Moral luck & negligent driving
Bicycle advocates in my home state of Washington are arguing for tougher laws against reckless drivers who kill pedestrians. In many ways, these new policy proposals mirror the national trend, as the Department of Transportation held a September summit on the dangers of distracted driving, and states like Utah have dramatically increased the penalties for drivers who cause an accident while texting. Are these stricter laws justified, and how responsible should we hold an individual who makes a reckless and deadly mistake?
One philosophical concept that is especially applicable to this debate is moral luck. Moral luck, first introduced by Bernard Williams, and detailed in a pair of essays by Williams and Thomas Nagel, occurs:
When an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment despite the fact that a significant aspect of what she is assessed for depends on factors beyond her control.
A common example cited by proponents of moral luck involves two careless drivers, A and B. Driver A speeds dangerously through a residential neighborhood and hits and kills a child who had run out into the street. Driver B drives in a similarly reckless manner through the same neighborhood but since no child appeared, he manages to make it home safely. Driver A, is charged with vehicular manslaughter and is assigned a high degree of moral blame, while driver B, at worst, might get a scolding from a neighbor for speeding. Yet there was no difference between the two drivers when it came to factors they could control.
Similar situations occur on the road each day. For every deadly crash caused by a negligence, there are countless other drivers who were texting or putting on makeup and could have just as easily caused the same accident.
So how do we solve the problem that moral luck poses? There is much debate amongst philosophers over whether driver A deserves more moral blame for his behavior than does driver B, but it is important to note there are reasons for punishing a person for a crime that extend beyond “the factors within her control.”
A society in which legal punishments tried to control for all elements of luck would be incredibly disorganized and confusing. Further, philosophers such as Henning Jensen have argued that blaming individuals purely on the basis of the harm they could have caused would subject us to an impossibly burdensome series of constraints. Still, in addressing the problems of negligent driving it is important to be conscious of the role that “luck” plays in accidents.
The next time we read a story in the newspaper about a deadly accident involving negligence, instead of simply condemning the reckless driver, it might be better to reflect on the times we speed through a red light or fiddled excessively with the radio dial instead of keeping our eyes on the road. In terms of public policy, many states are increasing the sentences for drivers who cause fatalities, but it would likely be more effective, and fairer, to focus on creating new and stricter laws against cell phone use and other behaviors that can lead to accidents.
-Luke
Related posts:
- The military makes a non-moral case for responding to climate change
- The Nobel speech as moral argument
- Risky business
- Jurors, cloaked in moral grey
- Moral reorientation?
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