Strokes of Luck: A Study in Moral and

Political Philosophy Gerald Lang

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Strokes of Luck
 Strokes of Luck
A Study in Moral and Political Philosophy

GERALD LANG

1
 1
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In memory of Shepley Orr
 Preface and Acknowledgements

As an undergraduate student, I was assigned, and duly read, the two classic
articles on moral luck by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. I was gripped, but
puzzled. I could grasp Nagel’s worries about the ramifications of luck in our moral
lives, and I agreed with him that those ramifications surely needed to be controlled
in some way. But how? That was much less clear to me. Once Pandora’s Box has
been opened, the damage has already been done. It cannot be undone merely
through the effort to close it again, or by pretending that it had never been opened
in the first place. Despite a number of readings of it, I was even more puzzled by
Williams’s article. Its connection to Nagel’s concerns seemed opaque to me, and I
struggled to see how exactly the killer blow to ordinary morality had been
administered, though I was also intrigued and stimulated, as many others have
been, by Williams’s charismatic opposition to morality’s more claustrophobic
aspects.
The years passed, and I became interested in, and puzzled by, other matters. At
some point, I began to do sustained work on distributive justice, and on luck
egalitarianism in particular. It occurred to me that some of the central cases one
encountered in the justice literature had a similar structure to the cases often
encountered in the moral luck debate: pairs of agents, doing similar things which
turn out differently, and being blamed or rewarded to different degrees.
Meanwhile, something about the way in which luck egalitarians had set up their
basic case was leaving me dissatisfied. The interpersonal pairwise comparisons
standardly prioritized by luck egalitarians may reveal the presence of luck, but
this form of luck did not strike me as one which manages to track anything worth
tracking. It does not, therefore, require correction, or annulment. It is a source of
distortion, not the basis for a serious complaint. I began to wonder whether there
were common lessons, or else interestingly contrasted lessons, to be recovered for
both debates: the debate about blameworthiness in normative ethics, and the
debate about just distributions in political philosophy. The eventual result, leaving
aside some other twists and turns, is the book before you.
Because luck intrudes in our lives in various ways, it raises a large number of
philosophical issues connected to our practical existence. Not all of them will be
tackled in this book. With the exception of some strands of discussion towards
the end of Chapter 1, I will be largely abstaining, for example, from examining the
role of luck in moral epistemology, though this is an important topic which has
been intensively studied in recent years, especially in the light of reflection on our
Darwinian inheritance. I will be similarly sparing about my attention to the role
x Preface and Acknowledgements

of luck in epistemology more generally, aside from some modest stage-­setting

and a small number of policy announcements in the Introduction. More seriously,
and except for some brief skirmishes in the Introduction, Chapter 4, and
Appendix II, this book omits any concentrated and detailed discussion of luck,
agency, and free will and responsibility. Other writers interested in moral luck
have had a great deal to say about luck and free will, and I am not claiming that
they strayed beyond their brief, or misidentified what can be fruitfully discussed
under this remit. So this particular omission does call for more concerted defence;
I will try to explain myself in the Introduction.
I have been thinking about these issues for a number of years, on and off, and I
have accumulated many debts, both institutional and personal.
First and foremost, I thank the Mind Association, which was kind enough to
award me a fellowship relieving me of normal teaching and administrative duties
for one semester in the 2016–17 academic year, and which therefore allowed me
to complete a working draft of a decent chunk of it within that year. Without that
period of leave, completion of this project would have been severely delayed. In
association with this award, I was invited, in July 2017, to present some of this
work at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association in
Edinburgh. I thank those who were there for their good advice and heart-­
warming encouragement.
The Mind Association period of leave was conjoined with a standard sabbatical
period of leave provided by the School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of
Science at the University of Leeds, which has been an enjoyable and stimulating
environment for doing philosophy over the last fifteen years or so. I am very
grateful to my colleagues, and ex-­colleagues, for their intellectual camaraderie,
good advice, and friendship, and for having sat, kindly and patiently, through
early-­doors efforts to articulate my various philosophical hunches about these
and many other issues. I have learned, and continue to learn, a huge amount from
them. I am also grateful to philosophical and philosophically interested friends
elsewhere, many of them encountered every now and then at conferences,
seminars, and workshops. I do not want to risk offence by mentioning some only
to fail to mention others, but I do wish to thank on this score Lucy Allais, Gustaf
Arrhenius, Elizabeth Barnes, Jessica Begon, Corine Besson, Thomas Brouwer,
Krister Bykvist, Ross Cameron, Jennifer Carr, Sophie-­Grace Chappell, Pei-­Lung
Cheng, Alix Cohen, Bill Cooper, John Divers, Jamie Dow, Ed Elliot, Daniel
Elstein, Carl Fox, Helen Frowe, Mollie Gerver, Rachel Goodman, James Harris,
Antony Hatzistavrou, Greville Healey, Tom Hancocks, Ulrike Heuer, Iwao Hirose,
Kent Hurtig, Ward Jones, Matthew Kieran, Rob Lawlor, Gail Leckie, Kasper
Lippert-­Rasmussen, Heather Logue, Brian McElwee, Andy McGonigal, Chris
Megone, Aaron Meskin, Margaret Moore, Daniel Morgan, Gary Mullen, Morten
Nielsen, Martin O’Neill, Alex Pelling, Oliver Pooley, Adina Preda, Massimo
Renzo, Simon Robertson, Léa Salje, Paolo Santorio, Joe Saunders, Daniel
Schwartz, Tasia Scrutton, Shlomi Segall, Scott Shalkowski, Matt Smith, Helen
 Preface and Acknowledgements xi

Steward, Adam Swift, Victor Tadros, Georgia Testa, Cain Todd, Patrick Tomlin,
Jason Turner, Pekka Väyrynen, Kristin Voigt, Alex Voorhoeve, Robbie Williams,
Nicole Woodford, Richard Woodward, and Nick Zangwill.
I have bent the ears of Jess Isserow and Jack Woods, in particular, about these
issues a number of times over the last few years, and Jack also went to the trouble
of providing helpful and instructive comments on a number of the early chapters.
I am very grateful to them.
A manuscript workshop was held on an earlier complete draft of this book in
November 2018 in Dublin, under the auspices of the Political Studies Association
of Ireland. I am very grateful to Adina Preda and Peter Stone for the invitation,
and the PSAI for the financial support. In addition to Adina and Peter, I also
thank John Baker, Brian Carey, Christopher Cowley, Katherine Furman, and
Brian O’Connor for going to the trouble of reading and commentating on the
various chapters. I learned a huge amount from them, though I worry that they
will not be completely satisfied with my attempts to accommodate their concerns.
For many years now, Roger Crisp and Brad Hooker have been encouraging and
supportive presences in my career. I thank them warmly for everything they have
done for me.
In May 2015, I organized a workshop on the Dimensions of Luck, held in
Leeds, where the speakers were Roger Crisp, Duncan Pritchard, Katie Steele,
Daniel Statman, and Zofia Stemplowska. I enjoyed it so much that I finally talked
myself into writing a book about at least some aspects of luck. I thank them all.
Thanks also to the Faculty of Arts in Leeds for the funds enabling me to hold this
workshop.
There are also substantial and more specific debts on the various chapters here.
The arguments presented here in Chapters 1 to 3 were presented, in slightly
different and sometimes over-­compressed formats, at seminars in Cape Town,
Leeds, Oxford (at the Moral Philosophy Seminar), St Andrews (at the Philosophy
Club), Sussex, and Warwick (at the Centre for Ethics, Law, and Public Affairs). I
also ran an enjoyable class as a visiting lecturer at Rhodes University in
Grahamstown in 2012, in which some of the early moves were written up and
tested out. I thank everyone at these events for their valuable advice and criticism.
The argument now distributed between Chapter 4 and Appendix II was much
benefited by the discussion of a shorter version of it in a meeting of the White
Rose Early Career Ethics Researchers in 2016, organized by Richard Chappell. I
thank, in addition to Richard, Jessica Begon, Daniel Elstein, Carl Fox, and Johan
Gustafsson for their insightful comments.
An earlier version of Chapter 5 was presented at a conference on the thirtieth
anniversary of the publication of Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy in Oxford, organized by Sophie-­Grace Chappell. I thank Sophie-­Grace
for the invitation, and I am grateful to the informed and enthusiastic audience for
the many extremely useful comments I received on that happy occasion. A revised
version of it was then presented in Leeds; thanks to everyone for comments I
xii Preface and Acknowledgements

received there and then. For further useful exchanges and comments, I thank
Victor Durà-­Villà and Jake Wojtowicz. Some of the material in this chapter has
already appeared in ‘Gauguin’s Lucky Escape: Moral Luck and the Morality
System’, published in Ethics Beyond the Limits: Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the
Limits of Philosophy, edited by Sophie-­Grace Chappell and Marcel van Ackaren,
and published by Routledge in 2019.
Chapter 6 is partly constructed out of already published work on luck
egalitarianism, notably ‘How Interesting is the “Boring Problem” for Luck
Egalitarianism’, published by Wiley in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
in 2015. An early version of some of that material was presented at the Society of
Applied Philosophy Conference in Zurich in 2013. The comments I received
there were extremely useful as I worked further on this material. In addition, I
thank Kasper Lippert-­Rasmussen, Adina Preda, Daniel Schwartz, Shlomi Segall,
Saul Smilansky, and Kristin Voigt for vital further exchanges about these topics,
and Nicola Mulkeen for detailed and instructive comments on a later draft of the
chapter.
An embryonic version of Chapter 7 was presented at the AHRC Workshop on
Equality at the University of Exeter, organized by Keith Hyams and Robert Lamb
in 2009; a couple of later versions were presented, to different audiences on
different occasions, in Leeds. I am grateful for the many helpful comments I
received on those occasions, and am particularly grateful to Jerry Cohen, in what
sadly turned out to be the last time I saw him, for a very useful suggestion about
what exactly I should be looking for in his Rescuing Justice and Equality. A yet
more recent and refocused version of some of the material on Rawls was presented
at the IDEA Seminar in Leeds, at the Society of Applied Philosophy conference in
2018, where I had helpful exchanges with Miranda Fricker, Kasper Lippert-­
Rasmussen, Serena Olsaretti, and Shlomi Segall, and most recently at a
MANCEPT seminar in Manchester, where I received helpful insights from Steve
de Wijze, Nicola Mulkeen, Miriam Ronzoni, Hillel Steiner, and others. Thanks
also to Adina Preda for useful early discussion and to Pei-­Lung Cheng for
comments on a later draft of the chapter.
Chapter 8 draws upon a number of sources. One of them is a talk on
international justice which was presented in rather different versions at the
Conference on the Demandingness of Morality, the AHRC Scottish Ethics
Network, at the University of Stirling, and also in Leeds, Stockholm, Sheffield,
and at the Conference on Poverty, Charity, and Justice, held at the University of
Witwatersrand. I offer my thanks to, respectively, Kent Hurtig, Gustaf Arrhenius,
Helen Frowe, and Lucy Allais for these various invitations, and I am grateful to
these different audiences for their challenging, constructive, and insightful
comments. This chapter also embodies ideas and passages from some work on
animal ethics and discrimination which was published in the Oxford University
Press collection Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard
 Preface and Acknowledgements xiii

Williams, which I co-­edited with Ulrike Heuer. Those whom I thanked there are
duly thanked again. Finally, this chapter draws upon some ideas about basic
equality which were put to work in my review of Jeremy Waldron’s One Another’s
Equals, published by Oxford University Press in Mind in 2019. My early ideas on
basic equality were presented at the Workshop on Equality: Grounds, Scope, and
Value, organized by Adina Preda in Oxford in 2015. A subsequent version of that
paper was presented in a panel at the Society of Applied Philosophy in Belfast in
2016, with Adina Preda, Kristin Voigt, and Ian Carter as my co-­panellists, and
then at seminars in Birmingham, Leeds, the London School of Economics, and
York. I am very grateful to everyone involved for their comments and insights.
Adina Preda, in particular, has been an active and important interlocutor for
most of these chapters, as these acknowledgements attest. I am especially
grateful to her.
As ever, I am grateful to Peter Momtchiloff at Oxford University Press for his
patience, professionalism, and friendly encouragement. It is always a pleasure to
work with him. Two anonymous reviewers for OUP made a number of very
shrewd suggestions on an advanced draft that I have tried my best to incorporate,
and a number of telling objections that I have tried my best, in various ways, to
disarm. They may be within their rights to have expected even more, but the final
version of the text is, I hope, considerably better for the attention they have paid
to it, and they have my earnest gratitude.
There is something about writing a monograph that can make you think you
are doing philosophy for the first time. Presumably that has to do with the
concentrated collection of intellectual demands, and feelings of exposure and
vulnerability over the longer distances. In any case, I want to acknowledge some
other, more personal debts. I thank Ronan McDonald and Sarah Montgomery for
their friendship, and for always being there, at least via social media. I also thank
my brother, Jim, for his friendship and company. My educational path was
nourished and supported, generously and uncomplainingly, at every point by my
mother, Ann Lang, and my late father, William Lang. I am forever grateful
to them.
My final acknowledgement combines intellectual and personal debts. My old
friend Shepley Orr passed away as the first draft of this book was nearing
completion. I regret that we never found the opportunity to discuss many of the
arguments that would have been deepened and sharpened had he laid eyes on
them, and I remember with affection all the hours, from years past, of enlightening
and often hilarious conversations about philosophy and just about every other
topic under the sun. I miss him keenly. This book is dedicated to his memory.
Gerald Lang
Leeds
July 2020
 Introduction

