On Luck And Moral Responsibility

Ethical life is under the influence of luck. Therefore, how should we look on the pervasive luck when making moral appraisals and judgments? As regard to this question, Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Williams, Nussbaum, and Jensen have different answers. This dissertation chooses some classic views for analysis, summing up three types of views on Luck: Kantism's view on luck, Williamsism's view on Luck and Compatible view on Luck. Then it demonstrates the complicated inheriting and critiquing relationships between these views and presents the views history on the relationship between Luck and Morality. This brief views history is of great significance to our re-understanding of the ethical function of Luck, furthering our understanding of the ethical ideologies of these philosophers, guiding people toward reasonably perceiving various Lucks in life and behaving upright and living happy lives.In the second chapter, the paper tidies up, analyzes and groups different definitions of Luck and introduces different categorizations of Luck, with a view to avoiding misunderstandings in conceptions. Luck is defined as those uncertain things agreed-by-people that meaningfully influence or disturb people's ethical life and are caused by Force Majeure.According to the different causes of Force out of men's control, William and Negel plot out different types of Luck. Based on their classification, this paper gets two types of Luck: one is caused by inadequate capability; the other is caused by environment factors or other people's action.In the third chapter, this paper analyzes Plato's, Stoic's and Kant's different understandings of Luck; and it induces Kantism's view on Luck and his basic view on Luck and Morality: the function of Luck should not be taken into consideration when making a judgment on moral responsibility, though Luck will influence people's ethical life; the reason why good behaviors are praised and the immoral ones are criticized is because of the moral value of these behaviors rather than the impact of Luck; so luck will have no ground in the field of Morality.Kantism's view on Luck is idealized, which can not explain the real judgments in people's ethic life and is fundamentally against people's intuition: People can not avoid shouldering the responsibility for activities that causes consequences even though they are under the influence of Luck.Scholars such as William, Nagel and Nussbaum realized the deficiencies of Kantism's view on Luck and they pointed out critically: moral luck does exist, therefore, when making moral judgment luck should not only be taken into consideration but also be highlighted. Starting from human's moral practices, these philosophers keenly perceived the practical influence of luck on moral appraisal, based on which they put forward the concept of Moral Luck and tried to build up a brand concept and bring luck into moral appraisal and practice. In the fourth chapter, this paper will make an analysis of the views of these philosophers and sum up Williamsism's view on Luck. This view on Luck may have the potential hazard of having people losing their pursuit for good and fair despite of its many reasonable points.Faced with the deficiencies of Kantism's view on Luck and the potential danger of Williamsism's view on Luck, other scholars put forward the Compatible view on Luck, which upholds the purity, stability and loftiness of moral conception and properly explains the existence of Luck and its influence on moral appraisal at the same time. In the fifth chapter this paper analyzes these scholars'views and sum up three types of compatible views on Luck: Andre put forward a Aristote's type of responsibility conception to make up for and explain the deficiencies in Kantism's views on responsibility conception; Jensen and Zimmerman advocated to distinguish between"the responsibility of taking action"and"blameworthy"in order for us to better understand our pragmatic moral judgments; Aristotle's neutral view on Luck provides us with a powerful guidance in looking on Luck rationally. In the conclusion part, this paper believes that we should go back to Aristotle's view on Luck based on three justifications and we should look on Luck with an unbiased and neither humble nor pert attitude; in everyday life we should think before we act instead of being messed up by Luck. Last but not least, this paper expatiates on the theoretical and practical meanings of researches on Luck and points out some deficiencies of this paper on its structure and creativity.