Strokes of Luck: A Study in Moral and Political Philosophy

Description

Strokes of Luck offers a large-scale treatment of the role of luck in our judgements about blameworthiness and responsibility, in moral philosophy, and in principles of distributive justice, in political philosophy. It takes an ‘anti-anti-luckist’ stance on these matters, and is opposed to the influential ‘anti-luckist’ views which hold that judgements of blameworthiness, or distributive relations, should be adjusted to annul or neutralize differential luck. It provides a new reading of Bernard Williams’s famous essay ‘Moral Luck’ which emphasizes the dissimilarity of Williams’s aims from the aims of Thomas Nagel and his intellectual descendants. It contends that luck egalitarianism is a structurally flawed programme, and it argues for a revised understanding of John Rawls’s justice as fairness that interprets Rawls’s hostility to factors that are ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’ in a novel way stationed more closely to his contractarian apparatus, and less closely to luck egalitarian concerns. Title_Pages Dedication Preface_and_Acknowledgements Introduction What_Results_from_Resultant_Luck Resultant_Luck_and_the_Irrelevance_Intuition Resultant_Luck_and_the_Fairness_Intuition Restraining_Situational_Luck Gauguins_Lucky_Escape Justice_Luck_and_Pairwise_Comparisons What_is_Arbitrary_about_Moral_Arbitrariness Justice_and_Arbitrary_Boundaries Appendix_I_An_Empirical_Challenge_to_Resultant_Luck Appendix_II_Zimmerman_on_Freedom_Control_and_Luck References Index