Every small child has an inherent knowledge of the concept of moral luck. Even Homer Simpson, the dull-witted star of animated TV, has mastered practical application of the concept. When his car's rear bumper falls off, causing mayhem for the cars behind him, Homer appeals for an analysis of his intentions, not of the result that happened to occur. ``Not my fault!'' he yells out the window at the chaos, ``Act of God! Act of God!'' Thomas Nagel deals with this issue of how moral responsibility is influenced by circumstances outside a person's control in his essay entitled ``Moral Luck.'' Nagel's work is strong in its presentation of the internal paradox this issue presents, but falls short when it fails to differentiate between moral responsibility and criminal culpability.
Nagel demonstrates a paradox between our intuition regarding moral luck and the way it is applied in most situations. On the surface it seems clear that we don't believe moral luck should affect our judgement. Nagel says that ``Prior to reflection it is intuitively plausible that people cannot be morally assessed for what is not their fault, or for what is due to factors beyond their control'' (574). He feels that this judgement is simply fundamental to our understanding of morality. Moral assessment of an act ``is easily undermined by the discovery that the act or attribute, no matter how good or bad, is not under the person's control'' (574). One of the situations he sets up is that of the truck driver who runs over a child. If the driver has done nothing wrong, and circumstances have merely dictated that the child would run out into the street at that very moment, then clearly the driver is absolved from moral responsibility. The circumstances negate the logical moral judgement that running over a child is wrong. Yet Nagel says that societal actions tell a different story, one in which moral luck plays a large role in morality. He adapts the situation of the truck driver to say that the driver does indeed have a minor degree of fault, perhaps for failing to have his brakes checked regularly. Given the same situation with the child, the driver will assuredly feel and be treated as having moral responsibility for the child's death. If, however, the child does not run out into the street, the driver would only be responsible for the mild act of neglect. ``Yet the negligence is the same in both cases,'' Nagel says, ``and the driver has no control over whether a child will run into his path'' (576). Despite the presence of these identical degrees of negligence, the driver would inevitably be held responsible for more in the case of hitting the child. He extends this argument to the situation of two drunk drivers, both who swerve on to a sidewalk, one happening to hit a child, one hitting nothing. Thought the actions are the same, he says that the lucky driver ``will certainly reproach himself and be reproached by others far less severely'' (576). Nagel finds this to be a paradox that no amount of logical argument can resolve. He claims that ``We may be persuaded that these moral judgements are irrational, but they reappear involuntarily as soon as the argument is over'' (579). In the end, Nagel's quandry can be summed up by asking how one can hold the fortunate driver less morally responsible than the unfortunate one.
It is in this quandry that Nagel's suppositions are insufficient. Nagel fails to adequately address the differences between moral responsibility and criminal culpability. Nagel presupposes that outcomes affect moral responsibility. He calls this resultant moral luck, or luck that affects how your actions turn out. In the drunk driving example Nagel claims that ``there is a morally significant difference between reckless driving and manslaughter,'' yet he doesn't make any attempt to support this (574). Certainly the criminal liability is different, and the sentence handed out by a judge would vary dramatically, but that does not necessarily have any effect on the act's moral standing. Nagel continually addresses criminal repercussions, but assumes that these translate to moral responsibilities. It seems illogical not to consider the two independently. Moral responsibility for an act does not hinge on its outcomes, while criminal liability certainly does. For an example, consider the real life case of the father charged with shaking his baby so hard that its brain stem snapped and it was only able to remain alive on a resprirator. The mother wished to remove the baby from life-support in order to let it die a natural death, but the father attempted to block these wishes in order to keep the baby alive until after his trial. The criminal implications of the baby's life or death were dramatic for the father. If it stayed alive, even on life support, he could escape a murder charge. If it died, his situation would become much more dire. Nagel would seem to consider it moral luck that the baby remained alive and the father faced lesser charges, but this is clearly preposterous. The morality of the father's actions is clearly independent of the baby's condition at the time of his trial. The father has commited a heinous act. His moral responsibility for that act is not dependent on a respirator, regardless of how it affects his criminal case.
Though this criticism largely targets resultant moral luck, a closely related one deals with circumstantial luck as well. Nagel considers it unfair to hold morally responsible a person to whom life has given more challenges than others. Some people, he says, just have the circumstantial bad luck to be born in Nazi Germany, for instance, and therefore have the opportunity to be an officer in a concentration camp. If a different political structure had been in place, that person ``might have led a quiet and harmless life'' (574). This logic again refuses to distinguish between criminal responsibility for an act, and moral responsibility for character. A person is responsible for their character regardless of the situations life might place in front of him.
Constitutive luck, that of the kind of person you are, is a weak argument in favor of changed moral responsibility. To say that a person whose ``inclinations, capacity, and temperment'' are faulty is given a free reign to let those vices express themselves is illogical. Predisposition does not necessitate action. A person whose temper is short is still responsible for his actions should he exhibit an outburst of violent rage toward someone.
Thomas Nagel is a smart man, and his essay contains a great deal of fascinating logic. However, by failing to clearly differentiate different spheres of responsibility he undermines his argument. Mixing criminal and moral responsibility forces him to abstain from conclusively choosing a side in the argument. His apologetic conclusion, in which he admits to having no solutions for the underlying issues of the problem, could have been avoided had he made such a differentiation.