The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck

230 Pages·1996·14.431 MB·English

by  Claudia Card

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CHARACTER AND MORAL LUCK
CLAUDIA CAID
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122
Copyright © 1996 by Temple University.
All rights reserved
Published 1996
Printed in the United States of America
@ The paper used in this book meets the requiremen ts of the
American National Standard for Information
Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1984
Text design by William Boehm
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Card, Claudia.
The unnatural lottery : character and moral luck / Claudia Card.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56639-452-X (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 1-56639-453-8
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Character. 2. Fortune. 3. Feminist theory. 4. Philosophy.
I. Title.
BJ1531.028 1996
170 - dc20 96-1316
To the memory of my father; Walter Munro Card (1911-1973),
and the futures of my nephews,
Jason Date Card
Ryan Kazuo Card
Matthew Miller Card
and
Eric Douglas Card

c
o n e n s
Preface ix
One Lifting Veils of Ignorance 1
Two Responsibility and Moral Luck 21
Th ree Women's Voices and Female Character 49
Four Caring, Justice, and Evils 72
Fi v e Rape Terrorism 97
Six Gratitude and Obligation 118
S eve n What Lesbians Do 140
E i g h t Race Consciousness 163
Notes 183
Index 207
I
I
p r e f a c e
uch of the luck with which this book is occupied
attaches to politically disadvantageous starting
points or early positionings in life. Moral luck is
luck that impacts either on character develop
ment or on one's ability to do morally good or
right things in particular contexts. The positionings that interest me
for their impact on moral character also interested Nietzsche in his
genealogy of morality. His hypotheses were that deep-seated or perva
sive bad luck produces ressentiment, a hateful, destructive envy of those
better off, and that this attitude lies at the root of our concepts of moral
goodness and evil. I Yet his evaluation of ressentiment was mixed, if not
ambivalent. For he saw that it could also make us clever and that clever
ness can be empowering.
On my view early bad luck is influential in developing many kinds of
character, not just the kind that bothered Nietzsche, and I do not find
hatred and envy at the root of moral concepts. The same external con
ditions can impact us differently as they combine with other variables,
including our often arbitrary choices. My working hypothesis is that,
ethically, there are many ways of being good and many kinds of charac
ter displaying different strengths and weaknesses. Yet I do not try to
prove this abstractly. It is a hypothesis that guides my inquiries, which, if
successful, may then support it. Although the hypothesis sounds em
pirical, it involves a response to the philosophical question whether
"virtue is one," whether ethical goodness is the same in all of us. My
view is not that certain virtues are more appropriate to certain people but
that different combinations of circumstances in fact provide oppor
tunities for, stimulate, nurture, or discourage the development of dif
ferent virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses of character.
More than two decades ago something that interested me in the
topic of mercy, on which I published my first essay, was that its best
rationales seemed to involve an appreciation of the fact that "there but
for the grace of God go I" - in effect, an appreciation of moral luck
(although the term had not been coined).2 During the same period I
published another essay defending a retributive view ofliability to pun-