#moral luck

[forevermorallylucky]

Hey! I'm sure you've been asked this before but what's the meaning behind your username?

So I was thinking about how a lot of morality is an issue of geographical luck. I deeply despise Trump. If I had been born poor in a Midwestern state I might have considered him my best option in my desperation. I deeply despise Putin. But when I talk into the lady that grew up in the Soviet Union without much higher education, and she was specifically born a Russian in Crimea, I can't help but feel that her supporting Putin is not an issue of her being a bad person but a result of her being ''morally unlucky'' Now, of course we do bear individual responsibility over our actions. And I think truly good people will manage to be good and break out of indoctrination even when it is hard. There are also some evil people who suck not bcs they have been raised to suck and bcs their environment forced them to but bcs they are pricks. BUT. BUT. For the average person, the morally ''mediocre'' person, not a hero, not a villain either, whether they end up being moral or not, holding the right opinions and doing the right thing and having what activists often call ''moral clarity'' is unfortunately an issue of geographical luck. And this idk felt very messed up to me??? In a ''oh the world is very unfair'' way. So yeah. The username is kind of a reflection of that ongoing debate with myself.

[importantangeldefendor]

Okay worm and moral luck right?

Like I can't phrase it super coherently but it's interesting how much of the morality in worm and the discussions around it center on like, characters making the right/wrong guess !

i think the biggest example is cauldron who are allowed in the good guy adjacent category because they were right. But what if they weren't ? What if scion WAS a good guy? Then they would have done all that shit for nothing. And be pretty much impossible to defend.

Reverse for saint. What if Saint had been right? He's a bad guy because he's wrong!

It's cool and interesting!

[triadic]

“When you encounter something beautiful … it means your luck has changed, ever so slightly, for the better.” —Timothy J. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty (2020), p. 94.

[urupotter]

Honestly, imagine if Remus Lupin had been sorted into Slytherin? Absolutely the worst house for him. James or Sirius might have avoided the Death Eaters if they had been sorted there (James definitely, Sirius maybe), Remus would definitely become a Death Eater me thinks. He’s social enough to make friends, and would have a desire to do so. While he has a strong conscience, at this age he has extremely little moral courage. He would almost certainly cave to the pressure of his proto Death Eaters friends to join with them, and would rationalize it with the fact that all other werewolves already support Voldemort.

[thehumanfront]

The philosophy of moral luck

The World Health Organization (WHO) is investigating the causal origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, with strong evidence pointing to horseshoe bats. The mode of transmission—direct contact, respiratory, oral-faecal, via pangolins?—remains a mystery. But whatever we determine the answer to be, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan (pictured) is being treated as the epicentre.

Before the market closed in January 2020 customers were able to purchase raw meats and live reptiles amongst wet garbage in poorly ventilated, unsanitary, and cramped conditions. In terms of the grave consequences that followed, it’s not the case that people weren’t warned well in advance about the threat of pandemics to civilization.

So who’s to blame?

Read more here.

[dandydoodlebug]

Moral luck

[studyinglogic]

Telling the truth, moral luck, and being a child of your circumstances

You can’t just expect people to tell you the truth: you have to create an environment where they can tell the truth as well.

This came to me many years ago when I was very unpunctual---the kind of person who was habitually late to everything. I was meeting with a friend who stressed that they had to leave by 12.30 to arrive at a 1.00 appointment. Our meeting stretched on until 12.45---as they left, I apologised that I had made them late.

“Oh, don’t be,” they said. “I anticipated this, so I told you that I needed to end at 12.30 so that we would be done by 12.45.”

That was an eye-opener for me---honesty is important to me, and yet they had no choice but to be dishonest to me in order to get to where they wanted on time. I like people to tell me the truth---but how can I expect people to tell me the truth if I don’t create the right circumstances for them to do so?

Ever since then I have been very aware of the time for these types of things.

I recently read an article about Jakarta sinking due to people digging illegal wells, draining the foundations of the city. If nothing is done within a decade, much of Jakarta will be underwater.

This is a bad thing (to say the least). But it’s understandable why people do that. Many people in Jakarta lack clean water, and this is the only way they can get it.

If we want them to do things legally, we have to create an environment where they can do so.

To halt the sinking, the city needs to stop the digging of wells, which means Jakarta must provide residents with reliable, clean, piped-in water and, to clear the waterways, somehow — at a cost of untold billions — retrofit one of the world’s biggest cities with a sewer system, or something approaching it.

The work Silence is about faith and struggle. My favourite character in Silence (both the novel by Shusaku Endo and the movie directed by Scorsese) is Kichijiro, a weak Christian who keeps denying the faith under persecution. He has a plaintive explanation: he is weak, and he is born in a time when his weakness makes him an apostate. But if he had been born earlier in a time of prosperity, he would have been a good Christian.

‘ . . .Yes, it is true that I trod on the holy image. . . But I have my cause to plead! One who has trod on the sacred image has his say too. Do you think I trampled on it willingly? My feet ached with the pain. God asks me to imitate the strong, even though he made me weak. Isn't this unreasonable?’ . . .

‘Listen to me, father,’ Kichijiro whimpered in a voice that the other Christians could hear. ‘I am an apostate; but if I had died ten years ago I might have gone to paradise as a good Christian, not despised as an apostate. Merely because I live in a time of persecution . . . I am sorry.’

This is the role of moral luck. Kichijiro does wrong, but he is morally unlucky.

I sympathise with Kichijiro - because like him, I am a child of my circumstances. We all are, I think.

[urupotter]

The realization that all that separates a good person from a bad one, a happy one from a sad one, a monster from a saint, is luck, is incredibly important in the development of empathy and is a crucial fact to take into account in any system of ethics one devises.