1. Moral Luck: Old and New

Philosop­­­hy still has the capacity to surprise, but the issues it investigates tend to
have been on the books for a long time. The problem of moral luck was strongly
anticipated by Adam Smith:

Had Caesar, instead of gaining, lost the battle of Pharsalia, his character would,
at this hour, have ranked a little above that of Cataline, and the weakest man
would have viewed his enterprise against the laws of his country in blacker col-
ours, than, perhaps, even Cato, with all the animosity of a party-­man, ever
viewed it at the time. His real merit . . . would have been acknowledged . . . But the
insolence and injustice of his all-­grasping ambition would have darkened and
extinguished the glory of all that real merit . . . Fortune has in this . . . great influ-
ence over the moral sentiments of mankind, and, according as she is either
favourable or adverse, can render the same character the object, either of general
love and admiration, or of universal hatred and contempt.1

It is beyond reasonable doubt, however, that the specific impetus behind contem-
porary discussions of moral luck was a symposium on moral luck by Bernard
Williams and Thomas Nagel, published by the Aristotelian Society in 1976.2 The
phrase ‘moral luck’ is also owed to Williams. Most of the recognizable contribu-
tions to that particular debate that have been made in the intervening period in
Anglo-­American philosophy have proceeded, in one way or another, from the
stage-­setting originally assembled by Nagel or Williams.
What is perhaps less obvious, but still strongly arguable, is that the debate on
moral luck that has emerged since then owes rather more to Nagel than to
Williams. Though bits and pieces of Williams’s article are routinely referred to,
and sometimes receive substantive discussion—one thinks here, in particular, of
the Gauguin case, or the ‘agent-­regret’ experienced by the lorry-­driver in one of

1 See Smith (1759/1976), II.iii.2; for a recent useful discussion, see Hankins (2016). Nagel (1979),
pp. 31–2, acknowledges Smith’s important path-­finding work in this area, and Crisp (2017) examines
Smith’s views in some detail. See also Section 5.
2 See Williams (1976), and Nagel (1976). Both essays were subsequently revised and reprinted, and
the literature on moral luck usually deals with these later versions: I will, accordingly, be referring
mostly to Williams (1981a) and Nagel (1979). Another precursor for the contemporary moral luck
debate is Feinberg (1962), as Hartman (2017), p. 2, also notes.

Strokes of Luck: A Study in Moral and Political Philosophy. Gerald Lang, Oxford University Press (2021). © Gerald Lang.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868507.003.0001
2 Introduction

Williams’s imaginary examples—there is something elusive about Williams’s

treatment of moral luck which has obstructed its comfortable or wholesale
in­corp­or­ation into the moral luck literature. This is because, when examined
more deeply, Nagel and Williams are chasing different philosophical scents; their
quarries are different. Williams’s distinctive concerns will be revisited in detail in
the course of the book. In the preliminary orientation for the moral luck debate
that I provide in this Introduction, I will be chiefly concerned with Nagel. But it is
not a bad idea to start even further back.

2. What is Luck?

In his article, Williams does not provide any analysis of the concept of luck, and
simply adopts the policy of using the notion of luck ‘generously, undefinedly, but,
I think, comprehensively’.3 Might we properly expect a greater degree of ana­lyt­
ic­al candour than this?
Resistant to analysis though he might be, Williams’s rough working idea seems
to be that the presence of luck denotes an absence of control over the outcomes of
acts and plans. The same basic characterization of luck is also employed by Nagel:

Where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his
control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judg-
ment, it can be called moral luck.4

But Nagel himself encourages connections to be made between ethics and epis­
tem­ol­ogy.5 And, if moral luck is definitely a species of luck, then our characteriza-
tion of luck might properly require more critical detail, because we will need to
know what luck amounts to, across both moral and epistemological contexts, if
we are going to successfully identify what a particular sub-­species of luck—moral
luck—amounts to.
This approach is upheld by at least some contributors to the moral luck debate.6
On such views, there are both opportunities to get ahead, and dangers to avoid.
Rik Peels, for example, is convinced that ‘we need to get a firm grip on the notion
of luck before we can solve the problem of moral luck’.7 And Steven Hales warns
us that ‘moral luck is possible only if one assumes a specific theory of luck, one
that is not a suitable account of epistemic luck’.8 In fact, because Hales thinks that
all the major theories of luck face serious critical problems, and because he
assumes that moral luck must be a genuine species of luck, he doubts whether

3 Williams (1981a), p. 22. 4 Nagel (1979), p. 26. 5 Nagel (1979), pp. 27, 36.
6 See, for example, Peels (2015), Hales (2015), Pritchard (2005), ch. 10, and Brogaard (2003).
7 Peels (2015), p. 77. 8 Hales (2015), p. 2385.
 What is Luck? 3

there is any interestingly unified phenomenon of ‘moral luck’.9 If Hales is right,

the debate on moral luck will have been floundering all this time under mistaken
assumptions. So the stakes are high. Is moral luck a species of luck that can be
generally applied across both moral and epistemological contexts?
Before we continue, it might be noted that it is not just the areas of moral and
political philosophy which have been slow to open up the concept of luck to ana­
lyt­ic­al inspection. As noted by Duncan Pritchard, a notable proponent of anti-­
luck epistemology:

The difficulty that faced anti-­luck epistemology when I first tried to develop
it . . . was that I found to my surprise that there was next to nothing in the philo-
sophical literature on the nature of luck. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that luck
was at this time largely treated as an undefined primitive.10

Pritchard and others have attempted, accordingly, to make good on these

lacunae.11
The notion of luck seems to belong to the same conceptual neighbourhood as
the notion of the accidental, or the unforeseen, or the uncontrollable, or the
unchosen. But these notions do not always go together, thus necessitating a more
fine-­tuned approach. Williams and Nagel propound what might be referred to as
the Lack of Control Account of luck. The Lack of Control Account may have defi-
ciencies as a general account of luck. One counterexample that has emerged in
the literature is provided by the humdrum daily event of the sun’s rising. This is
an event over which we lack control. It is also an event which is significant to us.
We cannot dismiss it as not being a matter of luck because it has no implications
for our lives and interests.12 Be that as it may, we would not normally describe the
sun’s rising as a matter of luck.13
Pritchard advances an account which neatly provides for the sunrise case.14
This Modal Account analyses luck in terms of outcomes in the nearest possible
worlds with the same initial conditions as the actual world. More precisely, and as
Pritchard originally presented it, the Modal Account holds that an event is lucky
if it satisfies two conditions: first, it is an event that occurs in the actual world but

9 See also Hales (2016).

10 Pritchard (2014), p. 595; cf. Pritchard (2005), p. 125.
11 It is a large and growing literature. For just a small sample of it, see, for example, Pritchard
(2005), (2014), Lackey (2008), Coffman (2014), (2015), and Hales (2016). (I should add here that the
‘strokes of luck’ account advanced by Coffman has essentially nothing to do with the commitments
defended in this book, its title notwithstanding.)
12 For the addition of this significance condition, see Pritchard (2005), p. 126. The significance
condition is opposed to any simple account of luck which explicates it merely in terms of the low
probability of an event’s occurrence.
13 See Latus (2000), p. 167, and Pritchard (2005), p. 127.
14 See Pritchard (2005), pp. 128–33.
4 Introduction

not in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant initial condi-
tions for that event are the same as in the actual world; and second, it satisfies the
significance condition.15 The sunrise does not count for us as lucky, because it
would not fail to rise in any of the nearby possible worlds. A huge amount about
our world, and about the physical laws applying to it, would need to be altered for
tomorrow’s sunrise not to take place.
The Modal Account also provides a decent accommodation of other common
cases. If I buy a winning lottery ticket, I am considered lucky. Why am I lucky in
this case, but not lucky in the sunrise case? Both of them lie beyond my control. It
is because, in nearby possible worlds, I would very easily not have been in posses-
sion of a winning lottery ticket: all it would take for me to have a losing ticket,
rather than a winning ticket, is for me to have purchased another ticket, or for a
slightly different combination of numbers to have been chosen. By contrast, the
sun would not stop rising in nearby possible worlds.
Finally, and in any case, the Modal Account makes a decent fist of the central
cases that engage with the particular concerns of the Control Account. It may be a
matter of good luck that my negligence produces no harmful consequences, and a
matter of bad luck that my negligence leads to disaster. Though I may be negli-
gent and experience good luck, I could so easily have experienced bad luck.
Similarly, I may be negligent and experience bad luck, but I might just as easily
have experienced good luck. I may make a malicious attempt on someone’s life:
even if this attempt is successful, I might easily have produced only an unsuccess-
ful attempt, and if my attempt is unsuccessful, it might just as easily have been
successful.
As a generally serviceable notion of luck, the Modal Account may score more
highly than the Lack of Control Account. But that does not reveal the Lack of
Control Account to be an inadequate basis for the problem of moral luck.16 As I
see it, Williams’s insouciance was justified; the various wrinkles in the current
lively debate on the analysis of luck will not pay dividends if our particular aim is
to understand the significance of luck in moral and political philosophy. The most
salient pressures favouring the Modal Account over the Lack of Control Account
of luck simply do not apply to the debate on moral luck.
Why is this? The very restriction to the moral domain ensures that we will be
talking about items that relate to moral appraisability, in either its evaluative or
deontic guise. This means that we will be concerned with moral agents, their acts,

15 Pritchard (2005), pp. 128, 132. It should be noted that Pritchard (2014) withdraws his former
commitment to the significance condition; I will not pursue the details here.
16 There are denials to consider here: see Pritchard (2005), ch. 10, and Peels (2015). Some of these
will be considered as we go along: see, for example, Chapter 2, n. 29. See also Hartman (2017), pp.
25–7, for some sensible reservations about the ostensible advantages of the Modal Account for the­or­
iz­ing about moral luck.
 Types of Moral Luck 5

their dispositions, their thoughts, and the practices in which they participate and
the institutions they create. Counter-­examples to the Lack of Control Account
such as the sunrise case do not damage the application of the Lack of Control
Account to moral luck. This is because the very restriction to the moral domain
ensures that we will be talking about morally appraisable items—acts, intentions,
and so forth—that relate to moral agents, and what matters here is the degree of
control that agents enjoy over these items.
These ideas can be further enriched if we take a more detailed look at the par-
ticular problems associated with moral luck.

3. Types of Moral Luck

The problem of moral luck arises out of a tension between two deep facts about
moral thought and practice. On the one hand, we are reflectively inclined to
affirm that the objects of moral appraisal—agents, actions, practices, institutions,
political policies, and so on—should not be the product of luck, or due to the
operation of factors which lie beyond agents’ control. On the other hand, we also
find upon reflection that our moral appraisals are saturated with luck-­dependent
content, and that they could not be easily revised to eliminate the operation of
luck without leaving those appraisals with indeterminate content, or no con-
tent at all.
Nagel outlines a number of different areas of moral luck, and it is customary to
enumerate them in preliminary discussions of the subject. I have no innovations
to offer in this respect. These are recognizable landmarks in the moral luck land-
scape, and they provide helpful orientation.
One of these—and still the most actively discussed in the literature—is ‘result-
ant’, ‘outcome’, or ‘consequential’ luck: luck in the results, outcomes, or conse-
quences of the acts agents perform, or attempt to perform. Acts have worldly
consequences which are not determined purely by the agent, even if these conse-
quences conform to the agent’s intentions. To take a mundane and morally
in­nocu­ous example, if my intention is make a cup of coffee for myself, then I may
succeed in doing that—I usually do—but the world has to cooperate with me in
certain ways, and I lack at any particular moment complete control over how the
world is. The kettle has to be working; the tap water must be flowing; someone
else must have seen to it that coffee beans, rather than something that merely
looks like coffee beans, have been deposited in the packet of coffee; it must be the
case that no one has stolen all my coffee cups overnight, and so on. If the world
does not cooperate with me, then my intention will be frustrated, and my coffee-­
making exercise will not turn out as planned. This will be true of any acts, includ-
ing acts which are much more morally consequential.
6 Introduction

One familiar example of morally consequential acts concerns a pair of drunken,

reckless drivers.17 One of these drivers has an unsteady but uneventful journey
home, harming no one. The second drunken driver hits and kills a pedestrian. It
was just a matter of luck that this pedestrian was in the wrong place at the wrong
time. The results of the drunk drivers’ acts are very different, but this difference is
a matter of luck. Similarly, consider two assassins: one of them succeeds in his
attempt to assassinate his target, whereas the other fires a bullet which ends up in
a passing pigeon. The difference between them, once again, is just a matter of luck.
‘Circumstantial luck’ is luck in respect of the degree of morally revealing or
challenging circumstances which an agent encounters. Nagel gives the example of
German citizens who were exposed to the emergence of the Third Reich in the
1930s.18 Though it may have fallen on each of them, morally speaking, to do their
bit in resisting and subverting this political regime, and though we may blame
them for failing in large measure to do that, it cannot be denied that they were
placed in much more morally exposed circumstances than, say, the citizens of the
typical South American country at the time. The same person who became an
officer in a concentration camp in the Third Reich might have led a relatively
blameless life as an émigré businessman in Argentina, if only his background cir-
cumstances had been different. Those German citizens who now, as we see it,
failed that moral test, are considered blameworthy, but it was a matter of circum-
stantial luck that they were in those circumstances, rather than in more peaceful
political conditions in which their frailties would not have been exposed and
their strengths had been given a proper outlet of expression.
As another example of circumstantial luck, Judith Thomson invites us to con-
sider two judges.19 Judge Actual accepts a bribe, thus corrupting the course of
justice, whereas Judge Counterfactual, who shares Judge Actual’s dispositions,
does not accept a bribe, simply because he was not given the relevant opportunity.
The difference between them is simply a matter of luck. Can it be correct, then, to
deem Judge Actual more blameworthy than Judge Counterfactual?
We need to be precise about the difference between resultant luck and circum-
stantial luck, because resultant luck can undeniably be described as a species of
circumstantial luck. Differences in the actual outcomes of agents’ acts may be
truthfully described as being due to circumstances beyond these agents’ control.
Reconsider the case of the drunken drivers: the driver who collides with the
pedestrian does so because his journey unfolds in circumstances where there is a
pedestrian in the wrong place at the wrong time. The luck of the luckier drunken
driver, by contrast, can also be described as circumstantial: it consists in the
absence of any such pedestrian.

17 We will be spending a great deal of time with this case, as well as the second case about assassins,
in the early chapters of this book.
18 Nagel (1979), pp. 26, 28. 19 Thomson (1993), pp. 206–7.
 Types of Moral Luck 7

Collapse can be avoided. Although facts about resultant luck can be

re-­described in the language of circumstantial luck, the converse does not hold.
Nagel was therefore not over-­counting the relevant sources of luck; there is a dis-
tinctive hue in this further category of luck which certifies it as a genuinely dis-
tinct form of moral luck from resultant luck. On this more precise articulation of
it, circumstantial luck should be understood as the luck of being exposed to cir-
cumstances in which intentions are formed, acts are performed or at least
attempted, and dispositions are developed or actualized.20
‘Constitutive luck’ is luck in respect of an agent’s character traits, constitution,
dispositions, skills, and background. It is luck in respect of an agent’s ‘natural
endowments’ and ‘social endowments’, as John Rawls routinely referred to them.21
We can claim no credit for these endowments; we just have them. Even if we are
capable of shaping ourselves by willed effort and reflection, we have no control
over our starting points, which may themselves constrain or influence the willed
effort and reflection we can actually expend, and which are likely at least in part
to determine how we act, and where we end up. There is no very sharp distinction
between circumstantial luck and constitutive luck.
Finally, there is ‘causal luck’, or luck in respect of the causal antecedents of an
agent’s acts. Causal luck is a type of circumstantial luck which is concerned with
the immediate causal antecedents into our acts and decision-­making. Nagel
plainly has in mind the global determinism thesis, according to which everything
we do, and everything that happens to us, is subsumable under the laws of nature.
We do not get to choose those laws of nature, and we do not get to choose those
immediate causal antecedents. To make this plain, think of an arbitrary point in
time before you were born. Everything that happens afterwards—every event and
action—supposedly conforms to, and falls under, those laws of nature as they
proceeded from that pre-­mortem collection of factual circumstances.22 We are
blamed and praised for what we do, or omit to do, but what we do or omit to do,
on this way of looking at it, is downstream from deterministic currents that we
had no control over.
Think of how pervasive these categories of luck are in our practical lives. There
would seem to be no corner of them that does not betray their influence. How we
act in the circumstances we face, the decisions we make, how our acts turn out,
the traits and dispositions which are mobilized in the acts we perform, in the

20 Some of these items may appear to belong to the territory mapped out by Nagel’s category of
constitutive luck. The boundaries between circumstantial luck and constitutive luck are in fact some-
what porous, as we shall see when Michael Zimmerman’s category of ‘situational luck’ is under scru-
tiny in Chapter 4.
21 This is common terminology in Rawls (1971).
22 This is a rough description of Peter Van Inwagen’s ‘Consequence Argument’: see Van
Inwagen (1975).
8 Introduction

circumstances we face: these seem utterly central to our attempts to make sense of
our moral lives. But these verdicts also seem riddled with luck.
So can we attempt some form of purification of our moral appraisals? Can we
purge these appraisals of luck, so that corrected versions of them make due allow-
ance for, and attempt to discount or neutralize, the influence of luck? Given the
pervasiveness of luck, Nagel’s worry is that we could not do so. If we made an
honest attempt to implement this purging of luck-­influenced content, Nagel fears
that ‘the area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral concern,
[would seem] to shrink . . . to an extensionless point’.23
There is a discernible pattern to the concerns at work as we negotiate these
various categories of moral luck. Robert Hartman’s observation that ‘the moral
luck debate is about not luck per se but a tension in our ordinary thinking about
moral responsibility’ seems perfectly correct.24 We lack control over a number of
major dimensions which matter to our moral evaluation. That is puzzling, and it
calls for investigation.

4. Moral Luck and Free Will

If there is an elephant in the room in discussions of moral luck, it must be free

will and moral responsibility. The categories of constitutive luck and causal luck
in Nagel’s taxonomy seem particularly germane to free will and moral responsi-
bility. One could be forgiven for assuming that the debate on moral luck, as it has
developed in the literature over the last forty years, is a relatively small compo-
nent in the broader debate about these issues. On this view, moral luck is a minor
cog in a larger wheel. Moral luck can only expect to be engulfed in these larger
debates upon closer examination of the underlying issues. The debate on moral
luck cannot expect to be satisfactorily conducted, far less settled, independently
of the events unfolding in the never-­ending free will campaign. Moreover, if the
Lack of Control Account is not being disputed as an appropriate characterization
of luck in the moral domain, then the relevance of free will and responsibility to
these issues will be all the more obvious.
This is a serious challenge. But I do not accept that moral luck is merely a jun-
ior partner in the broader debate about free and responsibility; the debates are
not structured in that way, or at least need not be structured in that way. The

23 Nagel (1979), p. 35.

24 Hartman (2017), p. 24. It should be noted that this particular division in the debate cuts across
substantive commitments with respect to moral luck itself. Similar commitments are evinced, for
example, by Enoch and Marmor (2007), who are staunchly opposed to moral luck, while Hartman
and I accept its existence. They are anti-­luckists, and we are anti-­anti-­luckists.
 Moral Luck and Free Will 9

nature of free will and responsibility is, admittedly, a large, adjacent, and some-
times threatening presence in the moral luck debate. Large-­scale treatments of
moral luck can be naturally partnered with discussions of free will, and I do not
claim that the inclusion of causal luck in Nagel’s taxonomy was poorly judged.25
But the free will debate does not wholly engulf the moral luck debate. There are
distinctive concerns in the moral luck debate which can and should be investi-
gated independently of wider issues about free will and moral responsibility.
These distinctive concerns are chiefly relevant to resultant luck and circum-
stantial luck, and to a certain extent constitutive luck, and these three categories
of moral luck will indeed form the substance of Part I of this book.26 Consider,
first, resultant luck: one assassin hits his target, while the other assassin misses
hers. The difference between them, by assumption, is due to luck. Now we assume
that both assassins, in making their attempts in the first place, have satisfied the
normal conditions of responsibility and control. Their satisfaction of these condi-
tions, whatever they may amount to in detail, is necessary for each of them to
qualify as a candidate for moral blameworthiness. Resultant luck now presents us
with a further control-­related problem. If each of these agents lacks control over
the differences in the outcomes of their respective attempts, then will we not have
to agree that they are equally blameworthy? How else can we be in a position to
insist on their individual satisfaction of the ordinary conditions of control and
responsibility for their moral blameworthiness, but then deny the relevance of a
further control-­related difference between them as we determine what each of
them is blameworthy for, and the degree to which each of them is blameworthy?
That is the essence of the problem of resultant luck. This problem does not
ignore free will and responsibility, but assumes that those prior conditions are in
place in respect of the normal sources of action for individual agents in order to
raise another problem about control and responsibility. If we are going to insist
that there are control conditions which must hold in order to make each of these
agents morally appraisable in the first place, then we should surely be troubled by
our lack of control over a further important dimension of our moral appraisal.
The same broad points hold for circumstantial luck. Return to Thomson’s Judge
Actual and Judge Counterfactual. Neither of them would have been a candidate
for moral blameworthiness in the first place were it not for their satisfaction of
the normal conditions for moral responsibility. Whatever these conditions
amount to, they are, in the first instance, established separately for each of these
agents in turn. But the fact that Judge Actual accepts the bribe, while Judge
Counterfactual does not, reflects a difference in circumstances which neither of

25 See, for example, Levy (2011), and Mele (2006).

26 Constitutive luck will also enjoy a second life in Part II, when I turn my attention to distributive
justice.
10 Introduction

them has any control over. So there would appear to be a further control-­related
problem which is not budgeted for within the original terms and conditions for
the assignment of individual moral blameworthiness. There will be no room to
investigate this further control-­related problem unless we assume business as
usual for the satisfaction of the individual blameworthiness conditions.
We can consider further cases along this spectrum, thereby edging into consti-
tutive luck. Imagine that there is a third judge, Judge Possible, who does not have
corrupt dispositions, but who would have developed them had her circumstances
and early social conditioning been different.27 Once again, the fact that she was
not placed in these early character-­forming circumstances is just a matter of luck.
The differences between Judge Possible, on the one hand, and Judge Actual and
Judge Counterfactual, on the other hand, lie beyond the control of any of them.
Intuitively, it would appear that both Judge Actual and Judge Counterfactual are
blameworthy in ways that do not apply to Judge Possible. But the differences in
these intuitive verdicts are due to luck; they thus disclose a further control-­related
problem.
To recapitulate, there are puzzles about responsibility and control in all these
cases that will not even get off the ground unless we assume something like nor-
mal service when it comes to the satisfaction of the generic blameworthiness con-
ditions for each individual. If we are convinced that no such conditions for
individual blameworthiness exist, then we will not even reach those further
puzzles.
We can put these points in another way. If you are a pessimist about free
will and responsibility, then it may seem at first that the problem of moral
luck is less interesting for you. This is because the question of whether there
should be differential blameworthiness between agents whose differences are a
matter of luck will be dwarfed by the worry that there can be no justified
ascriptions of individual blameworthiness in the first place, due to the absence
of free will. But there are two points we can make against even pessimists about
free will.
First, these arguments between optimists and pessimists are complex and dif-
ficult, and we seem entitled to think in conditional terms: supposing the pes­sim­
is­tic arguments for free will were not correct, there would still be these further
control-­related puzzles to consider. So what is to stop us from considering them?
Second, even for error theorists about moral responsibility, appearances are
usually maintained. Pessimists about free will tend to keep ersatz versions of our
blaming practices alive, in order to redeem whatever social utility these practices
can claim. If so, then an internal problem to negotiate further will be provided
by these categories of moral luck. We will still want to know whether the

27 Thomson does not mention Judge Possible: this addition to the cast of agents was pioneered by
Zimmerman (2002).
 Moral Luck, Blameworthiness, and Responsibility 11

control-­related problems associated with resultant luck, circumstantial luck, and

constitutive luck can be satisfactorily dealt with. So the phenomenon of moral
luck still generates a collection of problems which require investigation.
Suppose, by contrast, that you are an optimist about free will and responsibil-
ity. If you fall into this camp, then you will be committed to the existence of
blameworthiness conditions that can be satisfied by individuals one at a time. But
that leaves us with these further control-­related problems, concerning the differ-
ent types of moral luck, which have not been provided for. Again, these issues call
for investigation.
In short, whether you are an optimist or a pessimist about moral responsibility,
there are reasons to support an investigation—a separate investigation—into
moral luck. The problem of moral luck is not engulfed by free will and responsi-
bility, even if it is entirely understandable for philosophers who are interested in
one of them to take an interest in the other.

5. Moral Luck, Blameworthiness, and Responsibility

Although my policy is to avoid direct confrontations with the free will and
responsibility debate in these pages, I will be making repeated references to
blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, especially in Part I. These notions still
import various suppositions about moral responsibility. So it is a good idea at this
point to say something more about theories of blameworthiness, even though my
aim is to keep critical interventions to a minimum. I will briefly describe this ter-
ritory before commenting on its connection to moral luck. As for the free will
debate, I think that there is a way of maintaining a manageable distance between
these debates about blameworthiness and the moral luck debate.
There are different possible types of moral appraisability or assessability, which
I will use as broad umbrella terms. An important and highly visible central div­
ision in this territory has been advanced by Gary Watson.28 As Watson puts it,
there are two faces of responsibility. At one end of the moral appraisability spec-
trum, we find aretaic or descriptive appraisals, predications, or verdicts. The fla-
vour of this type of appraisal was expressed by John Dewey in the following way:
‘Responsibility is . . . one aspect of the identity of character and conduct. We are
responsible for our conduct because that conduct is ourselves objectified in actions’.29
In recent literature, this dimension of responsibility has become known as respon-
sibility as attributability. Other terms have also been used for it: Watson describes

28 See Watson (1996). This is complicated territory, of course, and Watson’s division does not settle
all the directions one can take. See, for example, Mason (2019) for other ideas.
29 Dewey (1957), pp. 1601–1; cited at Watson (1996), p. 227; original emphases.
12 Introduction

it as ‘responsibility as self-­disclosure’, and it is roughly equivalent to what Susan

Wolf calls ‘real self views’ of moral responsibility.30
Responsibility as attributability is ultimately concerned with what the agent,
morally speaking, is like. In the attitudes she holds and in the acts she performs,
an agent discloses or expresses herself and her values. Her character and her
broad orientation towards other moral agents and patients are also revealed in the
moral track record she accumulates through her practical career.31 T. M. Scanlon
considers someone whose conduct betrays the fact that he ‘does not place any
value on other people’s lives or interests’, and asks, rhetorically: ‘what clearer
grounds could one have for saying that he is a bad person and behaves wrongly?’32
Qualities of character will be captured by the terms we use to describe those acts
and attitudes. These may allow us to describe an agent at different times as cruel,
or kind, or cold, or fair-­minded, or generous, or sanctimonious, or vengeful, or
forgiving, or lazy, or any number of other things. Her acts and attitudes embody
or reflect these dispositions or traits of character.33 And, of course, we can also
characterize an agent’s acts in thinner terms, and more flatly, as bad or wrong. As
long as her acts and attitudes reflect what this agent is like, then she can be
appraised in this aretaic way.34 If the traits are morally undesirable ones, we will,
accordingly, end up with different exercises in ‘unwelcome description’.35
Attributability responsibility need not simply take an agent’s acts and attitudes at
face value: acts and attitudes can, after all, be coerced, distorted, or ma­nipu­lated.36
Some further tests for screening out manipulation or coercion may have to be
satisfied to arrive at a relevantly undistorted view of what the agent is like, mor-
ally speaking. Yet even if these scruples are heeded—and nothing prevents more
sophisticated conceptions of attributability from taking them into con­ sid­
er­
ation—a number of writers are convinced that responsibility as attributability
leaves out something important. Wolf has influenced much of this thinking:

. . . when we hold an agent morally responsible for some event, we are doing more
than identifying her particularly crucial role in the causal series. . . . [W]e are not

30 See Wolf (1990), esp. ch. 2. Wolf is Watson’s main critical interlocutor in his discussion. As we
shall see, Wolf herself rejects real self views.
31 Zimmerman (2002) makes repeated references to the idea of a moral ‘track record’.
32 Scanlon (1998), p. 284.
33 There is a further debate, adjacent to this one, about how stable or enduring character traits are,
and to what extent qualities of character should be viewed as largely a product of the circumstances
we find ourselves in at the time. See Harman (1999), (2000), and (2009), Athanassoulis (2000), Doris
(2002), Kupperman (2001), and Webber (2006) for instructive discussions of these particular issues.
34 See Adams (1985) for a strong defence of this form of responsibility. Scanlon (1998), esp. ch. 6,
and Smith (2005) are also relevant.
35 A phrase used by Smith (2012), p. 583.
36 Wolf (1990) understands real self views to be causally structured, so these views are of course
exposed to these problems. Attributability views can be less crude than this, however—a point to
which we shall return.
 Moral Luck, Blameworthiness, and Responsibility 13

merely judging the moral quality of the event with which the individual is so
intimately associated; we are judging the moral quality of the individual herself
in some focused, non-­instrumental, and seemingly more serious way. We may
refer to the latter sense of responsibility as deep responsibility, and we may speak
in connection with this of deep praise and blame.37

What is required for ‘deep’ responsibility, in Wolf ’s sense? One of her concerns
in this passage is that the appeal to an agent’s ‘role in the causal series’ may not
suffice for serious censure. Attributability theorists can agree. As I suggested
above, they may wish to refine purely causal criteria in order to arrive at a less
distorted view of what can be reasonably attributed to an agent. But the concerns
with deep responsibility are likely to go beyond this consideration.
The easiest way of proceeding here may be to enumerate some considerations
that do not especially engage the concerns of responsibility as attributability. As
Neil Levy explains:

. . . attributability requires relatively little in the way of control. An act or omis-

sion can rightfully be attributed to me whether or not I ever exercised control
over acquiring the attitude that it expresses. So long as my action is rightly taken
to be expressive of my real self—so long, that is, as it is the product, in the right
kind of way, of my beliefs and desires, values and commitments, and not of hyp-
nosis, brain manipulation, mental illness or what have you—then it is properly
attributable to me.38

Attributability is not especially concerned with the fair opportunity to have

avoided blameworthiness. Perhaps some people really are malicious, spiteful, vin-
dictive, or cruel: this is simply what they are like, and these qualities are faithfully
expressed by the way they think and the way they act. Due to early facts about
formative conditioning or upbringing, these agents may not have had any choice
about the matter, and they may lack control over the expression of these personal-
ity traits in their present circumstances. And this fact may serve, in turn, to shield
them from certain ascriptions of responsibility. Watson refers to this further type
of responsibility as responsibility as accountability. Unless these more demanding
conditions for accountability are satisfied, agents are not accountable to others for
their attitudes and acts.
How does accountability differ from attributability? What interest is served by
this more demanding notion of responsibility? Watson’s and Wolf ’s primary

37 Wolf (1990), p. 41; passage cited by Watson (1996), p. 228. 38 Levy (2005), p. 3.
14 Introduction

concern lies with agents’ vulnerability to hostile reactive attitudes: attitudes such
as indignation and resentment.39 As Watson writes:

In one way, to blame (morally) is to attribute something to a (moral) fault in the

agent; therefore, to call conduct shoddy is to blame the agent. But judgments of
moral blameworthiness are also thought to involve the idea that agents deserve
adverse treatment or ‘negative attitudes’ in response to their faulty conduct.40

It is generally unpleasant to be on the receiving end of these attitudes, and

other sanctions, formal and informal, may ensue from them. Agents who are
exposed to these reactive attitudes may be shunned or cold-­ shouldered by
others,41 or acquire a bad reputation which frustrates their future encounters and
op­por­tun­ities. These reactions may form, in turn, the basis of further formal or
institutional sanctions: fines, penalties, reprimands, and various forms of official
censure and setbacks. And the agents on the receiving end of these attitudes may
suffer feelings of guilt or shame, or a loss of self-­esteem.
An important question arising immediately from these theoretical divisions is
this: if we judge that attributability conditions are satisfied, then won’t negative
attitudes more or less automatically ensue from them? To take an example, the
description of Amy as spiteful cannot be easily combined with a commitment to
moral neutrality about this aspect of her character. Spitefulness is not just another
ordinary ascriptive characteristic of Amy’s, like her height or hair colour. Unlike
her height or hair colour, Amy’s spitefulness is not a morally colourless fact about
her. As a result, we cannot be expected to be morally indifferent to the evidence
that Amy is spiteful; negative feelings towards Amy seem justified on the basis of
this aretaic predication alone. In other words, exercises in aretaic predication
appear to be internally connected to what Watson calls ‘reactive entitlements’.42
Our justification for reacting negatively to the evidence that Amy’s acts and atti-
tudes have betrayed spitefulness ensues simply from her spitefulness, especially
if—as Watson thinks—attributability amounts to a genuine form of responsibility.
This problem threatens to scupper the division between attributability and
accountability. If reactive entitlements are licensed by aretaic ascriptions alone,
then it is far from clear that responsibility as accountability enjoys any distinctive
domain to operate in. It can still be noted, of course, that some acts reflecting
those traits were not performed in the presence of a fair opportunity to have
avoided performing them, and that fact may make a difference to our responses

39 Strawson (1962) famously makes the reactive attitudes central to our understanding of moral
responsibility. His discussion has generated a huge critical industry. See Todd (2016) and Hieronymi
(2020) for some penetrating recent reflections on this debate.
40 Watson (1996), pp. 230–1; original emphasis.
41 Scanlon (2008), ch. 4, analyses blame in terms of the relationships-­disrupting implications of
wrong action.
42 Watson (1996), p. 230.
 Moral Luck, Blameworthiness, and Responsibility 15

to the agents who perform such acts. We can reserve some additional discredit for
agents who had a reasonable opportunity to avoid performing blameworthy acts,
but performed them nonetheless.
Watson’s pluralist stance offers a way of providing for this approach:

Moral accountability is only part, and not necessarily the most important part,
of our idea of responsibility. The self-­disclosure view describes a core notion of
responsibility that is central to ethical life and ethical appraisal.43

On Watson’s view, attributability and accountability both have roles to play in the
determination of an agent’s responsibility. There is no need to decide on a victor
between them. We can instead appeal to a division of labour as we construct an over-
all picture of agents’ responsibility: there are simply the ways these agents are
(­covered by attributability responsibility), and there are the objectionable things they
do which they had the opportunity to avoid (covered by accountability
responsibility).
Others, however, wish to divide this landscape differently. On Neil Levy’s rival
approach, attributability verdicts do not furnish us with genuine ascriptions of
responsibility.44 We should instead divide the territory into ascriptions of respon-
sibility as governed by a strong control condition—Levy calls this theory volition-
ism—and ascriptions of different species of badness, which do not pretend to
function as ascriptions of responsibility as well.
There are a number of ingredients in Levy’s argument. He thinks, first, that any
notion of moral responsibility is defined in terms of vulnerability to reactive
attitudes:

To say that an agent is morally responsible (for an act, omission or attitude) is to

say that the Strawsonian reactive attitudes are justified in relation to her with
regard to that act, omission or attitude . . .45

This immediately raises the stakes: if attributability is a genuine form of responsi-

bility, then reactive entitlements are going to be generated.
Levy’s next point is that friends of attributability have already budgeted for
a distinction between blameworthiness and badness as a result of the earlier
concern that unrefined causal criteria were always too crude for delivering
­
­attributability in a reliable way:

43 Watson (1996), p. 229.

44 See, again, Levy (2005). Levy (2007a) and (2007b), and Levy and McKenna (2009) also offer
rele­vant discussions.
45 Levy (2005), p. 2.
16 Introduction

. . . volitionists might point out [that] even attributionists find fault with agents
without holding them to be at fault: when these faults are the product of tran-
sient mental illness, for instance. It is, therefore, false that there is no conceptual
room for a distinction between the bad and the blameworthy, and attributionists
owe us an argument for closing the gap between the two.46

Finally, Levy thinks that, if a strong control condition is not in place, blame­
worthi­ness seems inappropriate. Levy provides several arguments to this effect,
but I shall concentrate only on one of them, whose flavour is captured in the fol-
lowing passage:

If mental illness or brain damage results in transient change of character,

Scanlon argues, then we cannot attribute the attitudes it produces to the agent.
However, if the alteration is permanent and the agent herself does not reject her
new attitudes, then we can attribute them to her. She now has a new character,
and is responsible for it.47

Levy finds this implausible: responsibility cannot be assigned to agents simply

because the burdens they labour under are long-­lasting rather than transitory.
The crucial point, for Levy, is that these agents lacked control over these changes
in character, and are not responsible for them. Moreover, these changes in charac-
ter may render them unable to grasp the justification for the requirements which
they have supposedly flouted:

If psychopaths do not grasp the moral demand implicit in asking for a justifica-
tion of an action, they cannot challenge it (except in an externalist sense irrele­
vant to moral responsibility . . .). In general, ignorance of a moral concern
excuses someone of responsibility for failing to consider it.48

Such agents can still be described in moral terms: they continue to be cruel, or
vindictive, or spiteful. But badness is not a sufficient condition for responsibility,
and it does not necessarily warrant blameworthiness.
Other writers, such as Angela Smith, also wish to compress the spectrum of
possibilities, but in a different place.49 Smith thinks that the notion of answerabil-
ity ought to take the central place in our thinking about moral responsibility.
Agents are responsible if and only if they are in a position to answer the charges

46 Levy (2005), p. 6.
47 Levy (2005), p. 8. 48 Levy (2005), p. 9.
49 See, for example, Smith (2005), (2008), (2012), and (2015). Smith (2012) is a response to
Shoemaker (2011).
 Moral Luck, Blameworthiness, and Responsibility 17

levied upon them. Answerability is possible, in turn, if what agents are held
responsible for admits of judgement-­sensitive reasoning.50 As Smith explains:

In order for an agent to be answerable for something, it seems that thing must be
connected to her in such a way that it makes sense to ask her to rationally defend
or justify it. This, in turn, suggests that the thing in question must in some way
reflect her own judgment or assessment of reasons.51

The aspects of an agent’s moral track record that can be fruitfully harnessed
with answerability, in turn, are largely coeval with attributability. If agents perform
acts or hold attitudes that are morally significant, then there is something these
agents can say on behalf of their acts and attitudes. Those acts and attitudes can be
justified, or not. This is the key feature for Smith: attributable features are also
answerable features, because the moral significance of these features places the
bearers of them in a possible justificatory relationship with potential interlocutors.
What about the relationship between answerability and accountability? On
Smith’s view, there may be variation in the responses that are appropriate to
someone who has erred, depending on whether this agent has violated specific
moral obligations to others, or disappointed her friend or partner, or merely let
herself down in some way. But the basic story will always be the same: she has
behaved in ways which at least in principle make her answerable to other agents.
For Smith, there are no interestingly deep differences between attributability and
accountability.
Though my instincts are most sympathetic to Smith’s broad approach, I do not
have to endorse her arguments and rebut those of her opponents in order to be
able to investigate the relevance of moral luck. This is because the criteria that
need to be satisfied for an agent to be eligible for moral blameworthiness in the
first place can be detached from the difference made by luck in this agent’s final
appraisal. Consider resultant luck. You can be as fussy as you like about the con-
ditions that need to be met for an agent to be appraisable in these cases, which
involve malicious attempts or recklessness or negligence. You might favour a less
demanding attributability standard, or a more demanding accountability stand-
ard, or you may embrace the answerability account. My claim is that, having
qualified for blameworthiness in the first place, luck then makes a further differ-
ence to what these agents can be blameworthy for. If the more demanding stand-
ards set by accountability are insisted upon, then some agents will fail that prior
eligibility condition, and will not feature in the subsequent discussion about
moral luck. But if these agents do satisfy the prior eligibility tests, then luck will

