“THE ODDS HAVE NOT BEEN VERY DEPENDABLE OF LATE”
Morality and Luck in the Hunger Games Trilogy
I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstance over which I have no control, anything whatsoever that I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself.
—Simone Weil1
Oh, that is a piece of bad luck.
—Caesar Flickerman, in The Hunger Games2
In the 50th Hunger Games, the first Quarter Quell, the Capitol murdered Maysilee Donner, one of the two female tributes from District 12. The murder weapon was “a flock of candy pink birds, equipped with long, thin beaks,” which were used to “skewer her through the neck.”3 Maysilee was the owner of a family heirloom, a gold pin with a mockingjay emblem that would become famous nearly a quarter of a century later, after her niece, Madge Undersee, affixed it to Katniss Everdeen’s dress and made her promise to wear it into the arena in the 74th Hunger Games—“for luck.”4
Because of Maysilee’s pin, Katniss won the trust of little Rue, the sharp-eyed tribute from District 11 who saved Katniss’s life by drawing her attention to the tracker jacker nest in the branches above her when a pack of Careers had trapped her in a tree. Because of her alliance with Rue, Katniss learned the use of her night-vision glasses, was able to destroy the Careers’ supplies, and, most important, was provoked to defy the Capitol by decorating her slain ally’s body with wildflowers. And because of that gesture, Thresh spared Katniss’s life, making it possible for her and Peeta Mellark to return home from the Games.5
It would seem that the mockingjay pin was indeed a source of what most of us would call very good luck.
If the plot of the Hunger Games trilogy were one of Katniss’s arrows, the force keeping it in flight would be luck—sometimes good, but more often than not very, very bad. According to contemporary philosopher Nicholas Rescher, luck is at play whenever, “as far the affected person is concerned, the outcome [of some action] came about ‘by accident.’ There has to be something unpredictable about luck.” To attribute something to luck, as opposed to design, is to acknowledge that forces we neither control nor foresee have brought it about. Moreover, “the outcome at issue has a significantly evaluative status in representing a good or bad result, a benefit or loss.”6 In other words, luck can be good or bad but never merely indifferent.
That Katniss prevailed in the 74th Hunger Games can be chalked up to a host of factors, such as her prowess with a bow and arrow, her courage, intelligence, and determination, and the sensational “star-crossed lovers” narrative that captivated potential sponsors. But luck certainly belongs near the top of the list. When our heroine needed to scale a tree to escape the Careers, she had quite a few to choose from. But she was lucky enough to pick the one that was home to a tracker jacker nest and then lucky enough to have Rue point it out to her in time for her to weaponize it. Those back-to-back strokes of luck were her salvation. When Caesar Flickerman wrapped up his interview with each tribute by merrily wishing him or her the “best of luck,” it was that sort of unexpected good fortune that he had in mind.
Even outside the arena, the erratic course of Katniss’s life often depends less on her exercise of foresight and planning—after all, who has time for that when you’re living in an almost constant state of panic, anxiously responding to one crisis after another?—and more on the unpredictable whims of fortune. Having made up her mind to flee District 12 with Peeta and their families, she enters the square in the center of town to find her friend and poaching partner, Gale Hawthorne, bound to a post, as Romulus Thread, the new Head Peacekeeper, viciously administers a whip to his bloodied back. Gale’s crime was knocking on the door of old Cray, the former Head Peacekeeper, with the intention to sell him some freshly poached wild turkey. Unfortunately, Gale’s former customer had been replaced by Thread, a heartless official who didn’t share his predecessor’s lax attitude toward district protocol. Bagging a wild turkey would normally be a lucky break for Gale, but doing so on the same day that the Capitol sent Cray packing turned out to be just the opposite. Not only did Gale endure a brutal beating, but witnessing his cruel punishment flipped a switch in Katniss’s head that caused her to abandon her plan to flee. Thus, it was that unlucky turkey that, in a roundabout way, ushered Katniss back into the arena for the 75th Hunger Games.
