Moral Responsibility and "Moral Luck"

This paper has two purposes. The first (part 1) is to defend a distinctive account of responsibility; the second (part 2), to argue that moral luck, understood as a susceptibility of desert to lucky or unlucky outcomes, does not exist. The strategy will be to show that if responsibility is correctly understood, the phenomena that supposedly require moral luck as part of their explanation are fully explicable without it. The argument will turn upon the proposition that epistemic inquiry is an indissoluble part of responsibility in a world of intellectually and morally fallible persons, and that judgment on the decision making of others not only must, but in principle can, adjust for this fact.