their intentions or their “willings,” and that we are thus wrong to offer different moral assessments in this pair of cases. Adam Smith (1790/1976), for example, advocates this position, writing that
'To the intention or affection of the heart, therefore, to the propriety and impropriety, to the beneficence or hurtfulness of the design, all praise or blame, all approbation or disapprobation, of any kind, which can justly be bestowed upon any action, must ultimately belong. (II.iii.intro.3.)'

But 'justly' does not mean the same thing as 'correctly' and that to which things 'ultimately' belong may be very different to what they belong to at other points in time. Thus an accountant who prepares the books correctly may not being doing justice to the company because 'book values' understate asset worth. Ultimately everything should be 'marked to market'. But no impropriety has occurred. Evidence which is true is not necessarily admissible for the purpose of justice and what ultimately matters is very different from what must continue to matter on a quotidian basis.

There is a certain discretionary 'economia' in these matters which can't be reduced to algorithmic, bright-line, 'akreibia' of a type which aims at greater precision than the subject matter permits. 

This is a tempting response, and others have followed Smith in defending something like it (e.g., Khoury 2019). But it faces difficulties of its own. First, as we will see, the would-be murderers offer only one of many cases in which our intuitive moral judgment appears to depend on “results” beyond one’s intentions, as Smith himself noted (II.iii.intro.5).

This poses no great scandal. At any given moment, our judgments or assessments may be 'factorizable' into different components- e.g. a retributive component which is 'consequentialist', a moral component which is 'deontological', a strategic component which has to do with Aumann public signals or something yet more arcane. 

And even more importantly, luck can affect even our “willings” and other internal states (Feinberg 1970, 34–38).

But 'willings' and 'other internal states' are not well defined. They can't be the subject of any functional relationship save by arbitrary stipulation. This statement has no 'informativity' though, no doubt, for any practical purpose some empirical investigation may throw light on why a particular person made that statement or why it does or doesn't matter very much. Here, 'luck'- e.g. why one person's arbitrary stipulation regarding a particular matter diverges from another's- features as part of the information theoretic 'background' of each. But it doesn't itself affect anything being spoken of. 

This is like the 'schmeidentity' argument of Kripke. Some may know Cicero is Tully. For others, it is a discovery. But nothing about identity is affected.  

As Nagel develops the point, there are other types of luck that affect not only our actions but also every intention we form and every exertion of our wills.

Only by arbitrary stipulation as to what 'affects' means and what 'luck' means and what 'intention' means and so forth. We don't know if there is an informational content to the claim. Indeed, we don't know if there is a claim or what it is. There is no well-defined set or functional relationship here. There may be, after some investigation, but only for some particular purpose.  

Further, once these kinds of luck are recognized, we will see that not one of the factors on which agents’ actions depend is immune to luck.

No. We will see that there is nothing here but a series of arbitrary and increasingly fatuous stipulations which supposedly represent 'what most people think'. 

Nagel identifies four kinds of luck in all: resultant, circumstantial, constitutive, and causal.

This is arbitrary. Anything at all can be predicated of luck. Instead of 'resultant', we might equally say 'residuary'. Instead of 'circumstantial' why not 'circumcised'. How do we know that some sorts of luck haven't had their foreskin snipped off? Also, it not the case that some types of constitutive luck are suffering from constipation which is why causal luck often complains of having to share an office with that flatulent cunt? 

Resultant Luck. Resultant luck is luck in the way things turn out.

The way things out depends on how different opposing types of luck cancel out leaving residuary luck. But this sort of statement adds nothing to our information set. It is mere arbitrary stipulation made, it maybe, in the hope of sounding smart.  

Examples include the pair of would-be murderers just mentioned as well as the pair of innocent drivers described above. In both cases, each member of the pair has exactly the same intentions, has made the same plans, and so on, but things turn out very differently and so both are subject to resultant luck.

This is an arbitrary assertion. It may be plausible enough in some particular context but it won't hold in general. The 'unlucky' driver who actually loves dogs and is feeling traumatized about ever getting behind the wheel is happy to learn that there is a specialist driving course he can take and a special type of car he can buy such that 'bad luck' will never cause him to drive over a bow wow again. 

What is 'luck' at one level of granularity is an engineering or other such problem at another.  

If in either case, we can correctly offer different moral assessments for each member of the pair, then we have a case of resultant moral luck.

No we don't. All we can say is if 'correctly' means 'in accordance with relevant protocols and if different assessments obtain then there is a stochastic aspect to the relevant process- at least from some possible perspective. That may be a 'feature' not a 'bug'. Equally, it may represent a trade-off or Nash mixed strategy. Something like Kuhn's 'no neutral algorithm' argument applies- improving mechanism design has one type of result. Improving the information set has another. There is no 'natural' or 'canonical' path forward which all stakeholders would agree on. 

Williams offers a case of “decision under uncertainty”: a somewhat fictionalized Gauguin, who chooses a life of painting in Tahiti over a life with his family, not knowing whether he will be a great painter. In one scenario, he goes on to become a great painter, and in another, he fails. According to Williams, we will judge Gauguin differently depending on the outcome.

No. We judge Gaugin the same way we'd judge a guy who quit being an actuary in Paris to go be a ship's chandler in Polynesia. We might say 'he was a bad man to abandon his family' or 'he was a cool dude he followed his bliss'. Also, the vast majority of proles like me think 'modern art' is shite invented by clever art-dealers who get the nouveau riche to hang childish daubs on their walls.  When I win the lottery, I'm gonna have a toilet made of solid gold in every room same as wot Trump & the Queen Gor' bless 'er have.

Cases of negligence provide another important kind of resultant luck. Imagine that two otherwise conscientious people have forgotten to have their brakes checked recently and experience brake failure, but only one of whom finds a child in the path of his car. If in any of these cases we correctly offer differential moral assessments, then again we have cases of resultant moral luck.

So, 'resultant moral luck' only arises out of 'differential moral assessment'- i.e. it has no functional relationship with the underlying act or event. The thing is an artefact. It is arbitrary. We don't say 'OJ Simpson was innocent. He bears no moral guilt'. We merely say 'OJ was correctly found 'not guilty' coz of some legal technicality. Morally, he was as guilty as fuck.' We also nod our head when some other barfly says 'Had OJ been tried in Louisiana, he'd have been found guilty. That's coz Louisiana inherits features of the French legal code. California, by contrast, has a legal code based on surfer dudes getting high and hanging ten.'  

Circumstantial luck.

A circumstance either arises from a stochastic process- in which case we can speak of luck- or there is a deterministic process. Nagel, with great stupidity, speaks of the latter as involving luck. The man was a cretin.  

Circumstantial luck is luck in the circumstances in which one finds oneself.

Why find oneself in shit? Why not take the path of Good Soldier Svejk? Even the Gods battle in vain against stupidity.  

For example, consider Nazi collaborators in 1930s Germany who are condemned for committing morally atrocious acts, even though their very presence in Nazi Germany was due to factors beyond their control (Nagel 1979).

Being German is a good enough reason to present as being as stupid as shit. Nobody wants an utter cretin as a collaborator- except in the Philosophy faculty.  

Had those very people been transferred by the companies for which they worked to Argentina in 1929, perhaps they would have led exemplary lives.

The same is true if they had turned into pussy cats or potted plants.  

If we correctly morally assess the Nazi collaborators differently from their imaginary counterparts in Argentina, then we have a case of circumstantial moral luck.

No we don't. We just have a protocol bound system of moral assessment which nobody connected to Argentina, but not Nazi Germany, need bother with. The fact is the latter country was defeated and occupied. The former country wasn't. But luck had nothing to do with either outcome.  

Constitutive luck. Constitutive luck is luck in who one is, or in the traits and dispositions that one has.

This is largely deterministic. It is not a matter of luck that my biological dad is my legal dad. Mum wasn't a slut.  

Since our genes, care-givers, peers, and other environmental influences all contribute to making us who we are (and since we have no control over these) it seems that who we are is at least largely a matter of luck.

No. It is largely deterministic. Why not say 'it is largely a matter of luck that urine comes out of my penis. It could quite easily be Champagne. Anyway, losing my job as sommelier was undoubtedly bad luck though, no doubt, I ought not to have refilled the Duchess's champagne flute with my pee pee.' 

Since how we act is partly a function of who we are,

Nope. Who we are is not 'well defined'. There is no function here because there is no unique representation as a graph.  

the existence of constitutive luck entails that what actions we perform depends on luck, too.

No. Nothing 'depends' on what is merely a term for a naive set of stochastic outcomes. To say 'everything depends on luck' is uninformative. One might just as easily say 'everything is predetermined by an inscrutable and malicious demiurge'. 

For example, if we correctly blame someone for being cowardly or self-righteous or selfish, when his being so depends on factors beyond his control, then we have a case of constitutive moral luck.

No we don't. We have an arbitrary claim no more meaningful than the assertion that the Great God Fuck You has been at work again.  

Further, if a person acts on one of these very character traits over which he lacks control by, say, running away instead of helping to save his child, and we correctly blame him for so acting, then we also have a case of constitutive moral luck.

No. We have a case of a trait being proclaimed blameworthy. One may say this was also a case of bad luck or a case of the manifest malice of the Great God Fuck you- but these are not assessments. Even if part of a judgment, they are not 'ratio'. They are 'obiter dicta'. 

Thus, since both actions and agents are objects of moral assessment, constitutive moral luck undermines the Control Principle when it comes to the assessment of both actions and agents.

There is no such Principle to be undermined. Also, everybody knows 'assessments' are shit. Bureaucrats invent the things so as to prevent anything get done.  

