Collection: Moral Luck

Overview

Moral Luck is a compact collection of essays by Bernard Williams published in 1981 that crystallizes a paradox at the heart of moral thinking: factors beyond an agent's control often shape moral judgment in ways that seem irreconcilable with common ideas about responsibility. The book gathers Williams's sharp, essayistic pieces that range across case studies, thought experiments, and philosophical critique, all aimed at showing how luck intrudes on assessments of praise, blame, and moral worth.
The essays do not offer a single system-building theory. Instead they expose tensions between ordinary moral reactions and the demands of a principled moral theory, pressing readers to confront uncomfortable implications and to appreciate the moral psychology operating behind our judgments.

Central concept: moral luck

Moral luck names the phenomenon whereby identical or similar intentions and choices can yield radically different moral appraisals because of outcomes or circumstances outside the agent's control. Williams emphasized that moral luck forces a choice between two apparently attractive intuitions: that responsibility should depend only on what agents control, and that outcomes and contexts legitimately affect how people are judged.
He distinguishes several ways luck matters without formal taxonomy at the center of the collection: luck in consequences, luck in circumstances, and luck in constitutive features of the person. These variants show how what seems to be a straightforward claim about control collapses when confronted with real-life variation.

Philosophical strategy and examples

Williams favors vivid, concrete examples rather than abstract proofs. He invites readers to imagine parallel lives or split cases that isolate the role of chance: two agents with similar motives and carelessness may be judged very differently if one happens to cause harm. Such contrasts highlight a tension between a morally attractive "control" principle and the intuitive pull of outcome-based appraisal.
Rather than resolving the tension by abandoning common-sense reactions or by positing a new rule, Williams treats the conflict as philosophically revealing. He treats moral luck as an expression of deeper strands in ethical thinking, moral sentiment, evaluative language, and the structure of personal integrity, making the problem both practical and theoretical.

Related themes: character, blame, and moral responsibility

The collection moves the discussion beyond luck per se to examine character and blame. Williams explores how constitutive features, temperament, inclinations, emotional capacities, are themselves products of luck yet figure centrally in moral evaluation. This exploration complicates a neat separation between judgments of action and judgments of character.
Blame and moral responsibility are treated as emotional, social, and normative phenomena. Williams pays attention to how reactive attitudes and everyday practices sustain moral life, while also showing how philosophical rigor unsettles those practices. The result is a nuanced account that resists simple resolutions and preserves the complexity of moral experience.

Style and argumentative stance

Williams writes with aphoristic clarity and a conversational philosophical tone that blends analytic precision with humanistic sensitivity. He often attacks over-confident theoretical moves, especially forms of consequentialism or rule-based systems that ignore the texture of moral psychology, without proposing a tidy alternative. The essays thereby model a kind of philosophical scrutiny that privileges clarity about moral perplexities over system-building.
The arguments are exploratory rather than programmatic. Williams aims to show why certain moral intuitions are serious and what it costs to reject them, inviting ongoing reflection rather than delivering definitive solutions.

Legacy and significance

Moral Luck has become a touchstone in ethics, widely cited and debated across analytic moral philosophy, metaethics, and moral psychology. It revived attention to the interplay between luck and responsibility and influenced subsequent work on reactive attitudes, the ethics of character, and the limits of moral theory. The book endures as a provocative prompt to reconsider how luck, agency, and judgment interlock in moral life.