The Moral Irrelevance of Constitutive Luck

Abstract

One’s constitution—whether one is generous or miserly, temperate or intemperate, kind or mean, etc.—is beyond one’s control in significant respects. Yet one’s constitution affects how one acts. And how one acts affects one’s moral standing. The counterintuitive inference—the so-called problem of constitutive moral luck—is that one’s moral standing is, to some significant extent, beyond one’s control. This article grants the premises but resists the inference. It argues that one’s constitution should have no net impact on one’s moral standing. While a bad constitution lowers the chance that one will act morally, it offers significant gains to moral standing should that chance materialize. A good constitution increases one’s chance of performing good acts but for correspondingly more modest gains. This effect should smooth out, and possibly eliminate, the expected impact of constitution on moral standing.

It would be bad if compatibilism were true; therefore, it isn't

“…the “equal moral opportunity” view defended by Swenson, 2022; cf. also Diamintis, 2023. The thought here is the inverse of a point familiar from the project of theodicy: if God wants to create agents who become praiseworthy, the moral facts imply that even God will have to risk that they instead become blameworthy.…”

Circumstantial and constitutive moral luck in Kant's moral philosophy

“…6 6 My claim here assumes that degrees of difficulty, praiseworthiness, and blameworthiness are not so fine‐grained and contrastively counterbalanced as to provide absolute equality of moral opportunity, as Swenson (2022) and Diamantis (forthcoming) argue. For a preliminary defense of this assumption, see Hartman (2019b:3189–3190). …”