Katniss’s life is littered with bad luck in pretty much the same way the Capitol was laced with lethal pods, except that she doesn’t have the benefit of a Holo to alert her to when the next misfortune is around the bend. Of course, good luck also comes her way often enough to sustain her through some of her most horrible trials. If Mrs. Mellark hadn’t spied Katniss at the baker’s trash bin and alerted Peeta to her presence by launching into an angry tirade, the baker’s son might never have burned those two loaves of bread that fed Katniss’s family that night and gave her the hope to keep fighting. But even the good luck that snatched her from the jaws of death more than once only underscores how much her fate depends on little twists and turns of fortune over which she had no control.
Ironically, this girl whose fate is so often at the mercy of luck is also one of the most powerful people in Panem, someone who through the sheer force of her example can inspire the revolution that topples a seemingly untouchable tyrant like Coriolanus Snow. But the fact that her actions can have such earth-shattering repercussions, rippling out far beyond anything she intended or imagined, doesn’t make her any less vulnerable to luck. To the contrary, as the accidental instigator of the Mockingjay revolution, she’s paradoxically both powerful and helpless at the same time. As she herself acknowledges, “I had . . . set something in motion that I had no ability to control.”7
Most of us have had this experience, though perhaps not on as grand a scale as Katniss. Decisions we’ve made have permanently altered the landscape of our lives for better or worse, although the game-changing nature of our choices often comes into view only in retrospect. On a whim, you decide to take a class and as a result meet the love of your life. Oh, happy twist of fate! But, on other occasions, we might suspect that our lives have been scripted by the Capitol’s Gamemakers, who, in order to entertain themselves, have thrown us into an arena where one misstep can unleash an avalanche of misfortune—and we can never know where those trip wires are hidden until we have the bad luck to stumble into them. The unpredictability of our world is something we might find disturbing or delightful, but either way, it’s a feature of the human condition that’s as constant for us as danger is for Katniss in the arena.
Walking blind into so many of the most pivotal events in our lives, we’re hardly masters of our fate—and our awareness of the fact is, as Rescher explained, the source of our universal human preoccupation with luck: “We live in a world where our aims and goals, our ‘best laid plans,’ and, indeed, our very lives are at the mercy of chance and inscrutable contingency. In such a world, where we propose and fate disposes, where the outcome of all too many of our actions depends on ‘circumstances beyond our control,’ luck is destined to play a leading role in the human drama.”8
What’s most troubling about those “circumstances beyond our control” is that they make many of the things that matter to us most hostages to fortune. The vulnerability of goods like health, happiness, and even our very lives can be the source of tremendous unease. That’s why human beings have always sought ways to shelter the things they love from the vagaries of luck, to reduce the extent to which luck can freely roam, and, ideally, to bring luck within the ambit of things we can control or at least influence.
Can luck—this capricious rascal that throws everything into disarray while we’re busy making other plans—be domesticated? Many of us are ready to cross our fingers and give it a shot. We wear a lucky shirt or tie to an interview, carry a St. Christopher’s medal when traveling, toss a pinch of salt over one shoulder, and resort to an endless train of other charms and rituals in our quixotic attempts to woo the fickle maiden Lady Luck.
Katniss entered the arena wearing Maysilee’s mockingjay pin—and in this case, at least, an item intended to bring good luck really did work like a charm, if only by charming the girl who would become Katniss’s first ally in the arena. But if the mockingjay pin brought Katniss luck, it wasn’t because it possessed some magical luck-bearing property, but only because of the happy coincidence that Rue regarded some of the mockingjays in the orchard where she worked as her “special friends” and consequently was inclined to trust Katniss.9
Rue was chosen in a lottery. Lotteries epitomize the realm of things ruled by luck that people often hope to influence by magical or talismanic means, as anyone who has ever banked on a lucky number can attest. Given what we know about the workings of causality, however, there’s no way the mockingjay pin could have caused Rue’s slip of paper to be drawn, since the lottery in District 11 had already taken place when Madge affixed that golden token to Katniss’s dress. Consequently, there’s no way it could have been the direct cause of Katniss’s good luck in teaming up with Rue in the arena, however lucky Katniss was to be wearing it.
