Post by 溪山 on Mar 24, 2019 14:15:34 GMT -5
www.iep.utm.edu/moralluc/
Moral Luck
A case of moral luck occurs whenever luck makes a moral difference. The problem of moral luck arises from a clash between the apparently widely held intuition that cases of moral luck should not occur with the fact that it is arguably impossible to prevent such cases from arising.
The literature on moral luck began in earnest in the wake of papers by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. The problem of moral luck had been discussed before Nagel's and Williams' articles, although not under the heading of "moral luck." Though Nagel's paper was written as a commentary on Williams', they have quite different emphases. Still, the same question lies at the heart of both papers and, indeed, at the heart of the literature on moral luck: can luck ever make a moral difference? This idea of a moral difference is a wide one. Various sorts of difference have been considered. The most obvious is, perhaps, a difference in what a person is morally responsible for, but it has also been suggested both that luck affects the moral justification of our actions and that it affects a person's moral status in general (that is, that it affects how morally good or bad a person is). We shall pay more attention to these varied differences in time, but the important point for now is that both Williams and Nagel argue that luck can make a moral difference.
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Moral Luck
A case of moral luck occurs whenever luck makes a moral difference. The problem of moral luck arises from a clash between the apparently widely held intuition that cases of moral luck should not occur with the fact that it is arguably impossible to prevent such cases from arising.
The literature on moral luck began in earnest in the wake of papers by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. The problem of moral luck had been discussed before Nagel's and Williams' articles, although not under the heading of "moral luck." Though Nagel's paper was written as a commentary on Williams', they have quite different emphases. Still, the same question lies at the heart of both papers and, indeed, at the heart of the literature on moral luck: can luck ever make a moral difference? This idea of a moral difference is a wide one. Various sorts of difference have been considered. The most obvious is, perhaps, a difference in what a person is morally responsible for, but it has also been suggested both that luck affects the moral justification of our actions and that it affects a person's moral status in general (that is, that it affects how morally good or bad a person is). We shall pay more attention to these varied differences in time, but the important point for now is that both Williams and Nagel argue that luck can make a moral difference.
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