Moral Luck, solved?

pic: http://yoavdembak.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/whats-luck-got-to-do-with-it/

I haven't been able to stop thinking about my last philosophy essay and the problem of moral luck, because--with a shameless lack of humility--I think I may of solved it. What is moral luck? In short, there are moral implications for your actions beyond your own control, actions that you justly can't be held responsible for. For example, what if you get into a fight with somebody and accidentally kill him? Or, what if your fight results in him going to the hospital whereupon he discovers a life threatening tumor just before it's to late? Are you responsible for the death? Are you responsible for the saving of a life? Moreover, moral philosophers have been struggling to levy moral responsibility on moral agents given the power of situational, deterministic forces. How do you blame somebody for something they do if they control neither their will nor the moral implications of their actions? That is to say, they control neither the cause nor the moral effect.

This question isn't just academic, it is the question of justice in a world where we try to place blame on people who seem to be nothing but pawns. Who do you blame for prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib, the soldiers or the system? Philip Zimbardo holds that the system (the bad barrel) spoils the soldiers (turns them into bad apples). Some believe the individual is worthy of all the blame. Others, like Zimbardo and others who appreciate the deterministic forces seem to end up without any cause for personal moral responsibility because it becomes unclear what control, if any, the individual had for his or her action. My thesis seeks to preserve personal moral responsibility while accounting for these deterministic forces.

I argue that we ought to diffuse personal responsibility amongst all those that craft the environment, the collective will. Here are some highlights:

The traditional limits of moral culpability—namely, agents are culpable for their actions only to the extent that they had control of those actions—have been challenged by the immense moral implications of moral luck. The crippling of the responsible self by powerful external influences seems to of excused the agent of moral responsibility and challenged the very foundations of ethical theory by leaving immense moral implications unaccounted for. Critics have tried various ways to either soften Nagel’s account of moral luck or evade it entirely in favor of preserving the centrality of morality, but the levying of personal moral responsibility has become increasingly difficult to justify as the influence of external forces on human agency have become more apparent. The central worry here is that traditional morality seems incapable of justly attributing the important moral implications of moral luck to the agent.

To rectify this problem, I believe we need a wholesale transformation of the process of moral assessment. I will insist that the instigator of an action cannot be the sole recipient of moral blame or moral praise. I will argue in favor of a radically different target for the responsibility of moral luck, namely, the collective will. Individual agents are feeble in the face of powerful external forces when making particular moral decisions, but the collective will is such a force that it creates those same conditions conducive to positive or negative moral luck. Therefore, I will argue that the responsibility for moral luck is diffused to the collective will. . .

. . . The incredibly powerful and burdensome situational and systemic forces I have discussed impinge on individual moral agents, but they are actually an embodiment of the will of those same agents. The best way to understand this contradiction is to think of it much like representative government, a system in which the restraint placed on citizens (the rule of law) is constructed and consented to by those same citizens. We are feeble in the face of the powerful situational forces of these environments, but these environments are our creations. These environments are much like the biological restraints that Chomsky found essential to human progression, because the environments will define our moral progression, good or bad. Therefore, we can finally define the collective will as the embodiment of each person’s individual will and moral responsibility in the environments that the collective has created and now operates in. The moral responsibility for the moral luck of the instigator (good or bad) is thus diffused among every human being on Earth (including the instigator himself), proportional to the contribution his or her will had in constructing and/or preserving the environmental forces that influenced the actions of the instigator. The spectrum of responsibility ranges from somewhere above Stanley Milgram’s near total responsibility (but below agent-causation, for no such human agent exists) to the very low responsibility that some random child halfway across the world might have for the moral effect of, say, this paper (this child, even if he didn’t speak English, would still be above absolute zero responsibility, because there is always at least a potential for any human being to influence another human being). . . .

. . . .There remains an important final objection to imputing moral luck to the collective will, namely, collective moral luck. I have shown that the collective will is not subject to the same onerous pressures as the individual will, but the collective will is certainly subject to resultant luck that leads to unintended moral implications. This objection seems quite powerful, because the collective will should presumably be subject to the same test of intention as the individual when it comes to moral responsibility. For example, the collective will might have the intention of creating a prison system that genuinely reforms inmates and creates a positive moral effect, but our understanding of the motivations for crime may be so inadequate that our prison system contributes to criminality. The principle of intention would seem to suggest that the collective couldn’t be held morally responsible for collective moral luck. But where else can we place the responsibility for moral luck if not the collective will? In the case of the instigator, we found that the collective will enfeebled and coerced the instigator by using powerful external pressures that influenced not only his decision making process, but the moral implications of his decisions. Consequently, we imputed the moral luck of the instigator to the collective will (diffusing it to each human being), but the collective moral luck can’t be imputed to anyone, therefore the collective must absorb it. There is no room for further abstraction; the buck stops at the collective will. But this is the strength of the theory, not the weakness. Only the collective will is capable of rectifying negative moral luck, therefore the collective will is precisely where we want to place the challenge of our moral system. This is because members of the collective operate outside of the environmental pressures that impinge on the instigator. The collective will has the capacity, and therefore the moral obligation, to create new systems with new situational forces to rectify the negative moral luck being imputed to it by the actions of the instigators who work within the existing system. To be more precise, the collective moral luck isn’t really luck it all, it is simply the challenge that morality appropriately poses to the collective will. Therefore, morality is best understood as the obligation of the collective will to rectify the negative moral luck imputed to it by individual moral agents. In other words, only as one people can we transcend the weakness of individual human capacities.

When we realize that the atomized conception of humanity that places the entirety of blame on the instigator is the true evasion of individual moral responsibly that needs to be vehemently rejected, when we realize that the actions of our neighbors are influenced by the systems which we ourselves have created and consented to, when we embrace the view that each and every person ought to feel a sense of personal responsibility for the moral progression of humanity, when we allow people outside our immediate situational pressures to propose solutions to our moral problems, and when we realize that the universe is indifferent to our plight and we as one people are the only ones who can overcome the limits of our internal frailties and feeble individual capacities, only then will we have a hope of creating a better world for everybody.