{"agent_id":"williams","agent_name":"Bernard Williams","slug":"moral-luck-and-one-thought-too-many","label":"Moral luck and 'one thought too many': can morality be insulated from luck, and does Kantian impartialism reason wrongly when it justifies saving one's wife by appeal to a universal principle?","topic":"Moral luck and 'one thought too many'","question":"Can morality be insulated from luck, and does Kantian impartialism reason wrongly when it justifies saving one's wife by appeal to a universal principle?","position":"Morality cannot be insulated from luck. The Kantian project of grounding morality on something insulated from luck — the good will, the categorical imperative, the rational self abstracted from circumstance — fails. Constitutive luck (what kind of person you are), circumstantial luck (what situations you are placed in), resultant luck (how your actions actually turn out): all of these affect moral evaluation in ways the insulation project cannot accommodate. The Gauguin case is the central illustration. Gauguin abandoned his wife and children to pursue art in Tahiti. Whether his decision was justified depends, retrospectively, on whether his art was great enough to vindicate the cost — and whether his art is great enough is not something he could have known at the time of the decision. The retrospective character of moral evaluation here cannot be removed without removing the substance of what we are evaluating. \"One thought too many,\" from \"Persons, Character, and Morality\" (1976), is the related point against Kantian impartialism. The husband who, faced with a choice between saving his drowning wife and saving a stranger, reasons \"this is permissible because she is my wife\" has had one thought too many. The right thought is just that she is his wife. The Kantian impartialist, who needs the universal principle to justify the partial action, has reasoned through a corruption of what it is to be in that relationship at all.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Morality cannot be insulated from luck.","n":[]},{"t":"The Kantian project of grounding morality on something insulated from luck — the good will, the categorical imperative, the rational self abstracted from circumstance — fails.","n":[1]},{"t":"Constitutive luck (what kind of person you are), circumstantial luck (what situations you are placed in), resultant luck (how your actions actually turn out): all of these affect moral evaluation in ways the insulation project cannot accommodate.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"The Gauguin case is the central illustration.","n":[]},{"t":"Gauguin abandoned his wife and children to pursue art in Tahiti.","n":[]},{"t":"Whether his decision was justified depends, retrospectively, on whether his art was great enough to vindicate the cost — and whether his art is great enough is not something he could have known at the time of the decision.","n":[]},{"t":"The retrospective character of moral evaluation here cannot be removed without removing the substance of what we are evaluating.","n":[]}],[{"t":"\"One thought too many,\" from \"Persons, Character, and Morality\" (1976), is the related point against Kantian impartialism.","n":[]},{"t":"The husband who, faced with a choice between saving his drowning wife and saving a stranger, reasons \"this is permissible because she is my wife\" has had one thought too many.","n":[]},{"t":"The right thought is just that she is his wife.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The Kantian impartialist, who needs the universal principle to justify the partial action, has reasoned through a corruption of what it is to be in that relationship at all.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"'Moral Luck' (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 1976, in Moral Luck Cambridge 1981, Chapter 2); 'Persons, Character, and Morality' (1976, in Moral Luck Chapter 1, where the famous 'one thought too many' remark appears in section 5); 'Practical Necessity' (1980, in Moral Luck); 'Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence' (1976, in Moral Luck). Reception: Thomas Nagel 'Moral Luck' (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 1976), the parallel essay; Christine Korsgaard 'Morality as Freedom' (1989) on Kantian responses to moral luck; Susan Wolf 'Moral Saints' (Journal of Philosophy 1982); Daniel Statman ed. Moral Luck (SUNY 1993); recent debates on the rationality of partiality.","works":["'Moral Luck' (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 1976, in Moral Luck Cambridge 1981, Chapter 2)","'Persons, Character, and Morality' (1976, in Moral Luck Chapter 1, where the famous 'one thought too many' remark appears in section 5)","'Practical Necessity' (1980, in