Katniss wasn’t the only one who enjoyed the alleged protection of an amulet. Rue also wore a “good luck charm”—“a necklace woven out of some kind of grass,” on which “hangs a roughly carved wooden star. Or maybe it’s a flower.” Inspecting it, Katniss observed, “Well, it’s worked so far.”10 Alas, that “so far” turned out to be prescient, since Rue’s grass necklace offered no protection from the spear that Marvel thrust through her abdomen later that day. Could all the luck have run out of her charm by then? Perhaps. It’s more likely, however, that her necklace was never anything more than an ordinary handcrafted piece of jewelry, with as much charm as any other homemade objet d’art but no occult powers whatsoever.
Philosophers have traditionally taken a dim view of these attempts to pull the strings of fate through charms and rituals, since they misunderstand what luck really is. Superstition tends to reify luck, treating it as a cosmic force that can inhere in objects and be summoned or lost through symbolic gestures and deeds. Or, even worse in the opinion of many philosophers, the superstitious mind thinks it can discern behind the ebb and flow of our shifting fortunes the capricious hand of some superhuman agent with a will of her own—for some reason luck is always a she—whom we can cajole into helping us, just as popular tributes can appeal to their sponsors for assistance in the arena.
The ancient Romans personified luck as the goddess Fortuna, typically portraying her with an overflowing cornucopia, since, like the Gamemakers, she was sometimes the bearer of gifts. She was also frequently depicted perched atop a wheel to represent life’s ups and downs. This proverbial wheel of fortune might have been the inspiration for the wheel-shaped arena design of the 75th Hunger Games, although the latter doesn’t deliver anything that remotely resembles blessings, only new horrors by the hour. In important respects, the world of the Hunger Games arena is just like the world that many people, from ancient times until this very day, believe they inhabit: one presided over by powerful invisible beings who can sometimes be induced to help us but who don’t automatically make our interests their first priority.
The Duke of Gloucester in William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) King Lear represents this view at its most pessimistic when he laments, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport.”11 That comes close to a perfect description of life (such as it is) in the arena. But unless we’ve recently left the Launch Room, we have no reason to believe that powerful beings are watching us and engineering our fate. The truth is that luck is neither an impersonal force nor a willful agent, but only a product of our human finitude. If we could know what was going to happen at all times and could arm ourselves in advance against all of life’s cruel contingencies, then luck would cease to be a factor in human affairs. Of course, if we could pull that off, it’s doubtful that we would still be human or that our lives would continue to hold much interest for us.
In short, luck isn’t the sort of thing that can exist independently of finite creatures like us: intelligent and vulnerable animals who take sensible precautions to protect the things we care about but who can still be benefited or harmed in myriad ways that we don’t always see coming. The temptation to represent luck as a power that can be woven into a “good luck charm” or as an invisible “sponsor” who can be propitiated is understandable, for that at least offers us some hope of getting luck under control. But perhaps there are other, more promising approaches to limiting the tyranny of luck over our lives.
“There’s Still You, There’s Still Me”
One of the cruelest ironies of the Hunger Games trilogy is that all of the horrible ordeals that Katniss undergoes from the reaping day on stem from her selfless decision to volunteer for the Hunger Games in order to protect her sister, Prim, who was dearer to Katniss than life itself. Yet in the end, Prim died as a martyr in the Mockingjay revolution, not just despite Katniss’s best efforts to protect her, which would be tragic enough, but indeed because of the unforeseen string of events that Katniss set in motion that fateful day when she cried out, “I volunteer!” Nothing could serve as a more sobering illustration of the ineradicable role of luck in our lives.
