Moral Status, Luck, and Modal Capacities: Debating Shelly Kagan

SHELLY KAGAN Does

Moral Luck

The good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes or because of its adequacy to achieve some proposed end; it is good only because of its willing, i.e., it is good of itself And, regarded for itself, it is to be esteemed incomparably higher than anything which could be brought about by it in favor of any inclination or even of the sum total of all inclinations. Even if it sho...

The Moral of Moral Luck

A problem for moral luck

The present paper poses a new problem for moral luck. Defenders of moral luck uncritically rely on a broader theory of luck known as the control theory or the lack of control theory. However, there are are two other analyses of luck in the literature that dominate discussion in epistemology, namely the probability and modal theories. However, moral luck is nonexistent under the probability and ...

The Modal Account of Luck

This paper offers a rearticulation and defence of the modal account of luck that I developed in earlier work (e.g., Pritchard 2005). In particular, the proposal is situated within a certain methodology, a component of which is paying due attention to the cognitive science literature on luck (and risk) ascriptions. It is shown that with the modal account of luck properly articulated it can adequ...