In a 2021 paper in Philosophical Studies, Stefan Riedener proposed a reconciliatory position in the moral luck debate: agents who differ only in luck (one drove recklessly and killed a child, another drove just as recklessly and harmed no one) are equally culpable, yet it is fitting to blame them unequally, because their culpability differs in significance for us — significance being the presence of the facts that ground one's culpability among the facts that constitute one's life. Riedener presented this account as a sketch, and the paper acknowledges that completing it is open work: the endnotes leave the precise form of 'presence' underdetermined (perhaps it is 'multiply realizable in a countable number of key ways' that 'would be possible to detail') and flag incommensurability among sources of significance, while the concluding section records as open how fairness-based reasons for blame proportional to intrinsic culpability should be balanced against significance-based reasons, especially in institutional contexts, and how significance should be built into penal justification and penalty-setting. The one substantial related development is Riedener's own post-2021 work with Adam Lovett, which builds a precise 'contact account' of personal significance in terms of manifestation among the facts constituting a life — functionally a candidate refinement of the presence relation. The problem is open.

Background

The problem of moral luck, introduced by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel in a 1976 exchange, is that factors outside an agent's control appear to affect how much praise and blame are appropriate. The clearest case is resultant luck: two drivers exercise exactly the same recklessness, but only one happens to kill a child. Luck-skeptics hold that blameworthiness must track only what is within the agent's control — paradigmatically the quality of will, the moral character of the intentions and attitudes the action manifests — so the two drivers are equally blameworthy and must be blamed equally; David Enoch and Andrei Marmor gave this fairness-based case its most influential statement, arguing that unequal treatment for outcomes beyond control is unfair in morality as in law. Luck-advocates reply that ordinary practice really does blame such agents very unequally, and that a theory convicting central features of ordinary responsibility practices of irrationality is itself suspect. T. M. Scanlon's Moral Dimensions (2008) suggested a partial reconciliation: the significance of what happened can affect the appropriateness of blame even though it does not affect blameworthiness — but Scanlon left 'significance' unanalyzed. Riedener's 2021 paper 'Don't make a fetish of faults' develops this suggestion into a reconciliatory theory. Its key notions: the reactive attitudes (resentment, indignation, guilt — the emotions by which we hold one another responsible); fittingness (an attitude is fitting when it accurately reflects the evaluative features of its object); and grounding facts (the facts in virtue of which a given fact obtains — for culpability, roughly the agent's willful attitudes and the harms they risk or produce). On Riedener's account, a value-fact such as an agent's culpability is significant for a subject to the extent that its grounding facts are present among the facts that constitute that subject's life: the killer's culpability is grounded partly in the death of someone near to us, and that grounding fact is present in our lives in a way the mere counterfactual death caused by an equally reckless driver is not. Riedener concedes to the skeptics that the agents are equally culpable, but argues it is fitting to blame them unequally, because their culpability is unequally significant for us; indeed, blaming strictly in proportion to culpability regardless of significance manifests a 'fetishism' — caring about the principle of proportionality rather than about the concrete values (victims, relationships, harms) that make culpability matter. He generalizes: any morally sensible responsibility practice involving caring, sanction, or expression must attend to significance. The paper itself, however, describes this as a general sketch and names what remains open.

Problem Statement

The problem is to complete Riedener's significance-based vindication of moral luck: to turn his sketch of significance into a determinate normative theory that can govern responsibility practices, personal and institutional. The outstanding work comprises: (1) a precise, non-metaphorical characterization of the presence relation — the conditions under which the grounding facts of a culpability-fact (or other value-fact) count as present among the facts constituting a subject's life — rich enough to compare degrees of significance across agents and cases, together with a treatment of incommensurability among heterogeneous sources of significance (e.g. facts about an agent's dispositions versus facts about harms to people near the subject) and an account of how the relevant kinds of grounding facts are individuated within different moral theories; (2) balancing principles that specify how fairness-based reasons — which favor blame and sanction proportional to intrinsic culpability, hence equal treatment of the equally culpable — weigh against significance-based reasons, including whether and when fairness should override significance, both in interpersonal reactive attitudes and in institutional and policy contexts; and (3) a theory of how significance should be built into penal justification and penalty-setting. All three are required for a complete answer, and each is open in the source: item (1) is flagged by the paper's own endnotes — which suggest that 'presence' may be 'multiply realizable in a countable number of key ways' that 'would be possible to detail', cite the incommensurability literature, and discuss how rival moral theories may ground the same culpability-fact in different constituents — and by the 2022 companion paper's acknowledgement that the central relation is left at 'a certain intuitive understanding'; items (2) and (3) are recorded as open in the paper's concluding section.

References

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