Preston Werner: "Patient Moral Luck"

Preston Werner, Hebrew University of Jerusalem: "Patient Moral Luck"

Abstract
As Bernard Williams (1976) first pointed out, our assessment of agents’ moral character can come apart from aspects of their actions that are in their control. Moral luck continues to be widely discussed today. In this paper, I argue for a fundamentally different kind of moral luck, Patient Moral Luck (PML). Unlike traditional moral luck, PML concerns the amount of moral consideration that different moral patients will be owed, independent of factors in their control. PML, I argue, entails that morality itself appears to sanction and even obligate actions which, along predictable patterns, will make certain groups of people worse off, through no fault of their own. And often these people will be members of groups who are already worse off through no fault of their own, thus exacerbating unjust inequalities. In this paper, I introduce and elaborate on PML and the normative puzzles that surround it. I then consider some of the ways that normative theories could try to accommodate PML. Aside from introducing the notion of PML, the core aim of this paper is that normative theories must either accommodate - or explain away - Patient Moral Luck. I conclude by considering a few ways that they might do this.