Luck, Moral Guilt and Legal Guilt

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Luck, Moral Guilt and Legal Guilt

The question of whether luck should play a role in our assessment of other people is fundamental to human society. Our judicial laws express the view that we are responsible for our actions-in other words, luck does have a bearing on the determination of legal guilt; since legal guilt is theoretically based on moral guilt, this means that luck is usually considered to have a bearing on moral guilt as well. However, there are serious difficulties with this system of judgment. Indeed, I believe that it is neither advantageous nor even logically plausible to accede to either side of this debate: simply admitting to one extreme (e.g., that luck should never be considered when assessing others, or vice versa) automatically creates a multitude of problems. If we do consider luck when assessing someone's moral character, we open ourselves to the very real possibility of punishing two people unequally for the same exact action or intention, which is incompatible with our notion of justice. Yet if we decide that luck should not be a factor, we are in effect embracing the notion that we are not responsible for our actions, and in such a case, punishment would be futile; without legal guilt and punishment, however, society would be chaotic, which again assaults our notion of justice. We shall see that this issue is closely tied in with the more general idea of free will vs. determinism, which itself is a fundamentally disturbing problem. As long as the free will debate remains inconclusive-as most people feel it is-so too will the debate over moral luck remain unresolved.

In order to examine this issue, it is beneficial to start with a specific example: consider a person who happens to ...

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... leads to chaos. Yet factoring in luck fails to punish those who are immoral but have good luck, while punishing only those who have bad luck. I maintain that a satisfactory answer to this question is impossible because, as I stated earlier, the issue of moral guilt in relation to luck is based heavily upon the idea of free will versus determinism, a problem which is fundamentally troublesome. With no clear way to decide the issue of free will vs. determinism, it is equally unclear how we should decide the issue of moral guilt. Should luck play a part in the assessment of a person's character? As I asserted at the start of this discussion, I believe that such a determination is logically implausible.

WORKS CITED

Nagel, Thomas. "Moral Luck." Reason and Responsibility, 9th edition. Joel Feinberg, ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996: 515-521.

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