50 Judgement-­sensitivity is especially emphasized by Scanlon (1998), and Scanlon’s argument is an

avowed influence on Smith’s account.
51 Smith (2015), p. 103.
18 Introduction

make a difference to their final degree of blameworthiness. Or so I maintain. Luck

makes a similar difference to accounts that require less for appraisability, such as
attributability accounts.
In general, then, we consult our favoured theory of responsibility to certify an
agent as eligible for moral blameworthiness in the first place, but—as I see it—
luck then makes a further difference to how blameworthy this agent is. Proponents
of each of the accounts I have briefly described here—attributability, accountability,
answerability—are free either to embrace or to repudiate these anti-­anti-­luckist
arguments. Their enthusiasm for these arguments, or their aversion to them, will
not be determined by whichever of these accounts of responsibility they embraced
in the first place. Once again, the argument about moral luck is not subsumed by
these other arguments about the conditions for moral responsibility.
The final point I want to make here concerns the connection between blame­
worthi­ness and blame. To be blameworthy is to merit blame, or to be worthy of
blame. But blameworthiness and blame do not always go together. If Kristin’s
wrongdoing is unwitnessed, there will be no one around to blame her. It does not
follow that Kristin has ceased to be blameworthy. Performing acts of wrongdoing
in secret is obviously not enough to cleanse Kristin’s acts of wrongness. Her acts
can still be appraised as wrong, and as blameworthy, which means that she can be
blamed if someone gets to know about her wrongdoing. This is a highly obvious
instance of a gap between blameworthiness and blame, explained by an epistemic
deficit, but there may also be other ways of driving a possible wedge between them.
Some think that there are fairly stringent qualifications for blaming, even when
we are dealing with blaming someone who has comfortably satisfied blame­
worthi­ness requirements. In other words, the fittingness of blame can come apart
from any particular agent’s standing to blame. More, then, may be required than
simply accuracy in the blameworthiness judgement if the agent who attempts to
blame is to enjoy the genuine standing to blame.
The standing to blame can be lost, or not acquired in the first place, for differ-
ent reasons.52 We may think that it is not always someone’s business to offer moral
criticism. Imagine that Emma has cheated on Charles. This is Charles’s concern,
but, intuitively, it may be none of my concern if Emma and Charles are strangers
to me. If I have in some way provoked an offence, or acted in such a way as to
amount to complicity with the targeted agent’s offence, I may also lack the stand-
ing to blame. And, if I am guilty of the same type of offence as that of my critical
target—that is, if I am a hypocrite—I may similarly lack the standing to blame.
Since the standing to blame may come apart from an agent’s blameworthiness,
I will tend to refer in the subsequent discussion to blameworthiness rather than
blame. When I do refer to blame, I will typically be assuming that there is no

52 See Smith (2007), Coates and Tognazzini (2013b), Bell (2013), Cohen (2012a) and (2012b),
Lippert-­Rasmussen (2018), ch. 4, and Todd (2019) for useful explorations of these arguments.
 Moral Luck as a Distributive Problem 19

interesting gap in this case between blameworthiness and blame. My main critical
quarry, in any case, is blameworthiness.53

6. Moral Luck as a Distributive Problem

How should we respond to Nagel’s dilemma, where we must settle either for
unsatisfactorily impure moral appraisals, or for pure but empty moral appraisals?
It seems vital to me that we resist the first horn of this dilemma. The worries
which congregate under it are overstated. Moral life is exposed to moral luck, but
that is nothing to be afraid of, or to recoil from. It would be morally myopic to
attempt to expel these types of luck from our moral appraisals, and—even if that
exercise left us with appraisals that were satisfactorily determinate—we would be
excluding morally significant information. I will be arguing both that there is
moral luck, and also that the sort of luck which matters to moral evaluation is not
the alien interloper to moral appraisability which anti-­luckists depict it as being.
Moral luck is much more fitting to serve as a faithful guide to what matters in
moral appraisal than anti-­luckists think. Many sources of luck to which anti-­
luckists proclaim hostility encode information which any sensible theory of moral
appraisability should wish to preserve.
To maintain a reasonably unified trajectory of argument, I want to focus the
argument on roughly common ground between normative ethics and political
philosophy, which is why I restrict my attention largely to the allocation of blame­
worthi­ness in Chapters 1 to 5, and to the role of luck and its conceptual cousin,
arbitrariness, in our theorizing about distributive justice in Chapters 6 to 8. By
restricting the focus in this way, we can make progress in both of these areas. Or
so I will contend.
What I have to offer here, in summary, is a fundamentally distributive diagno-
sis of the problem of luck in moral and political philosophy. That description of
my underlying approach will not raise eyebrows in the discussions of luck egali-
tarianism and the other responsibility-­sensitive accounts of distributive justice
which we find in political philosophy. Those debates cannot fail to have a funda-
mentally distributive character. They are ineluctably relational. But it may require
some more commentary in terms of its application to how blameworthiness is
allocated in normative ethics. My contention will be that the sharpest point of
engagement with the anti-­luckist tendency is to see its concerns as fundamentally
distributive, and as being centred on the pairwise comparison: here is some-
thing—blameworthiness—which is distributed unequally between pairs of
agents, or between an agent in one set of circumstances and the same agent in

53 I have said little here about praiseworthiness, as opposed to blameworthiness, but I re-­engage
with it in Chapter 3. Unlike others, I favour an asymmetrical account of blameworthiness and praise-
worthiness in moral luck.
20 Introduction

different circumstances, despite the relative lack of control from either of them
about these facts; and that is morally problematic. It is no coincidence that the
cases I have so far offered as evidence for the problem of moral luck, and will
continue to explore, involve comparison between one agent and another agent.
This is true of the cases involving drunken drivers and assassins; it is true of
Thomson’s Judge Actual and Judge Counterfactual; and it is true of citizens who
lived under the Third Reich, and citizens who lived under less morally chal­len­ging
political regimes. These are squarely cases of pairwise comparison.
My contention is that, although the luck which emerges from these pairwise
comparisons is a genuine form of luck, it is not a morally significant form of luck.
To endow it with any importance is to fall into error. Because it is the pairwise
comparison which generates problems of moral luck in the first place, anti-­
luckists suppose that the solution to these problems must also be distributive: we
must redistribute blameworthiness in order to tackle the underlying distributive
problem. In my view, that is the wrong approach. The solution to the problem is
not to rebalance a distributive injustice or irregularity due to the luck that emerges
from the pairwise comparison, but to deny the existence of the distributive in­just­
ice in the first place. The very generation of the data which so troubles anti-­
luckists is fundamentally flawed. Pairwise comparisons lead us astray.
The main problem with the anti-­luckist rebalancing exercise is that it expels
morally essential information. When anti-­luckists compare one agent’s situation
with another agent’s situation, and note the presence of luck in the comparison
between them, they are forced to make adjustments to the appraisal of each of
these agents in order to expel the influence of luck and thereby equalize blame­
worthi­ness. They will be forced to revise our intuitions about the blame­worthi­
ness of each agent in the pair of agents in order to bring them into alignment with
each other. Adam Smith calls this anti-­ luckist commitment the ‘equitable
maxim’:54 as an instance of this maxim, we should treat the two drunken drivers
on a moral par, by deeming them to be equally blameworthy.
The comprehensive application of the equitable maxim in an anti-­luckist
approach, as Roger Crisp explains, will involve a re-­ordering of what we think
matters to moral thought:

In cases of resultant luck . . . harmony between the equitable maxim and the
views of responsibility implied by our result-­sensitive sentiments is impossible,
since they are contradictory.55

On Crisp’s view, if the drunken drivers are equally blameworthy, then responsibil-
ity for the fatality resulting from one of their drunken journeys has to be removed

54 See Smith (1759/1976), II.iii.Intro. 1–5. 55 Crisp (2017), p. 11.

 Moral Luck as a Distributive Problem 21

from the moral ledger of that driver. This is what the suppression of our result-­
sensitive sentiments will require. The fact that a pedestrian has died, as a result of
activity for which the driver lacked any moral justification or excuse, has to be
somehow subtracted from the list of items for which we can find the driver
blameworthy. Or perhaps—at best—the fact that the driver caused the pedestrian
to die is still retained on that list, but it does not elicit any blameworthiness in its
own right.
This is odd. Such a fatality is a foreseeable consequence of the sort of behaviour
that this drunken driver was engaging in; and it is the imagined state of affairs
consisting in harm or death to pedestrians as a result of drunken driving which
explains why drunken driving is so strongly condemnable in the first place. We
condemn drunken driving because of the high risk of death and injury. So if the
worst actually happens and those risks turn bad, why shouldn’t we hold the driver
responsible for the pedestrian’s death, and why doesn’t the pedestrian’s death help
to determine what the driver is blameworthy for, as well as the degree to which
the driver is blameworthy? Somehow the equitable maxim has intruded deeply—
too deeply—into our grasp of what is relevant and what is irrelevant to
blameworthiness.
Because the pairwise comparison between the two drivers seems relevant, we
feel forced to reassess the moral relevance of what each of these drivers does, even
if we might initially have thought it possible to achieve a purchase on the moral
significance of their actions in the absence of that pairwise comparison. We
should guard against this anti-­luckist line of thought. The apparatus of the pair-
wise comparison encourages us to redact morally vital information about the
agents being compared to each other in those pairwise comparisons. I will argue
that pairwise comparisons provide a faulty and misleading guide to what matters
in moral evaluation. This contention will be pursued across the various categories
of moral luck.
Chapters 1 to 3 will be concerned with aspects of resultant luck. The appeal of
what I call the ‘Anti-­Luck Account’ will be traced to the influence of two central
intuitions: the ‘Irrelevance Intuition’ and the ‘Fairness Intuition’. The Irrelevance
Intuition will be treated in detail in Chapter 2, while the Fairness Intuition
will be examined in Chapter 3. When these two intuitions are examined more
closely, their appeal wears off, and my favoured anti-­anti-­luckist account—the
‘Restricted Luck-­Sensitive Account’, or the Restricted Account, for short—will
become more appealing. At least that is the hope. The trail continues in Chapter 4,
where I consider the expansion of anti-­luckist tendencies into the area of
­circumstantial luck and ‘situational luck’, which is a category of moral luck com-
bining circumstantial luck and constitutive luck. My responses to these further
categories of luck take their cue in part from the position I have worked out for
resultant luck. (Appendix II extends certain aspects of the arguments I explore
in Chapter 4.)
22 Introduction

Chapter 5 completes Part I of the book by examining Williams’s treatment of

moral luck. My interpretation of Williams makes his fundamental interests rather
different from Nagel’s, though there are certainly points of affinity between them,
and despite the fact that they have some common enemies. For the most part,
Williams uses the existence of luck as a way of exploring the grip that morality
has over us; certain types of luck, for him, can serve to remove someone from the
force-­field of moral assessment on one particular but influential understanding of
what morality is. I explain in Chapter 5 why I do not think Williams’s argument
succeeds, and why his insights do not impugn the Restricted Account.
The management of constitutive luck is further explored in contemporary
debates about distributive justice, and these issues will be the focus of Part II. In
Chapter 6, I address luck egalitarianism, an influential family of theories in the
distributive literature which is committed to neutralizing the influence of relative
luck between agents. As in cases of moral luck, the usual focus for these debates is
the pairwise comparison. In one sense, this interpersonal focus should not be
surprising when it is encountered in the domain of distributive justice. After all,
justice is an essentially relational political value; it cannot fail to involve compari-
sons between different agents. But in another sense, the emphasis on the neu­tral­
iza­tion of luck in luck egalitarianism is destined to struggle. As we shall see, the
very existence of that interpersonal focus in pairwise comparisons makes it diffi-
cult to see how luck egalitarianism can deliver an adequate account of individual
luck which can properly regulate distributive relations. Either everything affect-
ing an individual’s distributive holdings is down to luck, regardless of what prin-
ciples of distribution we employ—which is close to self-­defeating—or we have to
distinguish between different types of luck in order to tell a sensible distributive
story. If we are forced to distinguish between different types of luck in order to
arrive at sensible distributive criteria, we are probably tracking factors other than
luck. And that is what I think we are doing.
How does the role of pairwise comparisons in anti-­luckist normative ethics
compare to the role of pairwise comparisons in anti-­luckist theories of justice? In
normative ethics, when we are considering the distribution of blameworthiness,
anti-­luckists think that a disruptive influence on the ascription of responsibility at
the individual level—the involvement of luck—must have a similarly disruptive
application to the ascription of responsibility at an interpersonal level. This con-
viction is then used to press Smith’s equitable maxim into service. The antidote in
normative ethics for this sort of anti-­luckist theorizing is to accept that we should
never have ascended to that interpersonal level of comparison in the first place.
Now consider the situation in political philosophy. It would be understandable
to hold that interpersonal comparisons are unavoidable in theorizing about just­
ice. That truth, in turn, might encourage anti-­luckists to employ the very same
theoretical apparatus in their theorizing about justice as that employed in norma-
tive ethics: the pairwise comparison. Perhaps the fact that it would be perfectly
 Moral Luck as a Distributive Problem 23

