The Case against Moral Luck. Reconstruction and Reply

Abstract

After a detailed reconstruction of the global case against moral luck in all its kinds, which distinguishes two main argumentative strategies, the moderate strategy and the radical strategy; a twofold counter-argument is presented. It is argued that (i) whereas the former turns out to be insufficient, (ii) the latter becomes impractical and eventually incoherent. The fundamental aim is to show that a final argument against moral luck necessarily depends on the impossible notion of unconditional desert —or true desert understood, in a especially strong sense, as the strict function of (or strictly proportional to) the agent’s control.