On the Modal Solution to the Problem of Moral Luck

The similarities between the philosophical debates surrounding assessment sensitivity and moral luck run so deep that one can easily adapt almost any argument from one debate, change some terms, adapt the examples, and end up with an argument relevant to the other. This article takes Brian Rosebury's strategy for resisting moral luck in “Moral Responsibility and ‘Moral Luck' ” (1995) and turns it into a strategy for resisting assessment sensitivity. The article shows that one of Bernard Williams's examples motivating moral luck is very similar to one of the examples John MacFarlane uses to motivate the assessment sensitivity of epistemic modals, and in particular the assessment sensitivity of the auxiliary verb “might.” This means that, if Rosebury is right and we do not actually need moral luck to explain Williams's example, we may not need assessment sensitivity to account for the semantic behaviour of the epistemic modal verb “might” either.

For many years, Antony Duff has been one of the world's foremost philosophers of criminal law. This volume(s chapters, taken from essays by many of the world's other leading philosophers of criminal law as well as a reply by Duff himself, explore some of the principal themes in his work. Some of the chapters concentrate on the topic of criminalisation. That is, they examine what forms of conduct (including attempts, offensiveness, and negligence) can aptly qualify as criminal offences, and what principled limits — if any — should be placed on the reach of the criminal law. Several of the other chapters assess the thesis that punishment is justifiable as a form of communication between offenders and their community. Those chapters examine the presuppositions (about the nature and function of community, and about the moral structure of atonement) that must be embraced if communication is to be a primary role for punishment. The remaining chapters examine the nature and limits of responsibility in the law, as they engage with philosophical debates over ‘moral luck’ by investigating the ways in which the law can legitimately hold people responsible for events that were not within their control. These chapters tie the first and third parts of the book together, as they explore the relationship between the principles that determine a person's responsibility and the principles that determine which types of actions can appropriately be criminalised. Finally, Duff responds with comments that seek to defend and clarify his views while also acknowledging the correctness of some of the critics' objections.

Scientific discoveries are often to some degree influenced by luck. Whether luck’s influence is at odds with common-sense intuitions about responsibility, is the central concern of the philosophical debate about moral luck. Do scientists acknowledge that luck plays a role in their work and – if so – do they consider it morally problematic? The present article discusses the results of four focus groups with scientists, who were asked about their views on luck in their fields and its moral implications. The participants underscored circumstantial luck as a key dimension of luck in science. Nevertheless, most participants insisted that there are ways of executing ‘control’ in science: They believe that virtues and skills can increase one’s chances for success. The cultivation of these skills and virtues was considered a reasonable ground for pride. Prizes and rewards were rarely tied to personal desert, but instead to their societal function.

This paper examines how moral reasoning can become reoriented under emotional and normative pressure, producing post hoc justifications that prioritize desirable outcomes over reflective engagement with values. Using a conceptual and interpretive approach, the study draws on Jackendoff’s value system as a framework for understanding how agents assign, prioritize, and act upon values in morally complex situations. In Jackendoff’s model, values can function as input rules, guiding action selection, and as output rules, translating value judgments into practical directives. The originality of this work lies in applying the value system to ethically pressured contexts, revealing a distinctive reversal: actions are retrospectively justified based on outcomes, so that input rules (values assigned to outcomes) are treated as if they validate antecedent actions, while output rules take on the role of prior guidance. This inversion highlights a structural pattern in which moral reasoning appears coherent but becomes ethically shallow, relying on outcome-based reassurance rather than deliberation over competing values. The paper illustrates this pattern through a fictional but plausible dilemma, showing how emotional stakes and relational dependencies shape the orientation of justification. Supplementary perspectives from philosophical psychology, appraisal theories of emotion, and Bateson’s Double Bind Theory clarify how affective tension and conflicting imperatives contribute to this reasoning structure. By situating the analysis within philosophical debates on moral luck, outcome sensitivity, and moral hindsight, the paper emphasizes that the framework is conceptual rather than empirical. The study provides a novel lens for understanding how morally pressured agents may generate internally coherent, outcome-driven justifications, offering insight into the dynamics of moral reasoning under emotional and normative constraints.

Health, Luck, and Justice

This paper re-examines the philosophical debate surrounding the issue of moral luck through the lens of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. The author argues that Freud's writings on moral luck, which have not previously been discussed in this context, provide not only a cogent explanation for the reasons behind the existence of moral luck but also a compelling argument for the constitutive role played by moral luck in the formation of moral agency and moral identity. Freud's own example of a story by Mark Twain, "The First Melon I Ever Stole," is explored in this context and compared to other more typical examples of moral luck as is another example of moral luck having to do with the theft of pears drawn from the writings of St. Augustine.

