Moral Luck

Introduction

Williams’s paper opened a symposium of the Aristotelian Society in 1976, with Thomas Nagel as respondent, and later gave its title to Williams’s essay collection Moral Luck (1981). It challenges the idea, which Williams links especially to Kant, that moral worth must be immune to luck. A painter modelled on Gauguin leaves his family to paint; whether he can later justify this depends on his success, which lies beyond his control. A lorry driver who runs over a child through no fault of his own feels “agent-regret”, which differs from the regret of a bystander. Nagel’s reply distinguished several kinds of moral luck, a classification still used in ethics and legal philosophy.

Connections

Criticizes

• Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals1785 · Immanuel Kant

More works by Bernard Williams

• 1973Utilitarianism: For and Against
• 1985Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy