Moral Luck

In Class we learned that Kant believed that good or bad luck should influence neither our moral judgment of a person and their actions. Moral luck is whether an individual should be acknowledged or punished due to external conditions outside of their control. We have no control over situations at all when moral luck comes into play. The concept of moral luck is that should one be accountable for their actions due to things beyond ones control or surroundings. If an action is right or wrong can the failed action or successful action be considered good or bad. 

 I really can't really illustrate it with an example from your own life, but I'll use examples from class where Rex was talking about is it right and justifiable that luck makes a difference in our moral and legal judgments? The difference between murder and attempted murder can merely be the luck of the situation.Like the skill of the murderer and other factors that seem to be morally irrelevant, but  the two actions are viewed quite differently by some people. Ethically and legally, as evidenced by the court system punishing murder and attempted murder to a vastly different extent. Another example of moral and legal  disparity between accidentally killing a pedestrian while driving drunk, and narrowly avoiding a pedestrian while driving drunk. In either example, what justifies us in assessing and punishing those who are unlucky far more severely than those who are lucky. The problem of moral luck is we seem to be committed to the general principle that we are morally assessable only to the extent that what we are assessed for depends on factors under our control.

I think moral luck is a serious ethical problem because some people are born into it, live within, and experience circumstances that occur and seem to change their morality when all other factors remain the same.For example, a poor man is born into a poor family and  has no other way to feed himself or his family so he steals food from  another person. Who was born into a very wealthy family, it does very little to them, because they have enough food and does not need to steal to get it.So should the poor person be more moral and blame the rich person for being born wealthy and he wasn't ? It just goes to show that it is not his fault that he was born into such poor circumstances, but a matter of luck.