moral luck
Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.
William Hazlitt
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
H.L. Mencken
If Hitler had not overrun Europe and exterminated millions, but instead had died of a heart attack after occupying the Sudetenland, Chamberlain’s action at Munich would still have utterly betrayed the Czechs, but it would not be the great moral disaster that has made his name a household word.
Thomas Nagel
One evening, in April 2004, a rumour spread through the English village of Wooler that a local ATM machine was paying out twice as much cash as every customer asked for. The pubs emptied and front doors were left swinging on their hinges as villagers rushed to withdraw as much money as their cards allowed. Within the hour, the queue outside Barclays Bank stretched the length of the High Street and an otherwise law-abiding community had become a den of thieves. Only one beneficiary was reported to have returned her gains the next day. Rather than prosecute so many individuals, the bank decided to write off its loss, and the event is now remembered fondly by some as ‘Golden Wednesday’.1 Given the quantity of culprits, moral condemnation too might go the way of the law. Yet it was wrongdoing nonetheless, and many would feel that those who gave in to temptation cheapened their integrity as they fattened their wallets. At the same time, those who drained the machine did not plan for their local savings bank to start dispensing free money. Their pecuniary good fortune was matched by an equal dose of bad luck in the moral realm. For had they not been presented with such an opportunity, they would no doubt have continued to lead relatively blameless lives.
Philosophers have spent most of the discipline’s history denying that any such thing can take place, arguing that although luck can impinge upon our physical and mental well-being, it cannot enhance or discolour our inherent virtue or lack thereof. The Ancient Greek moral project was concerned with insulating our lives against ill fortune. While our material circumstance could not be rendered immune to the Fates, it was thought that one’s internal life possessed a degree of freedom from their incursions. Tragedies might affect our emotions as well as our flesh, but at least our attitudes to these thoughts and feelings could remain untouched. Our vigour may be wasted by sickness, our solvency ruined by unemployment, but similar catastrophes cannot befall our moral worth. If the latter is debased – or enhanced – it can only be the result of our own will, our own decisions. The integrity of a good intention is invulnerable, no matter what its first contact with the world brings. As Immanuel Kant wrote in the seventeenth century:
Even if it should happen that, by a particularly unfortunate fate or by the niggardly provision of a stepmotherly nature, this will should be wholly lacking in power to accomplish its purpose, and even if the greatest effort should not avail it to achieve anything of its end, and if there remained only the good will…it would sparkle like a jewel in its own right.2
The problem is that, like most jewels, a good will cannot sparkle until it has been dug up from beneath the ground. In other words, it needs to be acted upon. Actions, however, can be successful or unsuccessful, the outcome always depending to some degree on external contingencies. Not until the late twentieth century did moral philosophers became comfortable with this predicament. It was the English philosopher Sir Bernard Williams who coined the term ‘moral luck’ to describe it.
To illustrate moral luck, Williams gave me the example of Paul Gauguin, the impressionist painter who abandoned his family to live on an island in the South Seas in the belief that this would help him to become a great artist. On the face of it this was a selfish act, but its wickedness was mitigated by the success of his plan. According to Williams, the only fact that will settle the question of whether Gauguin was justified is whether he was successful or not. However, no matter how confident in his talent Gauguin may have been, he could not have been absolutely certain that he was correct in assessing his potential. The painter therefore could not have determined through reason whether his decision was morally justified at the time he made it. Since his success depended at least in part upon luck, his decision was a moral gamble. While winning a bet may make one richer, we would normally assume that it cannot make one a better person. Yet as we inspect Gaugin’s works in the Musée D’Orsée in Paris, we tend to commend his self-belief rather than condemn his selfishness. At the very least, his additions to the canon of great art prove that his selfishness was not conceit. For the sake of his moral status, Gauguin was fortunate to have turned out to possess the talent to succeed.
Moral luck can work against us as well as in our favour. The American philosopher Thomas Nagel has remarked on the ‘morally significant difference’ between reckless driving and manslaughter. Whether a reckless driver hits a child depends on whether one crosses the road at the moment he passes the red light. Were the driver entirely blameless, he would feel terrible about his role in the event but would not have to feel morally wretched. But if any negligence whatsoever was involved – for example, if he failed to get his brakes checked regularly or neglected to have a full night’s sleep before beginning his journey – he would blame himself for the death of the child. As Nagel writes:
What makes this an example of moral luck is that he would have to blame himself only slightly for the negligence itself if no situation arose which required him to brake suddenly and violently to avoid hitting the child. Yet the negligence is the same in both cases, and the driver has no control over whether a child will run into his path…If one negligently leaves the bath running with the baby in it, one will realize, as one bounds up the stairs toward the bathroom, that if the baby has drowned one has done something awful, whereas if it has not one has merely been careless.3
In Nagel’s view, there are legal uses in holding the driver responsible for what he has done, but it would be irrational to extend this judgment to his moral character.
