Moral luck
Circumstances outside your control that determine how moral you are judged to be.
What it commits you to
Thomas Nagel's essays on moral luck distinguish being lucky or unlucky in what one does from being lucky or unlucky in the situations one is placed in, and in the circumstances of birth. It is a problem for any theory that grounds obligation in consequences, since the consequences themselves are frequently assigned rather than chosen. It is also the reason care ethics emphasises the particular situation.
Which realms lean on this
Ethics is where the realms argue about what counts: the parties, the pleasures, the duties, the care.
ethics · 9 realms — The Benthamite Foundry, The Care Weft, The Contractual Court, The Kantian Citadel, The Longview Foundry, The Middle Kingdom, The Stoic Ramparts, The Ubuntu Weave, The Virtue Garden.
Canon that discusses this
modern · 2006
Ethics of Care
Held develops the care perspective into a full ethical position and argues against the priority claim of justice: obligations arise inside particular relationships, are partial, and are not derivable from general principles. The book that made partiality respectable in moral theory. The excerpt below paraphrases Held's thesis rather than quoting the 2006 book.
modern · 1950
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Turing replaces 'can machines think' with a behavioural test, then spends most of the paper answering his own opponents and proposing a trainable machine with sensory apparatus, a system of registers, and deliberate moral engineering of what he calls slave-maid behaviour.
primary · 1907
Pragmatism
Eight lectures given at the Lowell Institute in November and December 1906 and published the following May. Dewey moves the question of meaning from reference to consequence and argues that the moral life is a method of inquiry rather than a code, which makes intellectual humility a methodological requirement.
primary · 1863
Utilitarianism
Mill defends the intuitions Bentham's calculus was meant to replace: higher and lower pleasures, the justice principle that each person counts as one, and the liberty principle against the tyranny of the majority. Published the year after the Origin of Species, and much of the argument is a reply to the comparison.
See also
Virtue ethics
ethicsJudging moral character and disposition rather than the moral status of single acts.
Amor fati
ethicsLove of fate: to treat what happens as material to work with rather than to resist.
Normative uncertainty
ethicsUncertainty not about what is true but about what ought to be valued.
Care ethics
ethicsObligations arise inside relationships, are partial, and resist general principles.