Moral luck

Broadly speaking, human beings tend to correlate, at least intuitively, responsibility and voluntary action.

This correlation between responsibility and voluntary action is acceptable to most people on an intuitive level; indeed, this correlation is echoed in American and European law: for this reason, for example, manslaughter, or killing in self-defense carries a significantly different type of legal punishment (i.e., formalized moral blame) than premeditated murder.

But, if in 1929, those people were moved to some other country, away from the coming hostilities by their employers, it is quite possible that they would have led very different lives, and we could not assign the same amount of moral blame to them.

There can be little argument that education, upbringing, genes and other largely uncontrollable influences shape personality to some extent.

Causal moral luck, which equates largely with the problem of free will, is the least-detailed of the varieties that Thomas Nagel describes.

Thomas Nagel has been criticized by Dana Nelkin for including causal moral luck as a separate category, since it appears largely redundant.

It does not cover any cases that are not already included in constitutive and circumstantial luck, and seems to exist only for the purpose of bringing up the problem of free will.

[1] Some philosophers, such as Susan Wolf, have tried to come up with "happy mediums" that strike a balance between rejecting moral luck outright and accepting it wholesale.

Wolf combines these two approaches in trying to reconcile the tensions associated with moral luck by introducing the concept of a virtuous agent.