Dissolving the Puzzle of Resultant Moral Luck.

Neil Levy (Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, University of Melbourne), Neil Levy (Macquarie University)

Abstract: The puzzle of resultant moral luck arises when we are disposed to think that an agent who caused a harm deserves to be blamed more than an otherwise identical agent who did not. I argue that evolution has disposed us to blame agents to a degree commensurate with their mental states, but also to take the harms they cause as proxies for mental states. When agents cause a harm that is greater than they wanted or desired, these dispositions can conflict. I argue that in these circumstances we ought to discount the disposition to blame generated by perception of the harm, since it is an unreliable proxy for the state it aims to track.