This essay responds to Jeffrey O’Connell’s critique of fault-based tort liability. Behind O’Connell’s argument for no-fault liability lies the notion that “accidents” simply happen and no one is to blame for them. This idea can be seen as a species of philosophical arguments surrounding the perceived unfairness of moral luck. In reply, this essay outlines several responses to moral luck, ultimately siding with a position that accommodates both the apparent randomness of accidents with a coherent justification for personal legal responsibility. The essay’s position, however, assumes an answer to the precise feature of tort law that O’Connell found problematic and unjustified, namely, that

John Locke appears to have held that we possess, as part of our whole being, a soul substance, a thinking thing rooted squarely in the Cartesian tradition. But Locke adds that our awareness of personal identity does not depend on that soul and should not be confused with substantial identity. The sense of personal identity derives from consciousness, and particularly from memory. Many a soul or many a body could, in principle, host the same person, provided that a continuity of consciousness remained. A cynical commentator might be inclined to see here Locke as the philosophical hermaphrodite-half Descartes and half Hume, though tending a bit in the Humean direction. Edmund Husserl would not accept Locke's adherence to a soul substance. He would sympathize with Locke's view that the sense of personal identity depends on consciousness. This is not to suggest that in parting with Descartes' substantialist position (the view of consciousness as a "box" or "bag," as Husserl sometimes characterizes it),' Husserl joins forces with Hume in defending the bundle theory of the self. In his conception of the ego, Husserl, typically, adopts none of the standard positions delivered by the tradition. He does not view the ego as a hermetic container for psychic acts, or as an empty pole of consciousness, or as a swarm of psychic events held together in the present solely by their contiguity and, with respect to the past, by threads of memory. That Husserl is thus untraditional has not always been appreciated. Jean-Paul Sartre and Aron Gurwitsch argued that Husserl defended an essentially Cartesian view of the ego, and that this conception of the self was illegitimate and indefensible from the perspective of the very phenomenology that Husserl himself had fathered. I will argue in this essay that Sartre's and Gurwitsch's criticisms directed at Husserl's conception of the ego are misplaced and misguided. It may seem to some, of course, that this is a fine example of thrashing a dead horse. But this horse is still kicking. The issue of the ego and its proper interpretation remains vital for anyone concerned with phenomenology as Husserl conceived it. And while Sartre and Gurwitsch may have laid down their basic objections some seventy years ago, the pertinence and the demands these objections make on our attention have not weakened with age. I mean to show that Sartre's and Gurwitsch's objections are unsound, but only with the intent of revealing just how compelling Husserl's conception of the ego turns out to be. Since Sartre and Gurwitsch advance in all important respects the same arguments, I will base my discussion chiefly on Sartre's critique as it appears in his Transcendence of the Ego. Sartre's Critique of the Husserlian Ego Before presenting his philosophical arguments against what he takes to be Husserl's conception of the ego, Sartre takes note of the (now) familiar fact that while the transcendental ego appears in the Ideas of 1913, it is absent from the first edition of the Logical Investigations (1900-1901). Sartre takes this absence to be significant and appears to assume that when Husserl later fell victim to egological backsliding, the ego he came to accept is of the same nature as the one he earlier rejected. We will consider later whether that is a valid assumption. The ego against which Sartre argues has the following characteristics. It is not co-extensive with consciousness but "in" consciousness as an inhabitant is in a dwelling,2 as a blade is plunged into the heart (dividing, tearing, killing),3 as an empty pole indifferent to what it supports.4 It is personal,5 substantial,6 monadic, opaque,7 heavy, and ponderable.8 It is the owner of consciousness, the empty principle of the unification of consciousness, and "the inseparable companion" of each conscious act.9 "All this," Sartre writes, "is unfortunately the orientation of the new thought of Husserl" (that is, in the Ideas and Cartesian Mediations). …

Materialism/physicalism purports to be a significant metaphysical doctrine about the nature of reality, being the standard position in many contemporary philosophical debates. It is my view that this doctrine is misguided, a remnant of the categories of the 17th century. To argue for my position, I examine Locke’s commitment to corpuscularianism – a prevalent view about the nature of matter in the early scientific period – and the erroneous conclusions he draws from it. This historical reflection serves me to make a broader point: we do not anymore hold a strict conception of the material or the physical for good reasons, while these terms have no place in our technical subjects of inquiry. I conclude that materialism and any ontological position which depends on it are of no consequence.