Still, there are some philosophers who would point to Katniss’s willingness to substitute herself for Prim as an example of one precious thing that they believe is entirely immune from the tyranny of luck: our moral character, as reflected in the moral quality of our actions. Morality, they argue, is one dimension of our existence in which how we fare depends entirely on our own choices and not at all on those unpredictable forces beyond our control that we call luck. Luck could prevent Katniss’s action from achieving its intended purpose of keeping her sister alive, but nothing can ever rob her deed of its moral value. Regardless of what might happen subsequent to the reaping, what Katniss did that day will forever remain a noble act of self-sacrificial love.
According to the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), an action has moral value if it’s motivated by what he calls the “good will,” an inner resolve to do the right thing.12 In his view, the value of our actions doesn’t depend on their consequences, since, as Katniss learns again and again to her horror and dismay, we often have little control over how they will turn out. And if those unpredictable consequences determined our moral worth, there would be absolutely nothing of value that’s not a hostage to fortune—not even, as the philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) put it in the epigraph at the head of this chapter, “those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself.” What could be more “intimately mine” than whether I am a person of sound moral character? The good news, according to Kant, is that a virtuous moral character is the one thing that’s entirely secure from the vicissitudes of fortune.
If Kant was right and moral value depends solely on our intentions, then whether Katniss acted with a good will was up to her alone. Moreover, as long as her will and intentions were good, none of the ambushes and snares that luck might place in her path could diminish the moral value of her actions in any way. In a famous passage, Kant wrote:
A good will is good not 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 and, regarded for itself, is to be valued incomparably higher than all that could be merely brought about by it. . . . Even if, by a special disfavor of fortune . . . with its greatest efforts it should 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 a thing which has its full worth in itself.13
Kant could have been describing Katniss’s sacrifice at the reaping when he wrote those words, for what she did epitomized the idea of an action that we can’t help but admire even if bad luck prevents it from accomplishing its intended goal.
The idea that our moral character is immune to luck restores a measure of fairness to a world that is otherwise spectacularly unfair. In life, there are always the lucky few who start the game with undeserved advantages that shift the odds strongly in their favor. Consider, for example, the Career tributes from Panem’s wealthy districts, who have the benefit of years of training before they even arrive in the Capitol. But if Kant was right, the playing field is perfectly level and the odds favor us all equally when it comes to being moral. That may not offer much solace if you’re a tribute from one of the poorer corners of Panem like District 12—unless, of course, you’re someone like Peeta and your number one goal is preserving your moral integrity in the arena. “I want to die as myself,” he confides to Katniss on the roof of the Training Center the night before the start of the 74th Hunger Games. “I don’t want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not.”14 Kant would assure Peeta that not even the Gamemakers can turn him into a monster against his will.
Peeta’s concern for his integrity seems to be based on another belief that Kant would have wholeheartedly endorsed: that the most important thing in life isn’t the hand we’re dealt but how we choose to play it and the sort of people we become through our moral choices. As Katniss observed, “Peeta [had] been struggling with how to maintain his identity. His purity of self.”15 The Gamemakers can design the landscape of the arena, orchestrate violent conflicts within it, severely restrict the options of the tributes, and even maneuver Peeta into a situation in which he may have to kill other tributes in self-defense. But, as Peeta saw it, there could still be an absolute limit to what the Gamemakers could do to him:
“Only I keep wishing I could think of a way to . . . to show the Capitol they don’t own me. That I’m more than just a piece in their Games,” says Peeta.
“But you’re not,” I say. “None of us are. That’s how the Games work.”
“Okay, but within that framework, there’s still you, there’s still me,” he insists. “Don’t you see?”16
Earlier, we considered how the Gamemakers resemble the goddess Fortuna as people in the ancient world conceived her. The power of fortune may seem almost total, since it creates the “framework” within which we operate and make our choices. But Kant insisted that there’s one stronghold that it can’t penetrate: the inner realm of our moral character, which defines us as the kind of people we are. We might forfeit our “purity of self” through our own bad moral choices, but it’s not the sort of thing that we could lose against our will through some malign turn of fortune or safeguard by means of some lucky amulet.
