Moral luck and the talent problem

Abstract

My objective in this project is to explore the concept of moral luck as it relates to sports. I am especially interested in constitutive luck. As a foundation I draw from both Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel’s classic handling of moral luck, generally. Within the philosophy of sport are similar explorations of this nexus by Robert Simon and David Carr that also factor into the present work. My intent is to put a new lens in front of a puzzle drawn from Torbjörn Tännsjö’s well-known article ‘Is Our Admiration of Sports Heroes Facistoid?’ Specifically, the idea that we might admire an athlete who excels without having worked hard for it (i.e. though talent per se). If we may call this puzzle ‘the talent problem,’ the questions driving the present work are as follows: (1) what is the relationship between moral luck and the talent problem, and (2) can this relationship provide a prescription for morally assessing the talent problem? The thesis that this exploratory work suggests that more complex games (and therefore sports) are more praiseworthy than simpler ones because the former require an athlete to nurture a more complex matrix of talents, skills, and capacities and are therefore less vulnerable to the natural lottery.