natural to reach for pairwise comparisons in normative ethics if one were con-
vinced that interpersonal comparisons are a legitimate concern also fuels the
conviction that pairwise comparisons must be central to the interpersonal com-
parisons pursued in political philosophy. But in this particular respect, political
philosophy is in danger of being misled by normative ethics. What is unavoidable
in theorizing about justice is the focus on a common standard or baseline that can
permit interpersonal comparisons. But pairwise comparisons need not be the
focus of interpersonal comparisons—and they should not be, on pain of incoher-
ence or an incomplete attention to what matters in justice. I pursue this argument
in detail in Chapter 6.
Someone who is frequently cited as a progenitor for luck egalitarianism is John
Rawls, whose theory of ‘justice as fairness’, as outlined in his A Theory of Justice,
displays hostility towards the influence of factors that Rawls frequently describes
as being ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’.56 For many commentators, moral
arbitrariness is effectively synonymous with luck. On these views, when Rawls
sets out to neutralize morally arbitrary influences, he should be understood to be
neutralizing differential luck. This may be the standard interpretation of Rawls,
but I shall suggest in Chapter 7 that there is another way of interpreting his main
arguments, which supports a different understanding of the role and significance
of moral arbitrariness. Since this interpretation makes better sense of why Rawls
employs his contractarian apparatus, and is also strongly anchored in at least
some of his own texts, I think it is preferable to the standard luck-­neutralizing
interpretation. It is also largely free of the problems that infect other responsibility-­
sensitive theories of justice.
The final chapter, Chapter 8, also uses broadly Rawlsian commitments to
explore a trio of problems associated with arbitrary moral boundaries. These
problems are connected to luck in a slightly different sense, though they are sig-
nificantly related to the other issues I explore in this book. The problems are all
connected to the grounds of discrimination in our treatment of individuals, both
human and non-­human. Some of the grounds on which we habitually rely in our
ordinary moralizing in these areas seem due to luck. Those whose treatment is
governed by these standards might be reasonably thought to be the beneficiaries
of good luck, while those who fall outside the scope of these theories might be
reasonably suspected to be the victims of bad luck. Is that problematic?
One of these problems is international justice. Cosmopolitans and non-­
cosmopolitans disagree about the distributive relevance of state boundaries. For
cosmopolitans, these boundaries are morally shallow, and cannot justify the stark
differences in life chances for individuals who happen, through no fault of their
own, to be born in different places. For non-­cosmopolitans, these boundaries

56 Rawls (1971), Part One.

24 Introduction

may be morally relevant, given differences in the normative environment facing

insiders and outsiders to any given community or scheme of justice. Although
there is progress to be made on these non-­cosmopolitan fronts, it can seem awk-
ward for non-­cosmopolitans to affirm the relevance of factors that cannot be any-
thing other than morally arbitrary, or the product of brute luck, for each
individual affected by them, if these theorists also endorse a luck-­sensitive theory
of justice for those subjects of justice who qualify for membership in a particular
scheme of justice. These non-­cosmopolitans even risk the charge of incoherence:
how can they be committed to a theory whose central prescriptions are commit-
ted to the neutralization of arbitrary disadvantage, while accepting the relevance
of boundaries to a scheme of justice that are themselves fixed in an arbitrary way?
I do not offer a defence of non-­cosmopolitanism in this book. But I do think that
this central charge of incoherence can be dispersed, if our interpretation of moral
arbitrariness conforms to the one advanced in Chapter 7. That is an important
conclusion if we are to succeed in identifying what keeps cosmopolitans and non-­
cosmopolitans apart in these debates.
A second problem of arbitrary boundaries concerns human moral equality.
Human beings come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They seem morally heteroge-
neous as well, whether by appeal to their moral track records, or their characters
and dispositions, or their capacities for well-­being. Rawls treats all normal human
adult persons as potential subjects of justice, if they have the wherewithal for
what he calls moral personality: the capacity to be guided by a sense of justice,
and to form and pursue a conception of the good. This assumption of basic moral
equality among human subjects also risks arbitrariness, if there are relevant dif-
ferences among these subjects of justice. If some individuals have a greater ability
than others to be guided by justice and to realize a conception of the good, then
why shouldn’t they enjoy a higher status? A relaxed attitude to differences above
the threshold for those individuals who meet the moral personality standard also
appears to combine uneasily with the dismissal of those individuals—most of
them being non-­human animals—who are deemed not to qualify for justice.
These questions create pressure to seek a more rigorous account of human moral
equality that is anchored in a single characteristic, or else collection of character-
istics, that is equally distributed in an all-­or-­nothing way. One problem with this
search for ‘basic equality’ is that the candidates that could successfully realize it
seem to be in vanishingly small supply. I argue that the basic equality project is
wrong-­headed, and that Rawls’s relaxed view of the matter is precisely the one
to follow.
Yet another hotly contested site of dispute—and the third problem considered
in this chapter—concerns interspecies relations. In the philosophical literature,
the charge of ‘speciesism’ has acquired a reputation which rivals obviously invidi-
ous forms of discrimination such as racism and sexism. The problem with the
 Moral Luck as a Distributive Problem 25

species barrier is that it seems arbitrary, particularly when we admit that some
‘marginal’ human cases instantiate lives of little mental complexity or accomplish-
ment. Again, I argue that the arbitrariness of the species boundary is not a barrier
to policies and principles which reserve a moral status for human beings that is
not on offer to non-­humans. This is because many of the anti-­speciesism argu-
ments are committed to an ‘individualist’ approach to moral status: an approach
which ignores relational and extrinsic properties of individuals and just appeals
to the properties that are in some recognizable sense intrinsic to them. The chal-
lenges presented by these cases of arbitrary boundaries can, I believe, be met.
Arbitrary boundaries do not present an insuperable problem for our moral prac-
tice, even if they are based on certain forms of luck.
My conclusions here add to the corpus of arguments advanced elsewhere in
this book. Their joint upshot is that luck is not the interloper or alien moral pres-
ence it is often reputed to be in our moral and political lives. Luck is ineliminable
from our lives and practices, but in many cases that does not matter. And that, as
it happens, deserves to count as a stroke of luck for us.
 1
What Results from Resultant Luck?

1.1. Two Cases

The debate on moral luck has made us familiar with cases with the following type
of interpersonal structure:1

Drivers: In World 1, Fred drives home drunk, and runs over and kills a
pedestrian whom he would not have run over had he been sober. In World 2,
Thomas drives home drunk, encounters only empty roads, and arrives safely.
Assassins: In World 1, Imogen, a hired assassin, takes aim and shoots the
President, killing him. In World 2, Phoebe, a hired assassin, takes aim and
shoots, but inadvertently misses the President, who unexpectedly and unfore-
seeably moves just as she pulls the trigger.2

We will be spending a great deal of time with these cases. They exemplify what
Thomas Nagel calls ‘resultant luck’, or ‘outcome luck’: luck in respect of the results
or outcomes of actions.3 These cases also raise slightly different issues, as we shall
see. In both of them, however, the difference between what befalls these agents
seems, in part, to be a matter of luck. In Drivers, the fact that no pedestrian
appeared in front of Thomas on his drunken journey home is beyond his control;
a mere matter of luck. Similarly, in Assassins, the fact that the President
unexpectedly moves, thus rendering her attempt unsuccessful, is also beyond
Phoebe’s control; again, it is a mere matter of luck. So isn’t Thomas as blameworthy
as Fred, and isn’t Phoebe as blameworthy as Imogen?
I think the answer to these questions, in both cases, is ‘No’. Certainly, there is a
sense in which luck is at play in both cases, as we move from World 1 to World 2,
but we should not recoil from the existence of such luck, or dispute its relevance
for our moral evaluation of these agents and what they have done. This kind of
luck will not successfully sustain a complaint from Fred about his being
blameworthy to a greater degree than Thomas, or a complaint from Imogen about
her being blameworthy to a greater degree than Phoebe. As I see it, morality in
general, and our assignments of blameworthiness in particular, can and must

1 See Nagel (1979).

2 Assume that the President is by no means a legitimate target of political assassination.
3 Zimmerman (1987) appears to have coined the term ‘resultant luck’.

Strokes of Luck: A Study in Moral and Political Philosophy. Gerald Lang, Oxford University Press (2021). © Gerald Lang.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868507.003.0002
30 What Results from Resultant Luck?

provide for the existence and moral significance of such luck. To deliver this con-
clusion, I will provide a much more detailed analysis of the appeal of the anti-­
luckist tendency, and hope by so doing to discredit it.
The basic purpose of this chapter is to set up the various pieces for that debate.
The argument will be structured as follows. In the scene-­setting Section 1.2, I set
out three distinct approaches to moral luck: the ‘Strict Liability Account’, the
‘Anti-­
Luck Account’, and the ‘Restricted Luck-­ Sensitive Account’. (As I will
explain, the Strict Liability Account seems to me a non-­starter, but its inclusion
permits helpful structural contrasts with the other two accounts.) In Section 1.3, I
re-­describe the Anti-­Luck Account as the product of two requirements which
reflect the influence of two intuitions, the ‘Irrelevance Intuition’ and ‘Fairness
Intuition’. (These two intuitions are explored in detail in Chapters 2 and 3,
respectively.) Section 1.4 enumerates, in more fine-­grained detail, the various
types of luck which are manifested in Drivers and Assassins, and assesses their
potential relevance to the concerns of the Anti-­ Luck Account. Section 1.5
examines various attempts by anti-­ luckists to accommodate the ostensible
relevance, in some cases, of resultant luck. I shall suggest that these attempts are
unsuccessful. If relevant luck is ostensibly relevant, it cannot be domesticated as
easily as this collection of proposals pretends.
A caveat before I go any further: I am not going to pay any special attention
here to the status of resultant luck and omissions, or ‘negative’ responsibility.4 My
aim is to get clearer on the central cases represented by Drivers and Assassins,
without having to worry about these further complexities. Even these central and
familiar cases, as we shall see, provide us with many complications to untangle.

1.2. Three Rival Approaches

I shall open the argumentative bidding by distinguishing between three rival

approaches to moral luck, indicating prima facie strengths and weaknesses in
each of them. (I do not claim that these approaches exhaust the relevant options.)

1.2.1. The Strict Liability Account

According to the Strict Liability Account, moral blameworthiness is settled by

whatever actual harmful consequences ensue from one’s acts. As applied to our
two cases, the Strict Liability Account will therefore find Fred and Imogen to be

4 But see Raz (2010) and Sartorio (2012), esp. pp. 170–7, for instructive discussions.
 Three Rival Approaches 31

much more blameworthy than their respective counterparts. Since Thomas does
not, in fact, cause any injury or harm, he will not be held blameworthy. The same
goes for Phoebe, who does not succeed in assassinating the President.
The Strict Liability Account may pay due attention to the significance of out-
comes to our appraisals of agents, but it will nonetheless strike most people as
hopeless in other respects, at least outside very tightly specified domains: the
verdicts it licenses would allow good people to be unjustly held blameworthy, and
bad people to unjustly escape blameworthiness. To explain further, consider four
more specific problems with it.
First, the fact that Thomas and Phoebe are not blameworthy at all will strike
many as unsatisfactory. Second, there are other cases in which the Strict Liability
Account will hold that intuitively innocent and non-­blameworthy agents are
blameworthy after all. Consider:

Sober Driver: Noah, who never drinks and drives, drives home with due care
and attention and accidentally, through no fault of his own, runs over and kills a
pedestrian.5

Noah is not guilty of recklessness, yet the Strict Liability Account will find him
just as blameworthy as Fred. This result seems unacceptable. Third, and leaving
aside Sober Driver, the fact that Fred is much more blameworthy than Thomas,
and that Imogen is much more blameworthy than Phoebe, will also be resisted by
those with strong anti-­luckist tendencies. Fourth, and more generally, the Strict
Liability risks distancing moral assessment from practical action-­guidance to a
frankly uncomfortable extent. If the lion’s share of moral evaluation turns on what
actually happens in the world, and if the connections between what agents aim to
do and what happens in the world as a result of what they do are systematically
skewed by luck, then, to borrow a phrase from Christopher Kutz, ‘moral theory
looks more like the weather forecast than the Ten Commandments’.6 That distance
has to be reduced; moral theory must have something to do with the evaluation of
how agents decide to act. Normative moral theory is primarily prescriptive, not
predictive.7

5 The notion of ‘agent-­regret’ explored at length by Williams (1981a) might be thought to put pres-
sure on Noah’s sense of non-­involvement with the cost of his action. See Chapter 5 for a fuller discus-
sion, and especially Section 5.7. But briefly: the notion of agent-­regret does not actually imply that
Noah should be deemed blameworthy, even if we, along with Williams, would expect morally sensitive
agents to find it difficult to achieve an emotional detachment from what they have caused to happen.
6 Kutz (2009), p. 244.
7 Not always, or exclusively: see, for example, Boyd (1988) and Railton (1986). But the region of
ethics I am exploring is primarily prescriptive, rather than predictive.
32 What Results from Resultant Luck?

