Moral Luck And Good Life

“Moral luck” initiated by Bernard Williams is a controversial concept.Starting from “a person how to live”,Williams reflects on the deep relationship between luck and morality by revealing the complexity and diversity of ethical life.The problem of moral luck directly points to the core of ethics,that is,under the limitation of human nature and moral norms,a person how to live a better life or achieve a good life?When traditional moral theory explains the conflict between morality and happiness,it always adopts different ways to shut luck out.For example,Kant’s deontology,in order to protect morality from the influence of luck and maintain the supremacy of morality,even places happiness on the other side of the world,completely cutting off the connection between happiness and morality.Utilitarianism,on the other hand,takes “maximum utility” as the principle.In the process of calculating expected utility,it replaces individual happiness with the happiness of most people to ensure the moral correctness of behavior.Utilitarianism seems to solve the conflict between morality and happiness,but in fact,it completely exposes personal happiness to luck.Although Aristotle acknowledged the existence of luck in his ethics,he did not pay due attention to it.Williams realized that this conflict is more or less related to luck.Any moral theory that ignores the luck factors can not give effective guidance to personal life.Firstly,from the perspective of moral luck,Williams points out that ethical life can not be understood narrowly only from the “moral” aspect by distinguishing the concepts of “morality” and “ethics”.Ethical life refers to a good life that is reasonable,meaningful and worth living for “this person”.This “good” of ethical life is not necessarily related to “good” in the moral sense.Secondly,Williams criticizes the theoretical defects of Kantian ethics and utilitarianism,which are not acceptable moral theories about good life,and uses a sub-Humean internal reason model to demonstrate the ethical reasons.Finally,from the first person perspective,Williams distinguishes moral justification and rational justification,revealing the limitations of traditional moral responsibility and behavior justification.The difference between rational justification and moral justification is mainly to show that in the personal ethical life,rational justification contains the luck,which has ethical significance for the personal good life.Williams’ moral luck theory has great positive significance in methodology of ethics or moral philosophy.No matter from rationalism or emotionalism,the traditional moral philosophy elaborate and construct the theory of morality,ignoring the luck factors.Williams’ research on luck and value is a beneficial attempt to use scientific methods in the field of Ethics: that is,to obtain and test the theory from empirical facts,which is the embodiment of scientific spirit.However,this does not mean that his theory is impeccable.For example,the “internal reason model” lays too much emphasis on psychologism,which not only leads to the moral skepticism,but also makes moral behavior for people to choose at will;as another example,Williams does not clearly define the concepts of morality and rationality,which leads to the fact that the rational justification can not be applied to all value conflict situations,and it is not necessarily able to prove the correctness of immoral values under the influence of luck.From Williams’ two dimensions of “moral luck” and “good life”,this paper analyzes the moral luck problem of biomedical science with the case of child gene editing,investigates the relationship of moral luck and good life and supplements and amends Williams’ internal reason model and the theory of rational justification.We can find that the influence of luck is mainly reflected in the difference of evaluation degree and responsibility scope,and it can not fundamentally affect moral evaluation or moral value.Only in the moral dilemma situation,luck will become a real factor affecting moral evaluation.Although this paper agrees with Williams’ idea that “morality can not be free from luck”,it also admits that we should explore the question about “a person how to live” based on the real life itself.But we should see Williams’ purport of “human limit” from moral luck.Therefore,in ethical practice,we should not only pay attention to the limitations of moral norms in the two dimensions of reality and ought to be,but also not exaggerate the influence of luck on morality,so as to cause some immoral behaviors to violate the ethical norms arbitrarily under the protection of rational justification.In this sense,the significance of morality is not to pursue the maximization of personal welfare,nor to realize the sanctity and sublimity of human beings,but to ensure that people pursue a possible good life and guide people to look at the problem of luck in life with a reasonable attitude.