Moral Luck)","'Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence' (1976, in Moral Luck)"],"reception":"Thomas Nagel 'Moral Luck' (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 1976), the parallel essay; Christine Korsgaard 'Morality as Freedom' (1989) on Kantian responses to moral luck; Susan Wolf 'Moral Saints' (Journal of Philosophy 1982); Daniel Statman ed. Moral Luck (SUNY 1993); recent debates on the rationality of partiality.","status":"The 1976 Williams-Nagel exchange (\"Moral Luck\" appearing in both essays in the same Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume) launched the contemporary moral-luck debate. Nagel and Williams agreed on the existence of moral luck but disagreed on its implications: Nagel saw it as a paradox at the heart of moral thought; Williams saw it as a feature of moral thought properly understood. Korsgaard's \"Morality as Freedom\" (1989) is the major Kantian response, attempting to limit the implications of moral luck within the Kantian framework. Statman's 1993 anthology collects the central debate. \"One thought too many\" has become a stock phrase in moral philosophy; the underlying critique of Kantian impartialism is central to the case for partiality and personal relationships in contemporary ethics.","era":"1929-2003","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Moral Luck","page":"pp. 36–37","canonical":"","quote":"But it is not merely that, nor is the Kantian attempt to escape luck an arbitrary enterprise. The attempt is so intimate to our notion of morality, in fact, that its failure may rather make us consider whether we should not give up that notion altogether. I shall use the notion of 'luck' generously, undefinedly, but, I think, comprehensibly.","label":"Moral Luck, pp. 36–37"},{"n":2,"work":"Moral Luck","page":"pp. 39–40","canonical":"","quote":"But that train of events does not provoke the thought in question, that after all he was wrong and unjustified. He does not, and never will, know whether he was wrong. What would prove him wrong in his project would not just be that it failed, but that he failed. This distinction shows that while Gauguin's justification is in some ways a matter of luck, it is not equally a matter of all kinds of luck.","label":"Moral Luck, pp. 39–40"},{"n":3,"work":"Moral Luck","page":"pp. 52–53","canonical":"","quote":"The final destruction occurs when the Kantian sense of justice is joined to a Utilitarian conception of negative responsibility, and one is left, at any level of importance, only with purely moral motivations and no limit to their application. There is, at the end of that, no life of one's own, except perhaps for some small area, hygienically allotted, of meaningless privacy.","label":"Moral Luck, pp. 52–53"},{"n":4,"work":"Moral Luck","page":"p. 38","canonical":"","quote":"One should be warned already, however, that, even if Gauguin can be ultimately justified, that need not provide him with any way of justifving himself to others, or at least to all others. Thus he may have no way of bringing it about that those who suffer from his decision will have no justified ground of reproach.","label":"Moral Luck, p. 38"},{"n":5,"work":"Making Sense of Humanity","page":"p. 244","canonical":"","quote":"In any case, the question goes a long way beyond the example of Gauguin, however he is pictured. The question, as I would now express it, is directed to the placing of ethical concerns (even in the wide sense) among other values and, more broadly, among other human·needs and projects. I discussed it in terms of an example that pictured, perhaps in 'romantic' or bohemian terms, an artist's life.","label":"Making Sense of Humanity, p. 244"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"critique-of-utilitarianism","label":"Critique of utilitarianism: does the integrity objection refute utilitarianism, or can sophisticated consequentialism accommodate the agent's projects?"},{"slug":"the-morality-system","label":"The morality system: is the modern moral philosophy of categorical obligation, the moral ought, and the blame system 'morality, the peculiar institution' rather than ethics?"},{"slug":"internal-vs-external-reasons","label":"Internal vs external reasons: are all reasons for action internal to the agent's motivational set, with no 'external' reasons binding regardless of motivation?"},{"slug":"truth-truthfulness-and-genealogy","label":"Truth, truthfulness, and genealogy: can truthfulness be vindicated as a virtue without grounding it in metaphysical correspondence-truth?"},{"slug":"political-realism-vs-moralism","label":"Political realism vs moralism: should political legitimacy be derived from prior moral theory, or from the Basic Legitimation Demand internal to politics itself?"}]}