I have just come across the philosophical concept known as moral luck, which is illustrated by this example from Wikipedia:

Suppose there are two truck drivers, Driver A, and Driver B. They are exactly alike in every single way, drive the same exact car, have the same driving schedule, have the same exact reaction time, and so forth. Let’s say that Driver A is driving down a road, following all legal driving requirements, when suddenly, a child runs out in the middle of the road to retrieve a lost ball. Driver A slams the brakes, swerves, in short, does everything to try to avoid hitting the child — alas, the inertia of the truck is too great, and the distance between the truck and the child is too short. Unfortunately, the child is killed as the result of the collision. Driver B, in the meantime, is following the exact same route, doing all the exact same things, and everything is quite exactly the same –– except for one important distinction. In his scenario, there is no child that appears on the road as if out of nowhere. He gets to his destination safely, and there no accident occurs.

If a bystander were asked to morally evaluate Drivers A and B, there is very good reason to expect him to say that Driver A is due more moral blame than Driver B. After all, his course of action resulted in the death of a child, whereas the course of action taken by Driver B was quite uneventful. However, there are absolutely no differences in the controllable actions performed by Drivers A and B. The only disparity is that in the case of Driver A, an external uncontrollable event occurred, whereas it did not in the case of Driver B. The external uncontrollable event, of course, is the child appearing on the road. In other words, there is no difference at all in what the two of them could have done –– however, one seems clearly more to blame than the other. How does this occur?

This is the problem of moral luck. If we agree that moral responsibility should only be relevant when the agent voluntarily performed or failed to perform some action, we should blame Drivers A and B equally, or praise them equally, as may be the case. At the same time, this seems to be at least intuitively problematic, as — whatever the external circumstances are –– one situation resulted in an unfortunate death, and the other did not.

My reaction: The example only shows that moral luck is an artificial philosophical construct. Specifically, Driver B’s experience is irrelevant because Driver B wasn’t placed in the same circumstances as Driver A. The example avoids the real issues, which are these:

• Did Driver A in fact drive prudently? That isn’t the same thing as “following all legal driving requirements.” Driver A might have passed a breathalyzer test, but perhaps just barely. Or Driver A might have been talking on his cell phone in a jurisdiction that doesn’t forbid doing so while driving. Or Driver A might not have been paying full attention to his surroundings (an undetectable lapse) because he was thinking about where to make his next turn.

• More fundamentally, the example fails to mention the actions of the child and the child’s parents. Was the child of an age to have known better than to dart into the street without looking? Why was the child allowed to play with a ball near the street? Why wasn’t someone keeping an eye on the child? Why hadn’t the child’s parents fenced the front yard and seen to it that the child couldn’t unlatch the gate?

If Driver A drove prudently, no blame can attach to Driver A. The blame, if any, must attach to the child or the child’s parents, an option that the example omits.

Wikipedia continues:

Moral luck entails two extreme outcomes, both of which seem intuitively unacceptable.

If, one hand, we accept moral luck as a real phenomenon and accept it as a valid restriction on personal responsibility (and, consequently, the assign[ment] of moral blame or praise), it is difficult to identify a situation where moral luck does not affect an event or an individual. Many, if not all, of the moral judgments that we engage in daily seem to become problematic, since any single action can be defended as having been affected by moral luck. Constitutive moral luck [pertaining to the personal character of the moral agent] especially highlights this problem –– after all, it is perfectly valid to argue that every single thing that we do relates in some way to our personal character disposition, and is not one hundred percent voluntary. Thus, if we do stick by our requirement of moral responsibility as needing complete volition, we cannot validly morally assess any action performed by an individual. As Nagel himself points out, if moral luck is accepted as a valid premise, the area of individual moral responsibility seems to ““shrink . . . to an extensionless point.”