1.2.2. The Anti-­Luck Account

As a stark corrective to the Strict Liability Account, the Anti-­Luck Account denies
that luck in harmful consequences can make any difference to the degree of one’s
fundamental blameworthiness. On the Anti-­Luck Account, Fred will be no more
blameworthy than Thomas, and Imogen will be no more blameworthy than
Phoebe. And, since he acted without fault and was therefore entirely unlucky,
Noah will not be blameworthy at all. Moreover, the Anti-­Luck Account guarantees
that action-­guidance and moral evaluation are stationed together. The Anti-­Luck
Account thus appears to take immediate care of the four disadvantages of the
Strict Liability Account. This is an impressive sweep.
I will be taking a more detailed look at the structure and motivation of the
Anti-­Luck Account below, but even as it stands, and despite its superiority to the
Strict Liability Account, it is likely to leave some dissatisfied. Many will applaud
the Anti-­Luck Account for sparing Noah from blame, and for ensuring that
Thomas and Phoebe are blameworthy to some extent, but they may still be
convinced that Fred is more blameworthy than Thomas, and that Imogen is more
blameworthy than Phoebe. After all, Fred’s reckless behaviour has caused the
death of a child, whereas Thomas is guilty of no such offence; and Imogen’s act
has succeeded in killing someone who was not liable to be killed, whereas
Phoebe’s act has not. Acts have worldly consequences, and we may be inclined to
accept that we are often blameworthy for those consequences.
These thoughts can be pursued from a different direction. Is ethical assessment
exclusively concerned with the realm of an internal realm, free from all worldly
luck? Does the Anti-­Luck Account omit too much? Think about it from the first-­
person perspective. If you were unwise enough to get into the car when you were
drunk, would that decision strike you as being the end of the moral story?
Wouldn’t it morally matter to you that you did not run anyone over when you
were careering home? Imagine your morning-­after regrets: ‘That was really stupid
of me. I could have killed someone!’ You would be not just expressing contrition
at the fact you had behaved recklessly, but also expressing relief at the fact that
you had not, as a result of acting recklessly, caused someone to die. Your relief at
the fact that you did not kill someone appears to carry the implication that things
would have been worse for you—morally worse, not just prudentially worse—had
you done so. Had you killed someone, your moral track record would be worse
than it would otherwise have been, and that would have been your fault. To put it
another way, the fault in your action—acting recklessly—would have been
manifested in a more egregious way.
Not everyone will accept this intuition, and the argument to follow does not
assume that you were convinced by it. But I, for one, find it compelling. My aim is
to find a way of giving it a more full-­bodied expression.
 Three Rival Approaches 33

1.2.3. The Restricted Luck-­Sensitive Account

These thoughts, preliminary and under-­defended though they may be, help to
motivate the generation of an intermediate position between the Strict Liability
Account and the Anti-­Luck Account. This brings us, accordingly, to our third
approach. The Restricted Luck-­Sensitive Account, or the Restricted Account for
short, consists of two claims.
According to the first claim, an eligibility condition for blameworthiness is that
agents’ acts have to reflect morally objectionable mental (or internal) states.
Moreover, the moral objectionableness of these mental states must be fixed
independently of the outcomes of these acts, on pain of an immediate collapse
back into the Strict Liability Account. The mental states which will thus qualify
are primarily malicious intentions, and internal states which betray recklessness
or negligence. We can call this claim the Internal Claim, since it takes an interest
in the moral quality of mental states that are internal to the agent. I shall allow
myself to use the term ‘culpability’ and its cognates to gloss the internal states
which satisfy the Internal Claim: in this sense, Imogen, Phoebe, Fred, and Thomas
are all culpable, while Noah is non-­culpable. Imogen and Phoebe are malicious,
while Fred and Thomas are reckless. These are simply different ways of being
culpable, according to this sense of culpability.
The second leading claim of the Restricted Account is that, having satisfied the
Internal Claim, agents will then be blameworthy in rough proportion8 to the
badness of the actual harmful luck-­dependent consequences which proceed from
these acts. Call this the External Claim.
The Restricted Account will not hold Noah in Sober Driver to be blameworthy,
as his act does not satisfy the Internal Claim. The External Claim is not activated
if the Internal Claim has not been satisfied. By contrast, the acts performed by
Fred and Thomas, and Imogen and Phoebe, do satisfy the Internal Claim, since
these agents acted either recklessly or maliciously. Having satisfied the Internal
Claim, they are then eligible for evaluation by the External Claim; and, according
to the External Claim, Fred will be more blameworthy than Thomas, and Imogen
will be more blameworthy than Phoebe. This is because Fred’s act carried actual
harmful consequences which render him more blameworthy than Thomas, and
Imogen’s act carried actual harmful consequences which render her more
blameworthy than Phoebe.
The Restricted Account may appear, at least at first, to offer a successful correc-
tion of excesses and faults which can be reasonably suspected to mar the Strict
Liability Account and the Anti-­Luck Account. There are four points to make.

8 The qualifications which explain the presence of the word ‘roughly’ in the External Claim will be
advanced in Chapter 2, Section 2.5.
34 What Results from Resultant Luck?

First, the Restricted Account permits Noah to be excluded from the scope of
blameworthiness. Second, it holds that Thomas and Phoebe should be included
within the scope of blameworthiness. Third, it deems Fred to be more
blameworthy than Thomas, and Imogen to be more blameworthy than Phoebe.
Fourth, and more generally, although the Restricted Account accepts that worldly
consequences can affect the moral evaluation of agents, it does not turn moral
theory into the sort of weather forecasting that Kutz was worried about. Agents
get to be morally evaluated only given the presence of certain types of internal
states, over which they possess a normal degree of control, in the sources of their
actions. But worries remain: the Restricted Account can easily appear to be a
botched compromise, or an unstable half-­ way house. These worries can be
approached from two sides.
Consider, first, the Internal Claim. If the Restricted Account is correct to
provide for this condition at all, then it is answerable to the complaint that a more
thorough treatment of it is available: one which makes blameworthiness precisely
proportionate to the degree to which agents initially satisfied the Internal Claim.
Since it is already clear that the difference in the worldly outcomes between Fred’s
and Thomas’s car journeys was a matter of luck, rather than anything that either
of them had control over, then a stricter form of moral book-­keeping will insist
that Fred is held to be no more blameworthy than Thomas. We still need an
explanation of how any difference in the final degree of blameworthiness can
exist between agents whose mental states at the time of acting were, or seemed to
be, equally objectionable.
We can make much the same points from the other direction, by fastening on
actual consequences. This brings us to the External Claim. If it is the actual
harmful consequences that matter to blameworthiness, as the External Claim
proclaims, then why does the Restricted Account’s refusal to embrace the
uncompromising picture of the Strict Liability Account amount to anything other
than a failure of nerve? The Restricted Account attempts to pay tribute to both
actual consequences and objectionable motivation in an overall moral evaluation
of these agents, but these forces threaten to push in opposite directions. Acts
embodying culpable motivations are not perfectly matched by how things actually
turn out in the world. Even if a malicious intention is successfully manifested in
the world, that outcome will also reflect luck. To be successfully manifested in the
world, it must be the case that a malicious intention has not been obstructed, and
the fact that no such obstruction takes place is plainly a matter of luck. There is,
according to this sceptical line of thought, no principled case for setting up camp
on the fault-­line which lies on the interstices of these respective areas.
That, at least, is how the Restricted Account may strike you when it is first
encountered in this dialectic. Despite these initial reservations, it seems to me to
 Three Rival Approaches 35

be not just conceptually coherent, but morally defensible. To make further

progress, however, we need to undertake a more detailed examination of the
Anti-­Luck Account. The faults we will uncover in it help us to see how there
might be satisfactory accommodation of both culpable internal states and worldly
outcomes; how one and the same account can provide satisfactorily for the
Internal Claim and the External Claim as well.
There is one more challenge I want to flag at this stage. Some may worry that
this preparatory reasoning for the Restricted Account has been obtuse, because it
neglects the force of the distinction between the scope of blameworthiness and
the degree to which someone is blameworthy. This distinction, which has been
forcefully presented by Michael Zimmerman,9 will allow us to accept, in Drivers,
that Fred is responsible for a greater number of things than Thomas is, since
Fred’s driving was not just reckless, but deadly: a pedestrian died. Similarly, in
Assassins, Imogen is responsible for a greater number of things than Phoebe is,
since she has not just a malicious attempt, but also a murder, to answer for,
whereas Phoebe is answerable for just a malicious attempt. The responsibility of
Fred and Imogen enjoys, then, greater scope than that of Thomas and Phoebe,
respectively. But the degree to which they are blameworthy might still be the
same: Fred might still be no more blameworthy than Thomas, and Imogen might
still be no more blameworthy than Phoebe.
I am not convinced of the uses to which anti-­luckists think they can put this
distinction. My argument against the significance of Zimmerman’s distinction
will be given later in this book.10 For the time being, I am trading on basic
intuitions which are not immediately scuppered by the distinction between the
scope and the degree of responsibility. The Restricted Account holds that Imogen
is responsible for a murder as well as a malicious attempt, and that, therefore, she
is more blameworthy than Phoebe, who is responsible only for a malicious
attempt. Similar remarks can be made about Fred and Thomas. In each case, it is
assumed that degrees of responsibility rise along with expansions in the scope of
responsibility. We need arguments, of course, to vindicate such intuitions—to
show that enlargements in the scope of responsibility are partnered by
enlargements in the degree of responsibility. But these are nonetheless the basic
intuitions the Restricted Account rests upon. It is not inappropriate to appeal to
them in order to make some divisions among the theoretical options available to
us, even if they can enjoy only limited authority at this stage.

9 See Zimmerman (2002).

10 It might be mentioned even at this stage, however, that Zimmerman’s distinction is not always
accepted, at least in the form in which he presents it, even by those who reject moral luck either in
whole or in part: see, for example, Khoury (2018), pp. 1361–3, and Peels (2015).
Another random document with
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can’t receive so many visitors. We are not able to do our Work and
receive so many visitors, and can’t make sovioners to sell like we
once did and people will be expecting us to have them....”
The park, of course, cooperated and helped the sisters until Louisa,
the last, died in 1964.
Increasingly the park recognized the value of the human history of
the Smokies. Out of that recognition came interpretive projects and
exhibits at Cades Cove, Oconaluftee, Sugarlands, and a variety of
other sites which showed and still show the resiliency and the
creativity of the Appalachian mountaineer.
The same mix of problem, potential, and progress has made itself
felt on the Eastern Band of the Cherokees. Their population within
the Qualla Boundary doubled from approximately 2,000 in 1930 to
more than 4,000 forty years later. This increase has only pointed
more urgently to the economic, social, and cultural challenges
confronting the Cherokees.
By 1930, the inhabitants of the Qualla Boundary had reached a kind
of balance between the customs of the past and the demands of the
present. Most families owned 12 or 16 hectares (30 or 40 acres) of
woodland, with a sixth of that cleared and planted in corn, beans, or
potatoes. A log or frame house, a small barn and other outbuildings,
and the animals—a horse, a cow, a few hogs, chickens—rounded
out the Cherokee family’s possessions, which about equalled those
of the neighboring whites. The Eastern Band itself was unified by two
main strands: first, the land tenure system by which the more than
20,230 Qualla hectares (50,000 acres) could be leased, but not sold,
to whites; and second, the lingering social organization of the clan.
Smithsonian Institution
Dances are associated with certain traditional
Cherokee games. Separate groups of women and
lacrosse-like players are about to begin a pre-game
dance in 1888.

