We began to scrape the surface today on a deeper debate regarding how moral and circumstantial luck challenge the philosophy of free will and thus moral responsibility. I thought it would be useful and informative then for us to take a look at how to render consistent the two seemingly opposed concepts. Here is an excerpt form the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"A basic compatibilist strategy is to argue that agents can have control over their actions in the sense required for freedom and/or responsibility even if they do not control the causal determinants of those actions. For example, if one acts with the ability to act in accordance with good reasons (Wolf 1990) or if one acts with “guidance control” which consists in part of acting on a reasons-responsive mechanism for which one has taken responsibility, (Fischer and Ravizza 1998), one can be responsible for one's actions. The key move here is to distinguish between different kinds of factors over which one has no control. If one's actions are caused by factors that one does not control and that prevent one from having or exercizing certain capacities, then one is not responsible. However, if one's actions are caused by factors that one does not control, but that do allow one to have and exercize the relevant capacities, then one can be “in control” of one's actions in the relevant sense, and so responsible for one's actions.
Interestingly, compatibilists are often silent on the question of resultant and circumstantial moral luck, although these forms of luck might represent an underutilized resource for them. For if it turns out that the luck — or lack of control — delivered by determinism is but one source of luck among others, then determinism does not embody a unique obstacle to free will and responsibility, at least when it comes to control. This is to expand the application of a widely used compatibilist strategy to show that when it comes to causal luck, compatibilists are not alone.
For within the free will debate, compatibilists are not alone in accepting the existence of certain types of luck. Many libertarians assume that our actions are caused by prior events (not themselves in our control) in accordance with probabilistic laws of nature (see, for example, Kane 1996, 1999, Nozick 1981). Given this view, it is natural to conclude that if determinism is false, there is at least one kind of luck in what sort of person one decides to be and so in what actions one performs. That is, there is luck in the sense that there is no explanation as to why a person chose to be one way rather than another. At the same time, Kane, for example, denies that there must be luck in the sense that one's choices are flukes or accidents if determinism is false. In Kane's view, what is important is to be free from luck of the second kind. For even if one's action is not determined, it can still be the case that the causes of one's action are one's own efforts and intention. And if one's action is caused by one's own efforts and intentions, then one's action is not lucky in the sense of being a fluke or accident. But while this shows that one's actions can be free of luck of an important kind, it still leaves unaddressed luck of a third kind, namely the kind at issue in the moral luck debate: the dependence of agents' choices on factors beyond their control. And it appears that on the libertarian view in question, our choices are indeed subject to luck of this sort. (See Pereboom (2002) for a discussion of the similar burdens shared by compatibilists and this sort of libertarian.) Only the agent-causal libertarians discussed above offer an account that aims specifically at eliminating a type of moral luck."
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