On the other hand, if we deny the influence of moral luck and refuse to accept that it has anything to do with moral evaluation (as Kant most certainly would, for example), we are left with a single unappealing option: we are responsible for everything that we do, whether voluntarily or not, and for all the consequences, no matter how unforeseen or unlikely, that our actions entail. By this logic, the unlucky Driver A from our earlier example can take no solace in the fact that there was nothing he could have done to prevent the death of the child as the result of the accident –– he deserves the full amount of moral blame that can be assigned for such an outcome.

That is, moral luck either (1) negates personal responsibility or (2) places all responsibility on the individual actor to whom things happen. I reject the first premise because we have free will or must act as if we have it. (See this post.) I reject the second premise because, as I argued above, it fails to account for the freely chosen actions of others.

The concept of moral luck strikes me as useless philosophical casuistry. I’m sorry it came to my attention. I will now try to forget it.

Technorati tag: Philosophy

Compare and contrast:

The terms Introvert and Extrovert…[pertain to] how a person orients and receives…energy. In the extr[o]verted attitude the energy flow is outward, and the preferred focus is on people and things, whereas in the introverted attitude the energy flow is inward, and the preferred focus is on thoughts and ideas. [Emphasis mine.]

In sum, an introvert — compared with an extrovert — is likely to be analytical and deliberate. Unfortunately, the Framers of the Constitution, whose work connotes introversion, were followed by a succession of extroverted office-seekers.

This epitaph:

He knew what he wanted from life; what he wanted was within his reach; he took it and was content.

Sir Ernest Gowers, writing of H.W. Fowler in the preface to the revised edition of Fowler’s masterful and indispensible A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

Roger Kimball at Right Reason asks “Is Altruism an Illusion?” He answers in the negative. Here’s the core of his argument:

One proposition is that we cannot knowingly act except from a desire or interest which is our own. Not only is this true: it is what philosophers call a necessary truth — it could not be otherwise.

The other proposition is that all of our actions are self-interested. But this proposition, far from being self-evidently true, is a scandalous falsehood.

It is a tautology that any interest we have is an interest of our own: whose else could it be? But the objects of our interest are as various as the world is wide. No doubt much of what we do we do from motives of self-interest. But we might also do things for the sake of flag and country; for the love of a good woman; for the love of God; to discover a new country; to benefit a friend; to harm an enemy; to make a fortune; to spend a fortune.

“It is not,” Butler notes, “because we love ourselves that we find delight in such and such objects, but because we have particular affections towards them.”

Indeed, it often happens that in pursuit of some object — through “fancy, inquisitiveness, love, or hatred, any vagrant inclination” — we harm our self-interest. Think of the scientist who ruins his health in single-minded pursuit of the truth about some problem, or a soldier who gives his life for his country.

Those examples simply prove the proposition that Kimball seeks to disprove. Take the scientist who ruins his health in a single-minded pursuit of the truth. That scientist has simply chosen between health and truth, and truth has won out. That is to say, he revealed through his actions that his self-interest was more bound up in the pursuit of truth than in his own health.

All of our actions are self-interested, to the extent that they are taken with a good understanding of their consequences. An action that seems “unselfish” — that is, directed toward the benefit of others — must necessarily arise out of self-interest. It may simply be that the satisfaction gained from, say, a relentless pursuit of truth outweighs the resulting ill-health.

The problem, as I see it, is merely definitional. Altruism is defined as “the quality of unselfish concern for the welfare of others.” (Other sources also invoke “unselfishness.”) A better definition of altruism would go like this:

Altruism is the quality of concern for the welfare of others, as evidenced by action. An altruistic act is intended, necessarily, to satisfy the moral imperatives of the person performing the act, otherwise it would not be performed. The self-interestedness of an act altruism does not, however, detract in the least from the value of such an act to its beneficiary or beneficiaries. By the same token, an act that may not seem to arise from a concern for the welfare of others may nevertheless have as much beneficial effect as a purposely altruistic act.

