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Two drunk drivers, one dead child — why luck sneaks into blame
💡 We judge people partly by outcomes they didn't control, which quietly contradicts our belief that blame should track only what's up to us.
Picture two people who drive home equally drunk. One arrives safely. The other, through no extra recklessness, has a child dart into the road and kills them. We punish the second driver far more harshly — legally and morally. Yet the only difference between them was luck. This puzzle is called moral luck, named by philosophers Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams.
The trouble is that it collides with a principle most of us hold dear: you can only be blamed for what's within your control. If both drivers made identical choices, our judgments should match. But they don't — the outcome, which neither controlled, changes how guilty we feel each one is. Nagel argued that once you look closely, luck contaminates almost everything: the circumstances you're born into, the situations you happen to face, even the personality you didn't choose.
That's the unsettling part. If we strip away everything shaped by luck, there may be almost nothing left to genuinely praise or blame a person for. Moral luck isn't a loophole to excuse the drunk driver — it's a crack in the whole idea that responsibility can be cleanly separated from chance.