The problem of moral luck, anthropologically speaking

Abstract

While cultural responses to misfortune have long been an area of anthropological inquiry, this article examines the first person experience of misfortune and regret. I specifically explore why people take personal blame for consequences for which they were not entirely responsible, building on Bernard Williams’s discussion of ‘moral luck’ and ‘agent-regret’. I argue that the liberation of responsible human agency from ‘false causes’ – a promise made by the myth of moral progress – does not apply in all circumstances, as the processing of grief in the wake of misfortune reveals how modern subjects do not ‘know any better’ either. While Evans-Pritchard’s account of the Azande describes how they respond to misfortune by selecting the socially relevant cause in which to intervene, even while knowing the plurality of causes at play, I consider cases where people select the ethically relevant cause, turning the arrow of blame toward themselves. Why this happens in the first place relates to whether there was something personally at stake. I draw on Marshall Sahlins’s notion of the ‘mutuality of being’ to show how the blurring of identities and acts within relations involving an other for whom one bears a special responsibility goes a long way to explain an actor’s devotion to self-blame and punishment. The ‘mutuality of being’ is hardly a given, and it is the problem of moral luck and personal regret that can illuminate how social life oscillates between mutuality and disconnection. While agent-regret is conducive to moral learning, the agony of self-blame may also be understood as the actor’s way of participating in the web that constitutes his or her history. While discussions of regret have happened on the margins of philosophy, the same may be said of its place in anthropology. This suggests that we still have not taken moral experience seriously enough, as a matter of great theoretical significance.