Adam Smith said it thus:

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can…to direct [his] industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it….[B]y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

…By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

As for “altruistic” scientists, only a few days ago I quoted the great mathematician, G.H. Hardy:

There are many highly respectable motives which may lead men to prosecute research, but three which are much more important than the rest. The first (without which the rest must come to nothing) is intellectual curiosity, desire to know the truth. Then, professional pride, anxiety to be satisfied with one’s performance, the shame that overcomes any self-respecting craftsman when his work is unworthy of his talent. Finally, ambition, desire for reputation, and the position, even the power or the money, which it brings. It may be fine to feel, when you have done your work, that you have added to the happiness or alleviated the sufferings of others, but that will not be why you did it. So if a mathematician, or a chemist, or even a physiologist, were to tell me that the driving force in his work had been the desire to benefit humanity, then I should not believe him (nor should I think any better of him if I did). His dominant motives have been those which I have stated and in which, surely, there is nothing of which any decent man need be ashamed. [A Mathematician’s Apology, 1979 edition, p. 79]

There is no essential difference between altruism, defined properly, and the pursuit of self-interest, even if that pursuit does not “seem” altruistic. In fact, the common belief that there is a difference between altruism and the pursuit of self-interest is one cause of (excuse for) purportedly compassionate but actually destructive government intervention in human affairs.

I ran across an article on “Theories of Multiple Intelligence,” by Grady M. Towers, which was published in the Prometheus Society’s journal, Gift of Fire (Issue No. 33, September 1988). I know little about the measurement of intelligence and the controversies surrounding it. With that disclaimer, here are some bits I find fascinating:

We now know that there are two [kinds of intelligence]: one called fluid g, measured by culture fair tests such as the Raven Progressive Matrices or the LAIT, and another called crystallized g, measured by culture loaded tests like the Concept Mastery Test or the Miller Analogies Test. What we call g has been defined as the ability to “educe relations and correlates,” or in more everyday terms, the abilities for inductive (“relations”) and deductive (“correlates”) reasoning. Culture fair tests measure the ability to educe relations and correlates using abstract diagrams, and other material that requires only a minimum of formal learning. Culture loaded tests measure the ability to educe relations and correlates using learned and over learned material, such as vocabulary, algorithms for arithmetic or multiplication, recognition of common objects and their uses, etc. Ordinary IQ tests measure both kinds of intelligence, but not necessarily to the same degree; they are generally biased in favor of crystallized g.

The currently accepted relationship between these two kinds of ability is called the investment theory of intelligence. It says, in effect, that we are all born with a certain raw ability, or the eduction of relations and correlates, which can be measured with culture fair tests. As we get older, we “invest” this fluid g in certain kinds of judgment skills, such as those involved in doing a mathematical word problem, or parsing a sentence. When we are young, the theory goes, our formal educations are so much alike that we all invest our fluid g in much the same kinds of judgment skills. That means that our fluid intelligence and our crystallized intelligence are so similar at an early age that it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. After we leave school, however, we all begin to invest our fluid g abilities in different things. Measures of fluid g and crystallized g begin to draw apart. Those that invest their fluid g in school-like activities, such as accounting or law, continue to show intellectual growth on conventional (crystallized) IQ tests. Those that put their intelligence to work in other ways, such as becoming ranchers or artists, will not show the same intellectual growth, and may even show a decline in IQ on conventional measures of intelligence….

None of this would matter except that each kind of ability brings with it its own kind of cognitive style, its own kind of personality, and its own set of values. In fact, the contrast between persons gifted with fluid g and those gifted with crystallized g is so sharp that, with a little practice, most people find that they can learn to tell them apart at a glance. Those gifted with fluid g (LAIT) tend to be socially retiring, independent of the good opinion of others, analytical, interested in theoretical and scientific problems, and to dislike rigid systematization and routine. Those gifted primarily with crystallized g (conventional tests) tend to be sociable, quick in reactions, artistic, and to dislike logical and theoretical problems. And then there are those who are equally gifted with both kinds of ability, and tend to be mixtures of all these qualities….

In other words, there are those who can do, those who can teach, and those who can do both. In other-other words, don’t “misunderestimate” the intelligence of people who seem to lack “book smarts” and who talk like “regular people.”