fonyo

I’ve been thinking about luck recently, especially that species of chance that philosophers call “moral luck”. This is the idea that praise or blame, success or failure, are due to circumstances over which the agent does not have complete control. In the most influential essay on the subject, Thomas Nagel identified three main types of moral luck: resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive (there’s a fourth, but it just causes problems so I’ll ignore it). Resultant luck is the one we’re most familiar with — I run a red light and nothing happens, you run one and take out a family of four. Circumstantial luck refers to the way our moral outcomes are shaped by the broader events and situations in which we find ourselves embedded — that’s what I’ve been getting at with my little pieces on Sidney Crosby recently.