Introduction

Abstract

When Bernard Williams introduced the term ‘moral luck’ to modern philosophy, he intended it to be an oxymoron¹ because of the contradiction in the implications of the two terms: morality is associated with control, choice, responsibility and therefore praise and blame, whereas luck is about chance, unpredictability, lack of control and therefore the inappropriateness of praise or blame. If there is such a thing as moral luck, then we have to show both how it is possible to hold that crucial elements of the moral decision were outside the agent’s control and how we still want to hold the agent responsible for the act and attribute praise or blame.

One’s history as an agent is a web in which anything that is the product of the will is surrounded and held up and partly formed by things that are not, in such a way that reflection can go only in one of two directions: either in the direction of saying that responsible agency is a fairly superficial concept, which has a limited use in harmonizing what happens, or else that it is not a superficial concept, but that it cannot ultimately be purified…

— Williams, in Statman, 1993