Moral luck describes circumstances whereby a moral agent is assigned moral blame or praise for an action or its consequences even though it is clear that said agent did not have full control over either the action or its consequences. This term, introduced by Bernard Williams, has been developed, along with its significance to a coherent moral theory, by Williams and Thomas Nagel in their respective essays on the subject.
Read more about Moral Luck: Responsibility and Voluntarism, The Problem of Moral Luck, Four Types of Moral Luck, Alternatives
Famous quotes containing the words moral and/or luck:
“From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy’s will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Good shot, bad luck and hell are the five basic words to be used in a game of tennis, though these, of course, can be slightly amplified.”
—Virginia Graham (b. 1912)