In this video clip, a person playing a video game is interrupted when his phone blares out an amber alert. The person’s unlikely journey can be seen as illustrating the problem of “moral luck,” which is posed to Kantian accounts of agency.
At this point in the arc of an intro to philosophy class, students will have read parts of Kant’s Groundwork and will be familiar with his account of agency and moral responsibility. The only unqualified good, for Kant, is the good will — achieved by autonomously abiding the categorical imperative. As he puts it in the Groundwork, “The good will is good not through what it effects or accomplishes, not through its efficacy for attaining any intended end, but only through its willing” (G Ak 4:394).
For Kant, factors outside one’s control can’t change the moral assessment of an agent autonomously abiding the categorical imperative.
Neither happening to have the adequate constitution nor happening to be in the right circumstances to succeed in bringing about the action’s ends can affect moral assessment — the good will “shines like a jewel” and “has full worth in itself” (ibid).
For the class meeting organized around discussing moral luck, I assign Thomas Nagel’s “Moral Luck.” If it’s the case that we can’t be morally assessed for what is outside our control, then it follows that we can’t really be morally assessed on Kant’s terms at all. That’s because on Nagel’s analysis, “nothing, or almost nothing about what a person does seems to be under [their] control” (Nagel 1979 2). A person’s constitution, circumstance and action-results are domains of over which the person lacks control; yet, people are held to be morally responsible for parts of their actions that are distributed over these domains. Nagel proposes we therefore think of people not as morally responsible, but instead as morally lucky when they are praised, or morally unlucky when they are blamed.
After discussing the general lack of control people have over these three domains, I show the video a couple of times to students. I have them form groups to generate examples of circumstantial, constitutional and resultant luck without which the heroic accomplishments of our protagonist would be impossible. Students point out that the person is constitutively lucky, because he has such a strong disposition to be motivated to act by an amber alert, something we usually receive on our phones in a distant and impersonal way. We usually find it unlikely that there’s anything we can individually do about it, and as a result aren’t motivated to act on the impulse to save the child involved. Students observe that constitutive luck applies to all the other people who happen to find themselves as motivated as the protagonist is. Students also point to the subduing of the Honda Civic driver as an instance of constitutive luck — all the people who end up in the car end up being strong enough to overpower the driver.
With circumstantial luck, students point to the fact that the Honda Civic happens to drive past all the people who ran outside at the same time to find it. A car already in pursuit happens also to show up, there happens to be space in the car to fit everyone pursuing the Honda Civic. From the vantage point of resultant luck, students point out that the pursuing car manages to keep the Civic in view, that they catch up with it, that the car pulls over.
From the point of view of the beginning of the video, if the action is described as one motivated by the moral law, we have a funny case of what Nagel would regard as a reductio ad absurdum of the demands that Kant places on agency. It’s highly unlikely that we would ever succeed if we all ran outside our houses desperately seeking the vehicle described in an amber alert, and students find the video funny because it illuminates what Nagel sometimes cryptically argues in a way that they can immediately understand. Of course, the protagonist doesn’t control his impulse to act in the interests of morality in a case like receiving an amber alert that nobody else possesses — if I ran outside in the way that the protagonist does when an amber alert is issued, people would think I had lost my mind, not heap praise on me and my good will, radiating in its own unconditional worth and shining like a jewel.
Whatever praise the protagonists deserve must also be due to constitutive, circumstantial and resultant luck — factors no person in the video has control over.
And so regarding any person in the video as responsible for something they did seems inappropriate — they are instead severally morally lucky. There are several ways to interpret this video from the vantage point of moral luck what it problematizes, and students seem to have fun with this in-class exercise.
Possible Readings:
Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Allen Wood. Yale University Press, 2002 [1785].
Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
This section of the Blog of APA is designed to share pedagogical approaches to using humorous video clips for teaching philosophy. Humor, when used appropriately, has empirically been shown to correlate with higher retention rates. If you are interested in contributing to this series, please email the Series Editor, William A. B. Parkhurst, at parkhurst1@usf.edu.
Shane Callahan
Shane Callahan is a PhD candidate at the University of South Florida. He works in curricular reform as the ePortfolio coordinator and is part-time faculty at Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado.
