Kinds of moral luck

M. Herdova and S. Kearns argue, for this and other reasons, that situational moral luck is an especially problematic form of moral luck. Historical views are sometimes motivated by considerations about luck that concern the “formative circumstances” of agents, which in some cases seem to act as exempting conditions. Thus many think that it is best to set causal moral luck aside in order to distinguish the problem of moral luck from the more familiar skeptical worries embodied in the classical problem of free will. One potentially novel form of moral luck has its source in a graded notion of moral responsibility. If there is resultant moral luck, it is natural to think of the difference as a difference in the degree of the agent’s responsibility: although both assassins are blameworthy for something, one is more blameworthy than the other.