Abstract
The puzzle of resultant moral luck arises when we are disposed to think that an agent who caused a harm deserves to be blamed more than an otherwise identical agent who did not. One popular (but controversial) perspective on resultant moral luck explains our dispositions to produce different judgments with regard to the agents who feature in these cases as a product not of what they genuinely deserve but of our epistemic situation. On this account, there is no genuine resultant moral luck; there is only luck in what evidence becomes available to observers. In this paper, I develop an evolutionary account of our inclination to take the results of actions as evidence for the mental states of agents, thereby explaining why the resulting intuitions are recalcitrant to correction. The account explains why the puzzle of resultant moral luck arises: because our disposition to take the harms agents cause as evidence of their mental states can produce intuitions which conflict with those that arise when we examine agents’ mental states without reference to the results of their actions. The account also helps to solve the puzzle of resultant moral luck, by providing a strong reason to ignore the intuitions caused by our disposition to regard actual harms as evidence of mental states. Since these intuitions arise using an unreliable proxy for agents’ mental states, they ought to be trumped by more reliable evidence.
Highlights
The puzzle of resultant moral luck arises when we are disposed to think that an agent who caused a harm deserves to be blamed more than an otherwise identical agent who did not
Epistemic reductionism faces a standard objection: if our conflicting judgments are the product of our imperfect epistemic situation, an improvement in our epistemic situation should reduce the conflict we experience: at the limit – when all the relevant facts are in – we should experience no conflict at all
I will defend epistemic reductionism, with a twist: I will argue that our disposition to generate conflicting judgments when considering resultant moral luck cases has an evolutionary basis
Summary
In setting out the puzzle of resultant moral luck, I claimed that we were pulled in different directions depending on whether we focused on agents’ mental states or on the harms they caused. Exemptions show that the agent lacked some capacity needed to express a morally bad quality of will: she was too young to appreciate the nature of her act, for instance Another way to defend the claim that blame judgments track actors’ mental states is by reference to psychological research. The evidence that our blame judgments respond to actors’ mental states and, independently, to the harm they cause goes some way toward explaining the puzzle of resultant luck. I shall argue that we are disposed to accept the principle that agents deserve (only) a burden that is commensurate with their mental states Because we accept this principle, but we continue to feel the force of the intuition that they sometimes deserve more blame than that principle can account for, we experience the conflict on which the puzzle of resultant moral luck turns
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