Refusal of Fortune: An Argument Against Nagel’s “Moral Luck”

Though Nagel does not agree with the idea that people can only be blamed for things that are within their ability to control, his argument in his article “Moral Luck” is meant to cast doubt on the concept of moral responsibility altogether rather than to make a judgment that would run counter to the guiding principle of fault-finding. His notion is appealing from a sense of fairness since there are so many external factors that affect human decision-making in ways that might not be immediately apparent when a decision is judged. “Moral luck” argues that events preceding a decision, the temperament and abilities of a person making a decision, the environment situating a person making a decision, and ultimately the agency of a person making a decision are all factors that cannot be controlled by a person who makes a decision. Therefore, the moral judgment of a person cannot reasonably assess that person’s blame if blame is based on individual agency. Nagel’s argument relies so much upon a deterministic perspective, however, that one might well wonder if the only reasonable basis for making moral judgments in Nagel’s view is to satisfy some biological quirk in humans. Nagel’s argument is helpful as a check, healthy skepticism against rash moral judgments, but is otherwise useless in promoting human responsibility and existence. Whatever the actual level of external factors is that affect everyday human decisions, the concept of free will is one that provides order to human life, and it is not worth doubting altogether. Moreover, the concept of human nature and free will is essential to understanding morality, which can be defined as a community-based system of understanding choices that should be preferred and choices that should be rejected. “Blame” can be defined as an indictment of a person’s failure in a given situation precisely because that person has the necessary knowledge and ability to make a better moral choice but chooses some lesser moral choice instead. Nagel’s argument distorts the simplicity of making moral judgments in three ways: he indicates that free will needs some sort of absolute freedom/purity in order to be considered free will, he applies a general false equivalency to all moral judgments, and he does not take into account human interdependency.

Nagel uses a more general counterexample than some of his other illustrations to counter the idea of moral responsibility with the notion that free will cannot be considered free if it is not purely or absolutely so. He hints at some monstrous murder, and highlights that the judgment of the perpetrator largely rests upon external factors preceding the crime as well as the act itself: “[…] if certain surrounding circumstances had been different, then no unfortunate circumstances would have followed from a wicked intention, and no seriously culpable act would have been performed; but since the circumstances were not different, and the agent succeeded in perpetuating a particularly cruel murder, that is what he did, and that is what he is responsible for.” Nagel feels that this moral judgment can be called into question because the consideration of external circumstances as leading into the killer’s act is held in contradiction with the notion that the killer is judged because of what he chose to do. While Nagel is correct that the killer’s free will is not exclusively what is being judged here, it seems like a manic leap to suggest that because the killer is not absolutely responsible for his successful murder that he does not bear sufficient responsibility for his choice. The logic that the judgment of the killer’s moral responsibility for his crime is basically as arbitrary as the circumstances that helped enable the killer to commit his crime breaks down into absurdity if applied to the killer himself in this scenario. Nagel openly doubts the concept of human agency altogether, so why does it matter if this particular man committed murder as opposed to some other individual? If this man’s circumstances effectively dictated that he would commit murder, he is placed on the level of an animal, relying entirely upon impulse rather than choice. Rather than call into question the moral judgments made against this man, then, the responsibility and respect accorded him as a rational moral agent is negated entirely. He could be terminated as a potentially dangerous animal rather than afforded consideration for his ability to make better decisions and to reform. Free will does not fall apart as a meaningful concept because so much is outside of human control, but it has meaning in degree (however small) of how able humans are to make choices. No one is perfectly able at all times to make real their desired accomplishments, whether those accomplishments can be considered morally acceptable or not, and the severity of a crime affects how severely it is judged. Choices are never free from circumstantial or environmental effects, and the degree of those effects changes how “free” a decision is considered to be.