The ancient Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) was of the same mind as Kant when he said about moral virtue, “Just because it’s not in the power of another to bestow, neither is it subject to another’s whims. That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away.”17 Peeta would concur, only he would substitute “the Capitol” for “Fortune.”
More recently, however, some philosophers have argued that the “purity of self” that Peeta wanted to preserve is an illusion and that our moral worth is as vulnerable to luck as any of the other goods we care about. The contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel has spoken of moral luck, which comes into play whenever “a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment.”18 He identified four kinds of moral luck: constitutive, circumstantial, causal, and resultant.
Constitutive moral luck occurs whenever forces beyond your control have shaped “the kind of person you are, where this is not just a question of what you deliberately do, but of your inclinations, capacities, and temperament.”19 Consider Haymitch Abernathy, staggering through life in a nearly constant alcoholic fog. His inebriation is so incapacitating that it has probably compromised his ability to be an effective mentor to District 12’s tributes on many occasions. In fact, Katniss suspects that Haymitch’s alcoholism may have cost some of her predecessors their lives. “No wonder the District 12 tributes never stand a chance,” she reflects while watching Haymitch drink himself into a stupor on the train to the Capitol. “It isn’t just that we’ve been underfed and lack training. Some of our tributes have still been strong enough to make a go of it. But we rarely get sponsors and he’s a big part of the reason why.”20 But as justified as Katniss’s anger at Haymitch may be, we know that he didn’t choose to be this drunken wreck of a man. His character was shaped by a cruel twist of fate: his name being drawn in the 50th Hunger Games when he was still a boy. Morally, he never stood a chance.
Circumstantial moral luck is “luck in one’s circumstances—the kind of problems and situations one faces.”21 Circumstantial luck can take many forms, but it’s most easy to recognize in situations in which, through no fault of our own, we’re caught on the horns of a moral dilemma that forces us to choose between two evils. More than once during the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss worries about the prospect of having to do something unforgivable in order to fulfill her promise to Prim to come home alive. After receiving a surprise hug from Rue, Katniss reports, “I turn and head back to the stream, feeling somehow worried. About Rue being killed, about Rue not being killed and the two of us being left for last, about leaving Rue alone, about leaving Prim alone back home.”22 What she seems to fear most is not that Rue will be killed by some other tribute, but rather that she and Rue will face each other as the last two survivors in the Games, forcing Katniss to sacrifice her erstwhile ally for the sake of a promise to her sister. As horrible as it sounds, Rue’s death at the hands of Marvel was good moral luck for Katniss.
Causal moral luck is “luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstances.”23 Nagel’s point seems to be that we don’t make our moral choices in a vacuum. Rather, we’re influenced, for better or worse, by innumerable past experiences that shape our present decisions, perhaps even unconsciously. For example, if there was ever a moment that revealed Katniss’s moral integrity and courage, it was when she defied the Capitol by decorating Rue’s slain body with wildflowers. She did it because she wanted “to do something, right here, right now, to shame them, to make them accountable, to show the Capitol that whatever they do or force us to do there is a part of every tribute they can’t own. That Rue was more than a piece in their Games. And so am I.”24 We applaud her action, but in her motive we hear echoes of Peeta’s words from that night on the roof. Would Katniss have acted so admirably if Peeta’s words hadn’t been percolating through her unconscious mind for the past several days? Perhaps not, in which case her moral mettle might owe a lot to moral luck.
Finally, there’s resultant moral luck, which is “luck in the way one’s actions and projects turn out.”25 As we’ve already seen, try as we might to do the right thing, the results of our actions still sometimes turn out wrong due to some unexpected stroke of bad luck. Katniss volunteered to take Prim’s place at the reaping but ultimately failed to keep her sister alive due to circumstances beyond her control. We don’t blame her, though, most likely because the causal chain linking her action to Prim’s death was so elaborate and serpentine, so punctuated with unlikely accidents, that we’re sure there’s no way she could have possibly anticipated its course. But that’s not always the case with unintended consequences. Unfair as it seems, we often find it impossible to escape blame when our actions result in serious harm to others, even though our intentions might have been good and it was only the capricious play of chance events that caused them to go wrong. And in many instances, our most unforgiving accuser might be the person facing us in the mirror.
