Does moral judgment depend on luck?
Apparently not, of course, because moral judgment is about what a person has control over. If a person saves a baby that ends up becoming a great murderer, it is not said that the defendant who saved him committed a crime. And so it is agreed that a person is judged for what he has a choice over.
But let’s assume the following situation: Two of my friends went out to a bar one evening and drank too much alcohol. They both left the bar and each took their own car, except that one returned home safely, and the other got unlucky and on the way caused a car accident in which another person died.
Should we, from a moral perspective, judge the second as morally evil, while the first is not? Is the judgment different from one to the other, just because the second was unlucky?
There is a field in ethics called moral luck, which deals with exactly this (as part of the discussion of consequentialism). See columns 372, 253, and 229 on this. But this is the nonsense of philosophers. It is clear that moral judgment has nothing to do with luck, nor with consequences. What changes according to luck is responsibility, not blame. The two drunk drivers you described are equally wicked. The difference between the cases is only in the responsibility imposed on them. They are supposed to bear the consequences of their actions, and consequences are a matter that depends on luck.
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