Smithsonian Institution
Nine men celebrate a game victory with an Eagle
Dance in 1932.
Charles S. Grossman
Samson Welsh shoots arrows with a blow gun at the
Cherokee Indian Fair in 1936.
These clans, which largely paralleled the five main towns of
Birdtown, Wolftown, Painttown, Yellow Hill, and Big Cove, stabilized
the population into groups and offered, through such methods as the
dance, an outlet for communication and expression. Through the
Friendship dance, for example, young people could meet each other.
The Bugah dance depended upon joking and teasing among
relatives. And the revered Eagle dance celebrated victory in the ball
games between Cherokee communities.
The whirlwind changes of the mid-20th century tipped whatever
balance the Cherokees had gained. The Great Depression, World
War II, and the explosion of tourism and mobility and business
opportunity brought inside the Qualla Boundary both a schedule of
modernization and a table of uncertainty. The dance declined in
importance. Surrounding counties seemed to take better advantage
of the new trends than these natives who had been cast into a
political no-man’s-land.
By the 1950s, the Eastern Band could look forward to a series of
familiar paradoxes: relatively poor education; a wealth of small
tourist enterprise and a dearth of large, stable industry; an
unsurpassed mountain environment and an appalling state of public
health. A 1955 survey of health conditions, for instance, found that
90 percent of 600 homes in seven Cherokee districts had insufficient
water, sewage, and garbage facilities. More than 95 percent of the
housing was substandard. Diseases springing from inadequate
sanitation prevailed.
The situation changed and is still in the process of change. The
Eastern Band could not and cannot allow such oversight, such
undercommittment. The Qualla Boundary Community Action
Program sponsored day-care centers in several Cherokee
communities. In the years surrounding 1960, three industries
manufacturing products from quilts to moccasins located at
Cherokee and began to employ hundreds of men and women on a
continuing, secure basis. A few years later, community action turned
its efforts to the housing problem; as the program drove ahead, 400
homes were either “constructed or significantly improved,” reducing
the percentage of substandard houses to about 50 percent. As for
living facilities, the percentages have been exactly reversed: 90
percent of homes now have septic tanks and safe water.
The Cherokee Boys’ Club, a nonprofit organization incorporated in
1964, has improved the quality of life within the Qualla Boundary.
The club’s self-supporting projects include a complete bus service
for Cherokee schools and garbage collection for the North Carolina
side of the Smokies. Along with the Qualla Civic Center, the Boys’
Club serves a useful socializing function as the modern equivalent to
past dances and rituals.
Perhaps the soundest of the native Cherokee businesses is the
Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual. Since 1947, the Qualla Co-op has
marketed the work of hundreds of Indian craftsmen. Magnificent
carvings of cherry and walnut and baskets of river cane and
honeysuckle preserve the skills and art of the past and symbolize the
performance and the promise of the Eastern Band of the Cherokees.
The Tennessee portion of the Great Smoky Mountains has seen its
share of major accomplishments through imagination and hard work.
One such accomplishment is Gatlinburg’s Arrowmont School of Arts
and Crafts, known as the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School during the
early years of the century.
In 1910, Gatlinburg comprised a half-dozen houses, a couple of
general stores, a church, and scant educational facilities. Perhaps
200 families lived in the upper watershed of the Little Pigeon River,
and these families looked to Gatlinburg for trading, visiting, and
whatever learning they could reasonably expect to receive during
their lifetimes. In that year, the national sorority of Pi Beta Phi
decided to establish a needed educational project somewhere in
rural America; after discussing a possible site with the U.S.
commissioner of education, who suggested Tennessee, and the
state commissioner, who chose Sevier County, and the county
superintendent, who pointed to the isolated community of Gatlinburg,
the group picked this little village in the shadow of the Great Smokies
as the area in which they would work.
On February 20, 1912, Martha Hill, a neatly dressed and determined
young brunette from Nashville, opened school in an abandoned
Baptist church at the junction of Baskins Creek and the Little Pigeon
River. Thirteen suspicious but willing pupils, their ages ranging from
4 to 24, offered themselves for instruction. At first, attendance was
irregular, but by Christmastime, a celebration at the schoolroom drew
a crowd of 300. Miss Hill, herself tired and a bit ill from spending
exhausting hours nursing several sick neighbors, had to be brought
to the party by wagon from a cottage she had leased for $1.50 per
month.
The winter warmed into spring and the one-room school grew into a
settlement school. Workers from Pi Beta Phi organized a sewing
club for girls, a baseball club for boys. Martha Hill gathered some
books together to form the nucleus of a library. Students built barns
and chicken houses on land bought with sorority and community
contributions.
During the next two years, achievements small and large piled upon
each other. The library expanded to almost 2,000 books; school
enrollment swelled to well over 100. Pi Phi sank a second well,
tended a fruit orchard, took the children on their first trip to Maryville.
The people of Gatlinburg began to accept the school both in spirit
and in fact.
Activities branched out into other fields. In the fall of 1920, nurse
Phyllis Higinbotham, an experienced graduate of Johns Hopkins,
converted the old cottage into a hospital. Endowed with both
unswerving dedication and unending friendliness, “Miss Phyllis”
walked and rode from house to house, trained midwives, taught
hygiene, and persuaded doctors from Knoxville and Sevierville to
keep occasional office hours in Gatlinburg. In 1926, after firmly
establishing a model rural health center, Phyllis Higinbotham
became state supervisor of public health nurses for Tennessee.
As time passed, the county and the burgeoning town assumed
greater responsibility for the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School’s crucial
progress in the vital areas of health and education. But the broad-
based school was by no means undermined. Almost as soon as it
had arrived in Gatlinburg, Pi Phi had begun offering adult courses in
home economics, agriculture, weaving, and furniture making. These
courses formed the basis for a true cottage industry which in the late
1920s benefitted more than 100 local families. And when the coming
of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park assured a constant
wave of tourism, the products of folk culture in the Smokies rode the
crest of that wave.
The present-day Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, located upon
a peaceful estate in the heart of commercial Gatlinburg, attests to
the imagination of a generous group, the cooperation of a chosen
community, and the lasting good works of both. Like Qualla, like the
CCC camps, like the park today, and, most of all, like the Walker
place, Arrowmont signifies the profound beauty that can result when
people practice a simple respect for their homeland.
 Handicrafts
Woods and meadows, fields and mines and swamps, every part of
the natural scene yielded some material that could be transformed
into a handcrafted article of usefulness and beauty. From the trees
came richly grained lumber for furniture and musical instruments,
sturdy timber for tools and utensils, and softer wood for whittling
“play-pretties” and purely decorative objects. Wood-working, even
sculpture, became one of the outstanding skills of mountain artisans.
All the crafts involved in textile design and production were part of
the region’s history: weaving and spinning, quilting and braiding and
hooking, making dyes from roots, barks, vegetables, herbs. Baskets
were woven from oak and hickory splits, from river cane, and
honeysuckle vines.
Cherokee and mountaineer alike shared designs and shapes for the
baskets made from different materials for uses ranging from egg-
gathering to household storage.
Laura Thornborough
Alan Rinehart
And, as illustrated by Mrs. Matt Ownby (left) and Mack McCarter
(below), basketmaking was something done by both men and
women. Clay, fashioned on rude, homemade potter’s wheels of the
earlier days, provided pots and pitchers of primitive handsomeness
and daily utility. Broomcorn and sedge offered materials for rough but
effective brooms. Leather crafts arose from the need for harnesses
on mules and horse, and shoes on people. Skinning, treating,
tanning were just the first steps of a long, demanding process of
turning raw hide into usable leather. The use of corn shucks
illustrated with special clarity the mountain person’s inventiveness in
utilizing everything he raised or acquired. Corn shucks could make a
stout chair-bottom or a captivating little mountain doll. Nimble fingers
turned the husks into a dozen different articles. In his Handicrafts of
the Southern Highlands, Allen H. Eaton wrote in 1937: “We must try
to find the qualities of excellence which these people have
developed before insisting that they accept our formula for living,
thinking, and expression.... Better certainly, if we know, as those who
have worked and lived in the Highlands have had a chance to know,
what are the standards and the ideals to which the people cling. But
even that experience should not be necessary for us to understand
and to cherish the spirit of the young highlander who, after
expressing gratitude to the missionary who had come in to help build
a school, said with characteristic mountain frankness, ‘Bring us your
civilization, but leave us our own culture.’”

Alan Rinehart
Claude Huskey and Mack McCarter make chairs at one
of the shops in Gatlinburg in the 1930s.

Edouard E. Exline
John Jones was the miller in the late 1930s at the
Mingus Creek Mill in Oconaluftee.
Charles S. Grossman
Tom and Jerry Hearon, along with John Burns, hew a
log trough with a broad ax and adze.

Charles S. Grossman
With a mallet and ax, Tom and Jerry Hearon split logs
into bolts from which to make shingles.
Charles S. Grossman
Dave Bohanan feeds cane between the rollers as he
makes sorghum molasses.

National Park Service

A Smokies resident builds a flat bed for his sourwood
sled.
 A visit to the cabin of John and Lurena Oliver takes a
family back to yesteryear in Cades Cove.
Fred R. Bell
 Coming Home
Tremont. This Tennessee valley of the Middle Prong of the Little
River does not differ widely from Deep Creek or Greenbrier or Cosby
or most of the other branches and hollows of the Smokies. Each,
including Tremont, penetrates the hills, divides them like a furrow,
and protects its own rocky, racing stream with a matting of thick,
green growth. Nearby Cades Cove and North Carolina’s
Cataloochee might guard a few hectares of lush, hill-cradled pasture
or farmland, but even these are stamped with the clear, cool air and
feel of the Great Smoky Mountains.
So Tremont is representative. And, perhaps because of this, it is a
symbol—a symbol of both the mystery and the clarity of the
mountains which give it a name. There is, for example, the legend of
a small boy who wandered into the backcountry above the “Sinks”
and was lost for two days. Uncle Henry Stinnett, a worried neighbor,
searched in vain for the boy until he dreamed, on the second night,
of a child sleeping near a log on a familiar ridge. Henry Stinnett
renewed the search, and the boy was indeed found asleep “under
the uprooted stump of a tree.”
And side by side with such a strange vision exists its opposite: the
unforeseen. In August of 1947, a young woman was sunbathing on
the boulders of the river. While she enjoyed the rays of the warm sun
downstream, the high upper reaches of the prong were being
flooded by the swollen, flash attacks of a hidden cloudburst. Within
minutes, the woman drowned in a hurtling wall of water.
Yet there is also a clarity here that offsets the unknown. It is a quality
of outlook, a confidence of ability and expectation for the future as
immense as the mountains which inspire it. But it is an awareness
grounded in the facts of history and anecdote and the crisp, fresh
sounds of children’s voices.
“Black Bill” Walker knew about children; he had more than 25
himself. A double first cousin to the father of Little Greenbrier’s
Walker sisters, “Black Bill” or “Big Will” Walker moved into the lonely
valley in 1859. He was only 21 years old then, and his name was
simply William. He was accompanied by his strong 19-year-old wife,
Nancy.
His mother was a Scot, a member of the McGill clan. His father,
Marion, was another of those multitalented frontiersmen: miller,
cattleman, orchardist, bear hunter, saddlebag preacher. William took
up where his parents left off. He became the leader, the ruler of the
community he had started. He was rumored to have been a Mormon,
although denominations mattered little in the wilderness. He and
Nancy raised seven children. Later wives bore him approximately 20
more.
He milled his own corn and built log cabins for each of his families.
He fashioned an immense muzzle-loading rifle, nicknamed it “Old
Death,” and handled it with rare skill. Horace Kephart, in a 1918
magazine article, tells of a conversation he had with the 80-year-old
hunter:
“Black Bill’s rifle was one he made with his own hands in the log
house where I visited him. He rifled it on a wooden machine that was
likewise of his own make, and stocked it with wood cut on his own
land. The piece was of a little more than half-ounce bore, and
weighed 12½ pounds ... the old hunter showed me how he loaded....
“‘My bullets are run small enough so that a naked one will jest slip
down on the powder by its own weight. When I’m in a hurry, I pour in
the powder by guess, wet a bullet in my mouth, and drop it down the
gun. Enough powder sticks to it to keep the ball from falling out if I
shoot downhill. Then I snatch a cap from one o’ these strings, and—
so.’
“The old man went through the motions like a sleight-of-hand
performer. The whole operation of loading took barely ten seconds.”
After Black Bill’s own children had grown, he went to the nearby
town of Maryville and requested and received a school in the valley
for children yet to come. He governed his settlement, yet he was not
merely a governor. He was a remarkable man, an individualist who
also built a community.
After Black Bill’s death in 1919, life in Tremont continued as before.
Families still ate turkey and pheasant, squirrel and venison, sweet
potatoes and the first greenery of spring, onions. Children’s bare feet
remained tough enough to break open chestnut burrs. Mothers
continued to put dried peaches in a jar full of moonshine, let it sit a
day or two, and test their peach brandy with a sip or two. And on
Christmas, fathers and sons “got out and shot their guns” in
celebration.
 Legend has it that Black Bill Walker once went into a
cave after a bear and came out alive—with the hide.
The story is probably true, for he did many things on a
grand scale. He was the patriarch not only of a large
family, but of a community.
National Park Service
Intervals of violence interrupted the daily routine. Farmers with cattle
and sheep freely roaming the ridges sometimes made it hard for
others to grow corn and similar crops. A hunter’s bear and ’coon
dogs might kill some sheep. One “war” ended with a fire on Fodder
Stack Mountain that raced down into Chestnut Flats and killed a
number of sheep. No humans died, but the sheep men killed all the
hunting dogs in the vicinity.
By the early 1920s, change was creeping into the valley. The Little
River Lumber Company persuaded Black Bill’s children to do what
he would not do: sell the timber. From the mid-twenties to the mid-
thirties, more than 1,000 workers lived in the logging town of
Tremont, patronized the Tremont Hotel, and hauled away tens of
thousands of the virgin forest’s giants.
With the Great Smoky Mountains National Park came the CCC. The
Civilian Conservation Corps camp on the old lumber site, together
with a Girl Scout camp that would last until 1959, signaled a retreat
—and a progression—from the extractive industry of the past.
Although the CCC disbanded during World War II, a modern-day
CCC arrived in 1964. The Job Corps combined conservation work,
such as trail maintenance and stream cleaning, with training in vital
skills of roadbuilding, masonry, and the operation of heavy
machinery.
Then, in 1969, Tremont entered a new era. The previous years of
innovation seemed to prepare the secluded valley for a truly fresh
and creative effort in education. The Walkers would have been proud
of what came to be the Environmental Education Center.
The Center draws on both original and time-tested techniques to
teach grade school children basic awareness and respect for the
 natural world around
them. Because its
achievements are
both fundamental
and effective, and
because it treats a
splendid mountain
area as a lasting
and deserving
homeland for plants
and animals and
human beings, the
story of Tremont
culminates this
history of the Great
Smoky Mountains.
For here is one of
the ways the
Smokies can be
best used: as a wild
refuge and a living
laboratory where
young people may
discover the deeper
meaning of the
park’s past and why,
for the future, there
is a park at all.
H. C. Wilburn The Environmental
Education Center,
“It is point blank aggravating, I can’t administered by
walk a log like I used to,” Aden Maryville College
Carver told H. C. Wilburn as he from 1969 through
crossed Bradley Fork in October 1979 and since then
1937 at the age of 91. by Great Smoky
Mountains Natural
History Association, evolved through planning by both the park and