Strokes of Luck: A Study in Moral and Political Philosophy

294 Pages·2021·1.3 MB·English

by  Gerald Lang

Strokes of Luck

Strokes of Luck
A Study in Moral and Political Philosophy
GERALD LANG
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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-s etting
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-c olleagues, 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-G race Chappell, Pei-L ung
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-c ompressed 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