Nagel gives an example of resultant luck that’s particularly pertinent to the Hunger Games trilogy: the culpability of failed revolutionaries for the death and destruction their actions leave in their wake. “If the American Revolution had been a bloody failure resulting in greater repression,” he wrote, “then Jefferson, Franklin and Washington would still have made a noble attempt, and might not even have regretted it on their way to the scaffold, but they would have had to blame themselves for what they had helped to bring on their compatriots.”26
This isn’t to say that one should never take up arms against tyrants. But doing so is always a moral gamble, since only the outcome can determine whether the revolutionary will be lauded as a new founding father (or mother) or reviled as a false prophet who led his or her followers down a path to ruin. If the revolution Katniss inspired had gone down in flames, then she would have been merely that brazen girl whose reckless actions cast Panem back into the Dark Days (which is exactly how President Snow encouraged her to see herself) rather than the torchbearer of a new epoch in Panem’s history.
Right up until the final victory of the revolution, Katniss was haunted by the thought that she was responsible for the horrendous devastation that it had unleashed on Panem. Walking through the graveyard that was once District 12, planting her footsteps in the ashes of her former home, she accidentally thumps her shoe against the skull of someone who at one time might been her neighbor. Gazing at the bodies piled along the road, Katniss can’t help but feel like an executioner:
Some were incinerated entirely. But others, probably overcome with smoke, escaped the worst of the flames and now lie reeking in various states of decomposition, carrion for scavengers, blanketed by flies. I killed you, I think as I pass a pile. And you. And you.
Because I did. It was my arrow, aimed at the chink in the force field surrounding the arena, that brought on this firestorm of retribution. That sent the whole country of Panem into chaos.27
Had the revolution failed, it’s very likely that Katniss would have been destroyed by her guilt. That it succeeded was, for her, a stroke of good moral luck.
Some critics of Nagel have dismissed the idea of resultant moral luck on the grounds that intentions, not consequences, are the only things that we should factor into our moral assessment of people and their actions. Like Kant, they shudder at the thought that the moral worth of any of our actions could be at the mercy of consequences that depend in any way on luck. From this point of view, Katniss is just wrong to let things over which she had no control, such as the firestorm from the Capitol that turned District 12 to ashes, enter into her self-assessment. Her intentions are all that matter, for better or worse.
There’s something attractive about this view, since it allows us to maintain our “purity of self” no matter how disastrous the consequences of our actions may be, as long as we acted with pure intentions. Of course, there’s that old adage about how good intentions have paved the road to hell—or, in this case, the road to a hellish civil war that caused the annihilation of an entire district—but someone like Kant would stand his ground and insist that your good intentions still get you off the hook. But if intentions are the key, then we run into another problem, one that’s especially acute when we’re dealing with someone like Katniss, who distrusts her own motives as much as she distrusts the motives of people around her.
The pivotal moment of the Hunger Games trilogy, the tipping of the first domino that set in motion the whole chain of events that led to the Mockingjay revolution, was Katniss’s “little trick with berries.”28 But nearly a year later, she still doesn’t know whether her motive was noble or self-serving:
The berries. I realize the answer to who I am lies in that handful of poisonous fruit. If I held them out to save Peeta because I knew I would be shunned if I came back without him, then I am despicable. If I held them out because I loved him, I am still self-centered, although forgivable. But if I held them out to defy the Capitol, I am someone of worth. The trouble is, I don’t know exactly what was going on inside me at that moment.29
It may be that the difficulty Katniss has in discerning her motives arises because she’s such a deep and complex character, but I’m not sure that she’s really much different from the rest of us in that respect. If we were to follow Katniss’s example and be completely honest with ourselves, I suspect that many of us would have to admit that our motives are often equally mysterious to us. We’d like to believe that we always act from the most high-minded intentions, but in fact our motives are probably seldom, if ever, entirely pure. Katniss at least has enough insight and honesty to admit that she’s profoundly baffled by her own motives, intentions, and desires—and not just in sorting out her feelings about her rival suitors.