Williams disagreed, and introduced the notion of ‘agent regret’. If the reckless driver were a friend of ours we would rally round and tell him that it was not his fault and that he should not feel guilty. But we would also understand his emotions, as they would be quite natural in the circumstances. Williams himself thought that it would betray insanity not to experience such feelings, as we cannot detach ourselves from the unintentional aspects of our behaviour while retaining our personal identity and character. Even though we do not regard the driver as responsible, we would think much worse of him if he felt no regret but just shrugged and said, ‘It’s a terrible thing that has happened, but I did everything I could to avoid it.’ It is also doubtful that it would be a better world if we blithely disregarded the terrible but unforeseen consequences of our actions. As the philosopher Margaret Walker has pointed out, we can rely on friends to adapt to a change in our needs that they could not have foreseen when they became our friends, and we can expect parents to care for their sick children although they themselves did not cause the illness.4 It is in the nature of duties to often exceed their initial remit, and moral predicaments can foist themselves upon us. By accepting moral luck, by accepting responsibilities that we did not seek, we are able to display virtues that otherwise would not be exercised. For example, by accepting the open-ended nature of responsibility, we are able to display the virtue of dependability by accepting that we will be there for our friends, even if their needs are not in our control.
Some philosophers have used the question of opportunity as a further means to deny the existence of moral luck. Norvin Richards argues that the ‘luck’ enjoyed by those negligent drivers who do not run down a pedestrian consists in their culpability going unnoticed. That is to say, both they and the ‘killer’ driver are equally contemptible. The bad luck involved is not that which diminishes our moral character, but rather that which renders our poor character transparent to others. Richards suggests that the culpability is in fact worse in the case of the supposedly ‘morally fortunate’ driver – as his bad behaviour is more likely to persist. The fortunate Briton who never had to face Nazi occupation in the 1940s, for example, ‘is likely to live an entire life in which he takes the pleasure of authority too seriously and the pain of certain others too lightly. This will be a stunted life, as well as a damaging one.’5 Richards’s suspicion threatens to shatter a source of national pride for the British, most of whom could never imagine themselves collaborating with a Nazi occupation force with the enthusiasm that the French displayed. Yet, were it not for the twenty-mile-wide natural fortification known as the English Channel, the British could well be remembering a similar experience to their neighbours. There was little resistance in the Channel Islands after they were captured by German troops in 1940, so Anglophobes might assume that the rest of the United Kingdom’s populace would have behaved similarly. Perhaps Britain would have behaved rather better in the event, but we cannot be sure of this. Certain occupied countries – notably Bulgaria – persecuted Jews with far less alacrity than the French authorities despite arguably more pressure from the Germans. But, given the evidence to hand, the self-righteousness of the British seems to depend a great deal upon their fortuitous geography.
One of the many luxuries that citizens can afford in the affluent West is a highly developed moral sense. There is no need to declare ‘every man for himself’ when every man receives food, shelter and security by birthright. With the benefits of property rights and the rule of law, alongside the absence of malaria, famine and high infant mortality, people in developed countries have been spared the requirement to steal loaves of bread, bribe tax inspectors and commit murder in guerrilla wars against government forces or rebel armies. We can even afford the ‘moral luxuries’ of high-protein vegetarian diets and the animal welfare institutions that inspire laughter or disbelief in much of the Third World. It is obvious that we should not feel too proud of ourselves for eschewing criminal acts that we have no need to commit. For example, someone may eschew extramarital affairs because they are able to reject all offers through iron self-control. Someone else might achieve the same results simply because they never receive any offers. Then there is the case of the individual who lusts after his secretary yet fails to secure a weekend away despite bombarding her with gifts. The wrongdoing of this last character is there for all to see in the incessant love letters and unsolicited boxes of chocolates, but the former two individuals look outwardly similar. Yet while we would commend the first, we feel no such need to commend the second – for we would be praising him for nothing but inactivity. The ‘luck’ involved is not that circumstances have made the first man a better person than the second, but that they have made it easier to see what a faithful or well-disciplined fellow he is. The second man may be just as virtuous, but it is less obvious in his case. Similarly, it might be possible that the people of Britain would have been the sort to pack off the Jews to death camps the moment their Nazi occupiers whistled. However, in lieu of appropriately testing circumstances, they must be given the benefit of the doubt. There can be no such charity in the case of the people of France and Germany, as they were tested and found wanting.
It would be absurd to accuse people of things they have not done, such as collaboration, just as it would be absurd to maintain that those who did commit those acts should not be held responsible for them, but this is what any denial of moral luck entails. In a way, we ‘get lucky’ every time we succeed in an action, in that no random event interceded to make it fail, but this does not stop us from apportioning praise and blame for deliberate actions. The point is that although we are free, we can make our choices only from those alternatives arrayed before us. It is here that fortune intrudes, for different people at different times have different options. We might seek to minimize the effect of luck by following a very narrow, self-sufficient path through life, but this is neither easy nor desirable for a fully rounded human being.
