Moral Luck

Today, I stayed home and studied for my Statistics Final. It was fairly boring, and I didn't accomplish much. Among the list of things I didn't accomplish today is today's Light the World challenge, teach others. Apart from some unimportant movie trivia, I don't think I taught anyone anything today. I am 10 for 12.

But I did learn something interesting, though. As part of my not-accomplishing-much, I watched a video about Moral Luck. Let me teach you about it. Let's suppose that two people both go to the same party and get drunk. They each drive home separately while intoxicated. One of them accidentally hits someone and kills them. The other person luckily gets home without incident. Now, considering that they both made the same decisions, but also that one of them caused someone's death and the other one didn't, do you think that one of them is more worthy of blame than the other, or do you think they're both equally blameworthy? If you decide that the person who caused the death of another is more blameworthy than the person who got home without causing harm, the latter can be said to have been morally lucky.

I have gotten morally lucky over the course of this month. There have been a few days so far where I haven't even tried to meet the Light the World challenge, but I succeeded anyway because that day's challenge was to do something I was already doing.

Today, however, I got morally unlucky. As a writing tutor, I teach college students how to write better essays. I literally spend a few hours teaching people each school day. On a normal Monday, I would have succeeded at today's challenge without even breaking from my normal schedule. But today was the first day of Finals Week. My last day of work for this semester was last Thursday. Ergo, I didn't teach anyone about anything today. It was just bad luck.

Yet, I don't think God takes "moral luck" into account. I don't think God would consider either of the two drunk drivers any more or less evil because they either got unlucky and hit someone or got lucky and didn't. I think He cares more about our intentions, desires, and actions, than He cares about the outcomes of our actions. My guess is that God would consider both of the drunk drivers equally wrong for having made the decision to drive drunk. But that's just my opinion.

I also think that moral luck eventually balances out anyway. Some days, we get lucky; some days we get unlucky. Over the years, we have enough lucky and unlucky days to balance each other out, making luck a non-factor, even if God did hold people accountable for the luck they either did or didn't have.

Today didn't work out for me so well. Other days did. In the end, God will look at the big picture, factor out the "moral luck," and judge us based on principles of justice and mercy, not random chance.