Searching for what motivated her to defy the Capitol at the close of the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss can’t decide whether she acted “out of anger at the Capitol” or “because of how it would look back home” or “simply because it was the only decent thing to do.”30 If a sense of moral decency is what guided her hand to those berries, then, from Kant’s perspective, the purity of her motive exonerates her from any blame for the chaos her actions unleashed. There’s a famous Latin saying that Kant endorsed, “Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus,” meaning, “Let justice be done, though the world may perish.”31 As long as Katniss was trying to do the right thing, she bears no guilt for the destructive consequences over which she had no control. But what if she’s correct in her suspicion that she acted from motives that were less than purely noble, perhaps even base or selfish? If so, then she can’t plead good intentions as an alibi.
The problem is that Katniss has no way to untangle the complex mélange of motives that induced her to reach for the berries that day, no way to be sure that she acted first and foremost from a selfless desire to do what’s right and not just to protect herself from the scorn she would face back in District 12 if she took Peeta’ life. And given the seemingly bottomless complexity of our inner lives and our equally robust capacity for self-deception, aren’t we all at the same disadvantage when it comes to uncovering the real intentions behind many of our actions? Can we ever say with complete certainty what our real motives are, especially when what’s at stake is our belief in our own moral worth or, as Katniss puts it, “the answer to who I am”?
The upshot is that taking refuge in “good intentions” to shelter our sense of worth from the stormy caprices of luck may turn out to be just a ploy to escape the often unforgiving consequences of our actions. Let’s give Katniss credit for rejecting that option as a cop-out. However, her honesty is tantamount to an admission that there’s really nothing about our existence that’s entirely immune to luck, not even whether our lives are blameless or blameworthy. All we can do is hope that the odds will be, if not ever in our favor, then at least in our corner more often than not.
NOTES
1. Sian Miles, ed., “Human Personality,” in Simone Weil: An Anthology (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson), 70.
2. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic Press, 2008), 133.
3. Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire (New York: Scholastic Press, 2009), 201.
4. Ibid., 87.
5. Ibid., 21.
6. Nicholas Rescher, Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 32.
7. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic Press, 2010), 6.
8. Rescher, Luck, 19.
9. Collins, The Hunger Games, 212.
10. Ibid.
11. William Shakespeare, King Lear (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2005), 173, 4.1. 36–37. References are to act, scene, and line.
12. For more on Kant, see chapter 7, “Competition and Kindness: The Social Darwinian World of the Hunger Games”; chapter 11, “‘Sometimes the World is Hungry for People Who Care’: Katniss and the Feminist Care Ethic”; and chapter 14, “‘Safe to Do What?’: Morality and the War of All against All in the Arena.”
13. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8.
14. Collins, The Hunger Games, 141.
15. Ibid., 142.
16. Ibid.
17. Seneca, “Letter 59,” in Epistles 1–65, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library series (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 423. For more on Seneca, see chapter 18, “‘All of This Is Wrong’: Why One of Rome’s Greatest Thinkers Would Have Despised the Capitol.”
18. Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck, ed. Daniel Statman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 59.
19. Ibid., 60.
20. Collins, The Hunger Games, 56.
21. Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 60.
22. Collins, The Hunger Games, 213.
23. Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 60.
24. Collins, The Hunger Games, 236–237.
25. Nagel, “Moral Luck,” 60.
26. Ibid., 62.
27. Collins, Mockingjay, 5–6.
28. Collins, Catching Fire, 21.
29. Ibid., 118.
30. Collins, The Hunger Games, 358–359.
31. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 133. However, Kant translates this expression somewhat idiosyncratically as “Let justice reign, even if all the rogues in the world should perish.”