Causal luck. Finally, there is causal luck, or luck in “how one is determined by antecedent circumstances” (Nagel 1979, 60).

if luck is determined by something it isn't luck. Why not speak of heat as being determined by antecedent coldness?

Nagel points out that the appearance of causal moral luck is essentially the classic problem of free will.

We might call this 'old wine in new bottles' if we hadn't seen, with our own mind's eye, Nagel whipping out his dick to refill the Dean's champagne flute with his own frothing piss.  Meanwhile Williams was contributing to the feast of reason and flow of soul by providing everybody with the chocolate pudding which he had made in his pants.

The problem of free will to which Nagel refers arises because it seems that our actions—and even the “stripped-down acts of the will”—are consequences of what is not in our control.

So this problem only arises because of an arbitrary stipulation. Similarly if I stipulate that every time you take a piss, you are refilling Putin's champagne flute than the question arises as to whether you are 'sanctions busting' or 'providing material comfort to the enemy' who, by another arbitrary stipulation, is the neighbor's cat whose Nicraraguan horcrux stripped down acts of will and then made fun of its puny genitals. 

Anybody can talk nonsense. You don't have to be a Philosophy Professor.  

If this is so, then neither our actions nor our willing are free.

save in so far as actions are neither willings nor billings and no freedom is save that of self-sodomy on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in Margate.  

And since freedom is often thought to be necessary for moral responsibility,

Nonsense! A slave or a prisoner is still morally responsible though not legally so. 

we cannot be morally responsible even for our willings.

If something is 'often thought' no ethical proposition is entailed. Cats are often thought to say 'miaow' but they don't really. They make various noises which different languages name differently. 

It is a different matter to say that a responsibility exists though no means to discharge it obtain. This mayy arise by an arbitrary 'uncorrelated asymmetry'. Thus if it is the case that I am the father of a child in a distant country, I feel morally responsible for him even if I have no means of ascertaining his identity or location. The law may acknowledge this. Thus this son of mine may have a claim against me, or assets held in trust for me, or my estate even if I am not capable of discharging any sort of duty. 

Sometimes the problem is thought to arise only if determinism is true, but this is not the case.

The problem only arises if we believe that things which are 'often thought' entail any proposition whatsoever. But we'd have bigger problems with avoiding stepping under ladders and being careful not to break mirrors and refraining from touching our no-no place lest we go blind.  

Even if it turns out that determinism is false, but events are still caused by prior events according to probabilistic laws,

that is determinism.

the way that one is caused to act by antecedent circumstances would seem to be equally outside of one’s control (e.g., Pereboom 2002, 41–54, Watson 1982, 9).

if Darwin was right, then our continued survival is about expanding the sphere of what is in our control. Assessing stuff may play some small part in this but, precisely because the thing is utile, or has survival value, it isn't philosophical. 

Interestingly, assuming a moral responsibility for another even in an area where one has no control over oneself can have a beneficial outcome. In A.A there are 'ascending chains' involving sponsors, perhaps even sponsors of sponsors, but, I imagine people who take responsibility for each other on the basis of mutuality can regain autonomy or free themselves of addictions or conditioned patterns of behavior. 

In this context, Tyche (Luck) and Kairos (Timeliness) may indeed play a part. But they are aspects of the comedy of mutuality. This has nothing to do with any Physicalist configuration space. Indeed, there could be backward causation and a totally weird metric. Still, for any particular juristic process, a partition can be imposed such that agency is well defined- even it is notional in some respects. But this is arbitrary save from some utilitarian perspective.

 As Nagel puts it, “[t]he area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point” (1979, 66.) He goes on,

Here 'genuineness' means 'naturality' or non-arbitrariness.  

'I believe that in a sense the problem has no solution, because something in the idea of agency is incompatible with actions being events, or people being things.'

but many things in that do have that compatibility. It's just that there is never anything in any concept which is compatible with its every possible use. 

But as the external determinants of what someone has done are gradually exposed, in their effect on consequences, character, and choice itself, it becomes gradually clear that actions are events and people things.

Nope. It will turn out that the configuration space is radically non physicalistic and features backward causation and a totes weird metric 

Eventually nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised (1979, 68).

This is like saying 'if you get a lump of marble and start chipping away at it, you will eventually be left with nothing even if you are Michelangelo and what you end up with is the La Pieta.' True, if Mikey had been terrified he'd be blamed for stopping short of perfection he might indeed have stubbled away that marble to nothing. But then he wouldn't be remembered as a great sculptor. Indeed, he would have been known as a guy you need to keep well away from any nice piece of marble. Still, there may be a useless or foolish type of art criticism- perhaps one connected to Grievance Studies- which shits on great artists for their moral luck in being born with penises at particular times in history and which has nothing to say about the aesthetic choices underlying the creation of their masterpieces.