Doors, keys, and moral luck: A reply to Domsky

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 102, Issue 8, 2005, Pages 422-436

  Statman, Daniel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846810687     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2005102818     Document Type: Note

References (14)

1. "There Is No Door: Finally Solving the Problem of Moral Luck," this JOURNAL, CI, 9 (September 2004): 445-64.
2. "Postscript," in Daniel Statman, ed., Moral Luck (Albany: SUNY, 1993), pp. 251-58, see p. 256; hereafter, this volume will be referred to as ML.
3. Cf. Norvin Richards, "Luck and Desert," in ML, pp. 167-80;
4. see also Henning Jensen, "Morality and Bad Luck," in ML, pp. 131-40, who talks about the "moral assessments of persons," on pp. 138-39.
5. Judith Andre, "Nagel, Williams, and Moral Luck," in ML, pp. 123-30, on p. 125.
6. Nicholas Reseller, "Moral Luck," in ML, pp. 141-66, on p. 154.
7. Judith Thomson, "Morality and Bad Luck," in ML, pp. 195-216, on pp. 195-97.
8. Margaret Walker, "The Virtues of Impure Agency," in ML, pp. 235-50, on p. 243.
9. Daniel Statman, "Introduction," in ML, pp. 1-34, on p. 13.
10. Circumstantial luck is discussed, inter alia, by Nagel, Richards, Walker, Thomson, and Michael Zimmerman, "Luck and Moral Responsibility," in ML, pp. 217-34.
11. Trudy Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 117. Gorier relies on this insight to establish the possibility and rationality of forgiveness.
12. This is one of the insights of the attribution theory in psychology. Whether events are attributed to luck or to internal factors, that is, to abilities and effort, depends on the type of personality. In particular, depressed people have been shown to ascribe their failures to internal factors, while nondepressives ascribe their failures to external factors (luck and task difficulty). See Nicholas Kuiper, "Depression and Causal Attributions for Success and Failure," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, XXXVI (1978): 236-46.
13. From "Tossing the Rotten Thing Out" (forthcoming; typescript, p. 1).
14. A different use of psychological studies to shed light on the problem of moral luck has been recently suggested by Edward Royzman and Rahul Kumar, who argue that our "epistemic egocentrism" causes us to incorporate our retrospectively gained knowledge of the outcomes into our understanding of the knowledge that the actor must have had at the time of the action. In their view, this explains why we tend to view the negligent driver who killed a pedestrian as more blameworthy than the driver whose negligence did not lead to such an outcome - see their "Is Consequential Luck Morally Inconsequential? Empirical Psychology and the Reassessment of Moral Luck," Ratio, XVI (2004): 329-44.