Moral luck
We judge people for outcomes that were partly beyond their control.
What it means
Moral luck describes the phenomenon whereby a person is held morally responsible for actions or outcomes that depended significantly on factors outside their control. Although intuition says blame should track only what an agent freely controls, in practice we judge two people who acted identically very differently when chance hands one a worse outcome. Philosophers distinguish resultant luck (how things turn out), circumstantial luck (the situations one faces), and constitutive luck (the character one happens to have). Empirically, this maps onto the outcome bias: identical decisions are praised or condemned according to results. It raises deep problems for theories of responsibility and powerfully shapes legal punishment, blame, and self-judgment.
Examples
Two equally drunk drivers run the same red light; one hits a pedestrian who happened to step out, the other does not, and only the first is charged with manslaughter.
Two managers sign off the same risky launch on the same evidence. The one whose product happens to sell is called visionary; the other is called reckless.
Leaving a toddler alone in the bath for two minutes counts as negligence only if something happens in those two minutes. The same two minutes pass unremarked in a thousand homes.
First described in Bernard Williams & Thomas Nagel (1976).