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Virtue Epistemology and Moral Luck
Abstract
Thomas Nagel has proposed that the existence of moral luck mandates a general attitude of skepticism in ethics. One popular way of arguing against Nagel's claim is to insist that the phenomenon of moral luck itself is an illusion , in the sense that situations in which it seems to occur may be plausibly re-described so as to show that agents need not be held responsible for the unlucky outcomes of their actions. Here I argue that this strategy for explaining away moral luck fails because it does not take account of the fact that agents in morally unlucky circumstances are uniformly subject to a very specific type of epistemic obligation. I then proceed to sketch out an alternative strategy for blocking the inference to skepticism, one that makes use of the distinctive explanatory resources provided by epistemic virtue theory.
The aims of this paper are fourfold. The first aim is to characterize two distinct forms of circumstantial moral luck and illustrate how they are implicitly recognized in pre‐theoretical moral thought. The second aim is to identify a significant difference between the ways in which these two kinds of circumstantial luck are morally relevant. The third aim is to show how the acceptance of circumstantial moral luck relates to the acceptance of resultant moral luck. The fourth aim is to defuse a legitimate concern about accepting the existence of circumstantial moral luck, namely the fact that its existence implies substantial moral risks.
The problem of moral luck is that there is a contradiction in our common sense ideas about moral responsibility. In one strand of our thinking, we believe that a person can become more blameworthy by luck. For example, two reckless drivers manage their vehicles in the same way, and one but not the other kills a pedestrian. We blame the killer driver more than the merely reckless driver, because we believe that the killer driver is more blameworthy. Nevertheless, this idea contradicts another feature of our thinking captured in this moral principle: A person's blameworthiness cannot be affected by that which is not within her control. Thus, our ordinary thinking about moral responsibility implies that the drivers are and are not equally blameworthy. In Defense of Moral Luck aims to make progress in resolving this contradiction. Hartman defends the claim that certain kinds of luck in results, circumstance, and character can partially determine the degree of a person's blameworthiness. He also explains why there is a puzzle in our thinking about moral responsibility in the first place if luck often affects a person's praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Furthermore, the book's methodology provides a unique way to advance the moral luck debate with arguments from diverse areas in philosophy that do not bottom out in standard pro-moral luck intuitions.
Most presentations of the problem of moral luck invoke the notion of control, but little has been said about what control amounts to. We propose a necessary condition on an agent's having been in control of performing an action: that the agent's effort to perform the action ensured that the agent performed the action. The difficulty of satisfying this condition (or one like it) leads many on both sides of the moral luck debate to conclude that much of what we do is not within our control, and, at the limit, underpins agential skepticism, the view that no one has ever been in control of having performed an action in the external world. We propose a response to the agential skeptic modeled on the epistemological disjunctivist's response to the skeptic about perceptual experience. According to agential disjunctivism, the necessary condition on control can be met, thus undermining agential skepticism and one motivation for the problem of moral luck. Our view can be understood as resisting moral luck not by shrinking the domain of robust moral evaluation but by refusing to contract the realm of robust control.
In earlier work, I argued that examples supposed to substantiate consequential moral luck can lose their anomalous appearance if due account is taken of the moral obligation to discharge epistemic responsibilities, and of the different scope and focus of this obligation for the agent as contrasted with the observer. In his recent JMP article, Mark Silcox argues that my explanatory strategy is dependent on an unacceptable commitment to an 'ineliminable epistemic gulf' between first-person and third-person perspectives. Here I attempt a defence against Silcox's criticism, and tentatively suggest some wider implications of the debate.
The aim of this article is twofold. First, it is argued that while the principle of ‘ought
implies can’ is certainly plausible in some form, it is tempting to misconstrue it, and that
this has happened in the way it has been taken up in some of the current literature.
Second, Kant’s understanding of the principle is considered. Here it is argued that these
problematic conceptions put the principle to work in a way that Kant does not, so that
there is an important divergence here which can easily be overlooked.
In earlier work, I argued that examples supposed to substantiate consequential moral luck can lose their anomalous appearance if due account is taken of the moral obligation to discharge epistemic responsibilities, and of the diff erent scope and focus of this obligation for the agent as contrasted with the observer. In his recent JMP article, Mark Silcox argues that my explanatory strategy is dependent on an unacceptable commitment to an 'ineliminable epistemic gulf ' between fi rst-person and third-person perspectives. Here I attempt a defence against Silcox's criticism, and tentatively suggest some wider implications of the debate.
The recent movement towards virtue–theoretic treatments of epistemological concepts can be understood in terms of the desire to eliminate epistemic luck. Significantly, however, it is argued that the two main varieties of virtue epistemology are responding to different types of epistemic luck. In particular, whilst proponents of reliabilism–based virtue theories have been focusing on the problem of what I call “veritic” epistemic luck, non–reliabilism–based virtue theories have instead been concerned with a very different type of epistemic luck, what I call “reflective” epistemic luck. It is argued that, prima facie at least, both forms of epistemic luck need to be responded to by any adequate epistemological theory. The problem, however, is that one can best eliminate veritic epistemic luck by adducing a so–called safety–based epistemological theory that need not be allied to a virtue–based account, and there is no fully adequate way of eliminating reflective epistemic luck. I thus conclude that this raises a fundamental difficulty for virtue–based epistemological theories, on either construal.