Philosophy
Outcomes we can’t control still shape guilt, praise, and blame: Williams’s ‘agent-regret’ challenges Kant’s duty-only morality. From Nagel’s antecedent luck to situationist psychology, the Dr Chen case shows how success or failure skews judgement even when intentions match.
Living with What You’ve Done
Resultant luck most directly challenges our everyday moral practices. Williams’s truck driver example forces us to confront how deeply outcome-dependent our moral responses are. The driver who kills someone will likely experience more profound regret, face harsher social judgment and suffer greater legal consequences than his equally reckless but luckier counterpart.
Williams argued that this asymmetry is not a flaw in our moral thinking, but rather reveals something profound about moral life itself. We cannot simply retreat into intentions because moral agents must live with the consequences of their actions in the world.
The driver who kills someone should feel a different kind of regret, not just regret about his choice to drink and drive, but what Williams called “agent-regret” about the death he caused, even if unintended. This puts Williams at odds with Kant. He argues that consequences do matter for moral evaluation.
Furthermore, he insists that there is something special about the relationship between agents and the consequences they personally cause that impersonal calculations cannot capture.
The Deep Problem: Antecedent Luck
Perhaps most troubling is antecedent luck, that is, the formative experiences, cultural conditioning and historical circumstances that shape who we become. Thomas Nagel, building on Williams’s insights, puts this starkly: “The area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point.”
Consider: Your moral intuitions were shaped by your upbringing. Your neurobiology plays a significant role in determining your capacity for empathy. Your cultural and historical context shapes your understanding of right and wrong.
Even your ability to engage in moral reasoning varies with factors such as stress, fatigue, and blood sugar levels. If you trace the causal history of any moral choice far enough back, you find factors entirely beyond the agent’s control!
This doesn’t necessarily lead to moral nihilism, but it does suggest our practices of moral evaluation might need fundamental revision. Nagel suggests that we might need to accept that moral responsibility is an “essentially problematic” concept, one that we cannot do without yet cannot make fully coherent.
Contemporary Psychological Challenges
Modern psychology has made the problem of moral luck even more pressing. The situationist critique in social psychology, from Milgram’s obedience experiments to studies showing that people are more likely to help others when they find a coin in a phone booth, suggests that behaviour depends far more on immediate circumstances than on stable character traits.
In that case, if someone helps a stranger, how much credit do they deserve versus the circumstances that made helping likely? If they fail to help, how much blame is placed on the situational factors that made helping difficult?
A case to consider: Dr Sarah Chen, a brilliant surgeon, makes an unprecedented decision during a complex operation. Deviating from standard procedure to attempt an innovative technique, she believes, might save her patient’s life.
Patient A survives and makes a full recovery; the method becomes a celebrated medical breakthrough. Patient B, in an identical situation a week later, dies on the operating table despite the same innovative approach, same skill level and same intentions. Dr Chen faces a malpractice lawsuit and professional censure for the second case.
Both operations involved identical moral reasoning, identical risk assessment and identical compassion for the patient. Should Dr Chen feel the same about both outcomes?
Should we judge her the same way? If moral worth lies in intention and character, why does the arbitrary success or failure of an untested technique change how ‘we’ and ‘she’ evaluate her actions? What does this say about the relationship between moral judgment and the uncontrollable elements that determine whether our best efforts succeed or fail?
From a Kantian perspective, Dr Chen’s moral worth remains identical in both cases. She acted from the same maxim (save life through best medical judgment), with the same goodwill, following the same categorical duty to preserve human life.
The outcomes: one patient living, one dying; this is morally irrelevant because they depend on factors beyond her control. Her feelings of guilt about Patient B represent a confusion between moral evaluation and causal responsibility. Society’s differential treatment (celebration vs. lawsuit) reflects our flawed tendency to conflate moral worth with consequences.
From Williams’s perspective, Dr Chen should feel differently about the two cases, and this difference reveals something important about moral life. She should experience “agent-regret” about Patient B’s death. Not just regret about her decision to innovate, but regret about the death she caused, even unintentionally.
This agent-regret is appropriate because she must live as the person who killed Patient B, not just as someone who made a reasonable medical decision. The asymmetry in our social responses is not a flaw; it reflects the reality that moral agents are embedded in the world and must take responsibility for the consequences of their choices.
From the psychological/situationist view: Both Dr Chen’s decisions and our judgments of them reveal how much “character” depends on circumstances. Her willingness to innovate might depend on factors such as her energy level, recent successes, hospital culture, and time pressure, not stable moral traits.
Our evaluation of her shifts is based on outcomes, as human moral judgment has evolved to be outcome-sensitive. The same decision in different contexts (pre-lawsuit vs. post-lawsuit) would likely yield different choices, suggesting that moral character itself is more situational than we assume.
Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KiQk-Bm2Wk, Williams explaining his critique of systematic moral theory
Article: https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil1100/Nagel1.pd, Nagel “Moral Luck”- The foundational text that launched the debate.