Ethics Matters by Nicholas Rescher

Author:Nicholas Rescher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030520366
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

5 Do People Deserve Luck?

Can someone have deserved or undeserved good luck? Of course. Good luck often comes to the unworthy; ill luck often comes to those who deserve better. But if genuine luck is at issue (with its admixture of real fortuitous chance), then it would always be a mere superstition to contemplate the matter in retributively causal terms—to think that people come by their good or bad luck because they somehow deserve it. Under normal circumstances, what ultimately matters for the moral enterprise is not achievement but endeavor. And it is exactly this that prevents luck from being a crucial factor here. Luck, be it good or ill, generally comes to people uninvited and unmerited. Life is unfair—and luck is, above all, the reason why. The key lesson here is once again Kant’s. We would do well to see luck and fortune as extraneous factors that do not bear on the moral assessment of a person’s character. What actually happens to us in life is generally in substantial measure a product of luck and fate, of “circumstances beyond our control.”

It is crucially important, then, to recognize the role of luck in human affairs—for good and ill alike. For otherwise, one succumbs to the gross fallacy of assimilating people’s character to their actual lot in life. The recognition of luck, more than any other single thing, leads us to appreciate the contingency of human triumphs and disasters. “There but for some stroke of luck go I” is a humbling thought whose contemplation is salutary for us all. One cannot properly appreciate the human realities so long as one labors under the adolescent delusion that people get the fate they deserve. During every century of the existence of our species, this planet has borne witness to a measureless vastness of unmerited human suffering and cruelly unjust maltreatment of people by one another. Only in exceptional circumstances is there any link between the normative issue of the sorts of people we are and the factual issue of how we fare in this world’s course of things. The disconnection of the two factors of fate and desert, which luck so clearly signalizes, is a fact of life, a perhaps tragic but nevertheless characteristic and inescapable feature of the human condition. But from the specifically moral point of view, it is desert that is determinative and fate is ultimately—and mercifully—irrelevant. With respect to responsible rational agents, we do—and must—take the stance that however much their fortune may depend on matters of chance and circumstance, their moral condition is something that lies in their own hands.22

Footnotes

1Some earlier Greek speculations about the impetus of tuchê (chance) on people’s prospects for the good life are treated in Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986).

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