This is not to say that there are no measures to be taken. As the American classical scholar and philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written, ‘Emotions, in Aristotle’s view, are not always correct, any more than beliefs or actions are always correct. They need to be educated and brought into harmony with a correct view of the good human life…with regard to both passions and actions.’6 There seems to be such a thing as moral competence, which is not just about having good intentions, but concerns such skills as knowing the right thing to do, being aware of others’ feelings and never forgetting your wedding anniversary.
Someone may screw up continually while protesting that he didn’t mean to, but eventually, after fifteen years without a single anniversary gift, a man’s wife will be bound to think that her husband simply does not care no matter how much he protests otherwise. Ultimately, action is the only reliable test for intention. If action is never forthcoming, then the intention is most likely a sham. Her husband’s guilt may be genuine in its way, but he feels it precisely because of the light his actions shed on his intentions – ‘Perhaps I’m a selfish swine,’ he wonders, or ‘Perhaps she means less to me than I thought.’At the very least, he lacks the kind of moral intelligence that virtue requires. In morality, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Part of being a good person involves knowing right from wrong. We might deem cruel children immature rather than wicked, but we will change our opinion of them should they never learn some essential lessons. A bad man is sometimes unable to extinguish his virtuous impulses, so he crafts a dungeon for them and remains ‘good in his heart’ despite his crimes. For this he cannot be commended. We judge a nation by its governing regime and not its political prisoners.
It is important that Paul Gauguin was lucky in the ‘right’ way when he fulfilled his potential to become a great artist. That is, his plan worked in the way he intended it to rather than as a result of some other fortuitous reason. We would be less willing to absolve him if his sucess was only due to the happy circumstance of a genius living on the chosen island who managed to impart some of his gift to the young Frenchman. But because his success was properly his achievement, Gauguin’s actions are forgiven and we do not regard him as simply arrogant, deluded, self-centred or irresponsible. An eccentric devoid of talent is a fool by any other name. As cynics have always suspected, morality is, to an extent, about what one can get away with. Acts that would be heinous on the part of one individual might be mere misdemeanours if committed by another. Luck is thus a matter of one’s aptitudes as well as circumstances. Aristotle argued that there had to be minimum material conditions in place before one could live the good life. One cannot show generosity without having something to give, nor demonstrate courage without the health and vitality to stand up to one’s adversaries. The highest virtues, he maintained, were intellectual and attained through contemplation, but for this to be possible one would need a certain amount of leisure time – as well as the right kind of brainpower.
There is something about Aristotle’s account that offends our moral expectations as much as it worried his near contemporaries. We believe that moral worth must be accessible to all people in all times and predicaments – to the beggar as much as to the rich man. We like to think that virtue, unlike other attributes, cannot be inherited in genes or estates. As Bernard Williams put it:
The capacity for moral agency is supposedly present to any rational agent whatsoever, to anyone for whom the question can even present itself. The successful moral life, removed from considerations of birth, lucky upbringing, or indeed of the incomprehensible Grace of a non-Pelagian God, is presented as a career open not merely to the talents, but to a talent which all rational beings necessarily possess in the same degree. [It thus] offers solace to a sense of the world’s unfairness.7
The solace proposed by Williams only holds, of course, if the rest of the world’s unfairness does not seem all the more pointed when the morally blameless suffer while the guilty reap life’s rewards. It may be the case that we would rather have dinner with Richard Nixon than Mother Teresa but, if we do, that is our failing rather than hers. We pay more than lip service to the notion of moral character as the highest value and the real mark of a man or woman. As Williams explained, virtue ‘must have a claim on one’s most fundamental concerns as a rational agent, and in one’s recognition of that, one is supposed to grasp, not only morality’s immunity to luck, but one’s own partial immunity to luck through morality’. Morality will need to be more important than wealth, intelligence or physical prowess if it is to be the supreme value, for it offers little encouragement if it is merely ‘a last resort, the doss-house of the spirit’. If luck is allowed to enter into a man or woman’s moral worth, it could not be considered indisputably the highest value, because it would be subject to unearned fortune or undeserved corruption.
The writings of philosophers such as Williams and Nagel are a warning against moral fever. The former concluded:
Scepticism about the freedom of morality from luck cannot leave the concept of morality where it was, any more than it can remain undisturbed by scepticism about the very closely related image we have of there being a moral order, within which our actions have a significance which may not be accorded them by mere social recognition. These forms of scepticism will leave us with a concept of morality, but one less important, certainly, than ours is usually taken to be; and that will not be ours, since one thing that is particularly important about ours is how important it is taken to be.8
We may well wonder whether virtue’s supposed invulnerability to the Fates was our only reason for thinking it the highest value. It would certainly make it the trait that one is most responsible for – and therefore the most indicative of character – but this does not in itself make it the most important value. Immunity to fortune would be of no consequence if we did not already think morality a fine thing. This is just as well, for luck ensures that we never truly control our most precious possession.