Moral Luck

This brings up a question which is half ethical, half political. Can we regard as morally satisfactory a community which, by its essential constitution, confines the best things to a few, and requires the majority to be content with the second-best? Plato and Aristotle say yes, and Nietzsche agrees with them. Stoics, Christians, and democrats say n

There are lots of good reasons why murder is usually a really bad thing: you cause distress to the friends and family of the murdered, you cause society to lose a potentially valuable member in which it has already invested a lot of food and education and resources, and you take away the life of a person who had already invested a lot into it. But

no approach, viewed dispassionately, is measurably smarter than any other. The differences in their yearly results stem largely from one factor, one alone. In any given year, some are luckier than others.

So far in this book I’ve painted a portrait of human nature that is somewhat cynical. I’ve argued that Glaucon was right and that we care more about looking good than about truly being good.2 Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. We lie, cheat, and cut ethical corners quite often when we think we can get away with it, and then we use o