Are People With The Right Views Lucky?
Ayn Rand, Thomas Nagel, and Cognitive Luck
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Ayn Rand is right:
“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway.” (h/t Doug Clinton)
One problem that arises from Rand’s line of consideration is that the chances are high that all of us are wrong about many things much of the time—and have no way of knowing or correcting it.
If most moral and political questions are ultimately binary, it stands to reason that the average person is wrong about fifty percent of the time. (If moral reasoning doesn’t follow a bell curve pattern, but is instead what Nassim Taleb would call a black swan, the chances are even higher that the average person gets it wrong. A saint or a sage would be 1000x more moral than the median moral reasoner, moral differences being akin to differences in net worth rather than, say, differences in height.)
Moral luck is the philosophical idea that if we judge people by consequence, many good or well meaning people are simply unlucky in what they effect (and some terrible people are lucky in what they effect). Think of it this way: should the responsible person who happens to get in a car accident, killing the other driver be held to greater account than the repeated drunk driver who happens never to have gotten in an accident?
Now apply this same line of reasoning not to the level of action but to cognition.
Jewish law exempts the shoteh, the crazy person, from many divine commandments. Empirically, the shoteh is a rare case. Theoretically, he’s a vanishing point against which jurists can define what it means to have knowledge and intent. Yet from a progressive standpoint, most of us, most of the time, fall into the shoteh category.
The most common application of moral luck is temporal—it was customary for people in the ancient world to accept the morality of slavery. Assuming the absolute immorality of slavery, are the ancients simply morally unlucky for being born into the wrong time? Should we apply the same standard to ourselves? Can a good person be “trapped” in the mind of person with wrong ideals?
On the other hand, if we apply the concept of moral luck across the board, it strips us of all agency.
This is how Thomas Nagel puts it:
The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgment that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgment shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.
Extending the problem of moral luck to cognition means that if when we are right about something we are lucky and when we are wrong about something we are unlucky. The morally correct do not deserve praise anymore than the morally incorrect.
The best response to the problem of moral-cognitive luck is a portfolio response; buy the equivalent of a moral index fund.
Yet this seems like a cop-out. Someone, somewhere must judge.
How can we throw ourselves wholeheartedly into moral judgment knowing we are likely to lose to a computer generated index of moral judgments?
Perhaps this problem underwrites the existentialist conclusion that it is better, in some meta-ethical way, to choose—and be wrong—than not to choose at all.
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