Luck and Desert

One 'condition of moral judgment' is that matters beyond a person's control cannot bear on what he deserves. For example, to be born in Pakistan cannot make you deserve to fare less well than if you had been born somewhere else. Nor can you deserve credit for winning a lottery through sheer luck, or blame for bleeding when you are cut. Those are all matters beyond your control, and thus beyond your responsibility: a connection so fundamental that Nagel can say 'It seems irrational to take or dispense credit or blame for matters over which a person has no control .... And yet, Nagel also argues, 'If the condition of control is consistently applied, it threatens to undermine most of the moral assessments we find it natural to make.'3 For one thing, says Nagel, we take the consequences of a person's behaviour to bear on just how bad a thing he has done, and thus on how harsh a response he should receive-even though the consequences may be determined by something beyond his control! Consider the driver who roars through a school zone at 70 m.p.h., oblivious to the children darting a few feet from his path. If he is lucky enough to pass through without hitting anyone, he is guilty of reckless driving, and will be criticized accordingly. But what if a child chooses precisely the wrong moment to dash after a ball, and ends up crushed beneath our driver's wheels? Then it will be manslaughter he has committed, a far worse thing to have done, and we will take him to deserve much harsher treatment. What makes the difference, though, is something beyond the driver's control: his luck in what the children do. So here, Nagel would argue, we give luck the very power we deny it can have: the power to make a person deserve harsher or milder treatment. And, says he, we could not stop doing so without abandoning an equally fundamental tenet that those who do more harm deserve harsher treatment than those who do less. Similarly,