Moral Luck and the Participant Stance

In “Moral Luck” (ML), Thomas Nagel characterizes moral luck as “a fundamental problem of moral responsibility to which we possess no satisfactory solution” (1979a, p. 25). Nagel explicitly connects his notion of moral luck to Peter Strawson’s discussion of moral responsibility in “Freedom and Resentment” (FR), and Strawson seems later to endorse the connection in Skepticism and Naturalism. Yet, the connection between these two highly influential works is underexplored in the secondary literature. In this paper, I question the purported connection and suggest that the threat of moral luck to Strawsonian approaches to moral responsibility is unclear. I first show that Nagel’s internal–external distinction does not parallel Strawson’s distinction between participant and objective stances. I then use Strawson’s characteristic methodology to show that three of Nagel’s four types of moral luck—constitutive, circumstantial, and antecedent moral luck—do not threaten Strawsonian approaches to moral responsibility.