A few days ago I read an article about moral luck (see
the reference below). The authors distinguished several kinds of moral luck,
but in this blog I must ignore that because of lack of space. In order to make
clear what the concept involves I’ll use an example from the article.
An effect corroborated in many studies is the
so-called bystander effect. Suppose you are walking in the street and you see
someone getting a heart-attack. What will you do? If you are the only person
there, you’ll probably help, but the more people are around there, the smaller
the chance is that you’ll come to the person’s aid: “the likelihood of
intervention in emergency situations inversely correlates with the number of
people present in that situation”, as the authors formulate it (p. 367). It
depends on what is happening and how serious the accident is – or whatever it
is –, but if you are the only bystander, the chance that you’ll help is, say,
more than 80%; if there are more people present the chance that you’ll help may
be as low as 10% or less. The bystander effect applies apart from your personal
attitude towards helping in emergency situations in the abstract (so what you
would say you would do when you are not there). In other words, even if you are
morally and maybe also legally required to render assistance to a person and
even if you think you should help, how you really will act generally depends on
the accidental number of people present. So whether you’ll do your moral duty
is dependent on whether you are in luck or whether it is just your luck, so to
speak, whether or not many people are around there on the place of emergency.
That’s why philosophers talk here about “moral luck”. Whether you’ll act in a
moral way as you should do or whether you’ll dodge is determined by the
situation you are in, at least for a big part. Does this mean that we are actually
not responsible for our actions because “the situation made us do what we do”?
Maybe, but I think that in the end a person is responsible for his or her own
actions and that s/he is always accountable for what s/he does, certainly if
there is freedom to act, as in my examples. But that’s a subject for debate for
another blog.
Actually all this has nothing to do with the terrorist
attacks in Paris on Friday the 13th of November, but when I read this article a few days
later, automatically I linked up a connection between what happened to the
victims and the idea of moral luck. For isn’t moral luck a bit like being
somewhere at some time by chance? I mean, someone gets an accident and you
happen to see it: two unrelated events that coincidentally go together. And by
chance nobody else is there, or just a few other people are there, or maybe a
lot. These phenomena unrelated to your walking there happen to go together and
together they make what you’ll do. But one of the factors might be different
and you would behave in a different way: Things happen to you and often you
cannot help. It’s a bit like when we say: he was there at the right time at the
right place (so he could and did help) or just at the wrong time and at the
wrong place.
So it was in Paris in the evening of Friday the 13th
November 2015 as well: Many people who were where the terrorist attacks took
place simply happened to be there but they could have been elsewhere as well.
Coming one minute later; leaving one minute later; just a banal thing as having
gone to the toilet (and whether or not it was in use); that the terrorist would
have come a few minutes or even seconds later, because a car happened to cross
their way; such banal things in life often make whether you are a victim or a
survivor. Being at the wrong time at the wrong place can kill a life; or many. From the point of view of the victims,
of course; for the perpetrators there is no excuse. What happens in your life
can be a matter of good luck and back luck. Often life is on your side, but not
always.
No comments:
Post a Comment