Following Nagel’s tendency in his argument to criticize an absolute standard that is not truly absolute, Nagel also tends to apply a false equivalency to moral judgments in general. In order to illustrate the way that environmental circumstances drastically change the outcome of different moral decisions, he makes use of an example where a truck driver may or may not accidentally strike and kill a young child who crosses his path. Nagel contends that the presence or absence of the girl, Nagel argues, would not mitigate the driver’s neglect to maintain his brakes in good condition. Nagel writes, “[…] 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 a 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.” Though Nagel earlier distinguishes an accident where the driver would have completed necessary brake maintenance yet unintentionally kills a child as not qualifying as “moral bad luck,” he finishes his discussion by blurring the lines between the two sorts of accidents, creating a moral equivalency between a random tragic circumstance and professional negligence resulting in death. This is an extremely unhelpful perspective because rather than clarifying the problems inherent in making moral judgments, it seems to toss them out altogether. Professional negligence is morally wrong, but surely it is worse when such negligence results in death? The driver in this situation is not isolated in a laboratory to experience various stimuli causing various moral judgments in his own mind—the moral gravity of his actions is increased by the way that they directly (not just potentially) affect other people. A 2012 film, Flight, centers on this very question of how professional negligence should be morally judged. In the film, a commercial airline pilot who is a functioning alcoholic maneuver an airplane that has experienced a catastrophic mechanical failure to crash land in such a way that there is a minimum loss of life (4 passengers and 2 flight attendants) of the 160+ souls on board. At the time the pilot performed this maneuver, however, he was legally intoxicated. Throughout the film, the pilot is resistant to acknowledge that he did anything wrong and prefers to be considered a hero for the people he saved, but eventually, he admits under sworn testimony that because he was under the influence of alcohol that he is responsible for the 6 deaths on that flight. The fact that this was not the first time the pilot flew a plane while intoxicated does not place his professional negligence in all the other instances on the same level of moral culpability as the one where his negligence contributed to the loss of life. In this example as in any other, the direct negative consequences of professional negligence on other people make that negligence worse.

Finally, Nagel in arguing against an understanding of moral responsibility as being based on the control over the circumstances in which human agents make decisions, Nagel strangely does not seem to take into account human interdependency. He argues (once again) that actual rather than potential circumstances are usually taken into account in judging people’s actions, and he provides what he refers to as a “conspicuous” example in the response of Germany to the Nazi regime: “Ordinary citizens of Nazi Germany had an opportunity to behave heroically by opposing the regime. They also had an opportunity to behave badly, and most of them are culpable for having failed this test.” While Nagel leaves some nuance in this assessment of Nazi Germany and is primarily using this historical example as an illustration of how flat moral judgments can be, Nagel does not take into consideration that the ethical system in that country was based on nationalism; Nazi Germany created a situation where the moral thing to do was to utterly support your country. From an outsider’s perspective and with hindsight, the actions of the Nazi regime are nearly impossible to excuse, but within that community, there was a moral standard that most of Germany adhered to. While Nazi Germany is held up frequently as a universal example of countrywide moral failure, to the point where even Nagel is hesitant to question that status, Nazi Germany’s moral system was at least consistent with promoting the “Fatherland.” A community’s needs largely determine its moral system, and this is not an arbitrary determinant outside of human control, but one that relies heavily upon human choice in the context of how those choices affect others in a given community. Germany had suffered severe poverty prior to the Nazi regime’s rise to power, and the unity and strength that regime promoted through conquest appealed to the Germans who desired a healthy community. Hindsight once again shows that there is blame to be placed, but in the end, it is difficult to see that countries throughout the world developing their own moral standards through dissimilar processes.

The main problem with Nagel’s argument, when it comes right down to it, is that Nagel is dependent on moral judgments being made within a rigid, inflexible, and absolute system in order to criticize them. Certainly, Kant is responsible for much of the way that philosophy has evolved in examining ethics and moral theory in general, but it would seem more helpful to offer a positive direction for a moral system rather than to deconstruct the subject altogether and throw up one’s hands. Random as the events and circumstances are surrounding our lives, morality is a way of not an only attributing agency to humans but of creating that agency in the first place.

Works Cited

Card, Claudia. The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. 21-48.

Nagel, Thomas. "Moral Luck.", n.d. Web. 5 Dec. 2013. <http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/NAGELMoralLuck.pdf>

Walker, Margaret Urban. "Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure Agency." Metaphilosophy 22.1‐2 (1991): 14-27.

Zemeckis, Robert, dir. Flight. Perf. Denzel Washington. 2012. Paramount Pictures, 2013. DVD.