Levy (2016) proposed an evolutionary debunking account of resultant moral luck: humans evolved a mechanism that treats the actual outcomes of actions as a proxy for agents' quality of will, so the outcome-sensitive blame intuitions that generate the puzzle of moral luck are unreliable and should be discarded whenever direct evidence about agents' mental states is available. The account explicitly leaves open, first, whether outcome-driven moral luck judgments are a special case of hindsight bias (outcome knowledge distorting perceived probability and foreseeability, which then feeds judgments about the agent's mind) or a distinct cognitive process; second, whether blame judgments are generated by an encapsulated, early-developing module dissociable from the mechanisms underlying wrongness and permissibility judgments; and third, the normative theory the dissolution requires — what constitutes a culpable mental state and the metric by which luck is controlled for when blame tracks the likely rather than actual consequences of actions. Later empirical work (Kneer & Machery 2019; Kneer & Skoczeń 2023; Nobes & Martin 2022) shows that outcome effects on blame are substantially or fully mediated by hindsight-biased probability assessments feeding negligence ascriptions, which partially answers the hindsight-bias question in favor of Levy's rival explanation. However, no study directly tests his encapsulated-proxy hypothesis or its developmental and neuroscientific implications, and the theory of blame remains unspecified. The open problem is whether outcome-driven blame judgments are a special case of hindsight bias or a distinct encapsulated proxy mechanism, and what theory of blame should replace the outcome-sensitive judgments the account discards.

Background

Resultant moral luck arises when two agents are mentally identical — same beliefs, desires, intentions, and exercised care — but one happens to cause a harm and the other does not, and we are disposed to blame the harmful agent more. The disposition conflicts with the Control Principle, the principle that agents should be morally assessed only for what is under their control; the tension, introduced by Williams (1981) and Nagel (1979), is the puzzle of resultant moral luck. One family of responses is epistemic reductionism: there is no genuine resultant moral luck, only luck in what evidence becomes available to observers, because actual outcomes are (imperfect) evidence about agents' minds; skeptics about the entire moral-luck framework include Enoch and Marmor (2007). Neil Levy (2016) gave the epistemic strategy an evolutionary turn. On the consensus view that human punishment practices evolved to stabilize cooperation, blame should track agents' mental states, since deliberate wrongdoing predicts future defection better than accidents do. Levy hypothesizes that humans possess a mechanism that treats the actual outcomes of actions as a proxy for quality of will — roughly, the regard for morality and for others' moral standing expressed by an agent's beliefs about likely consequences, desires, and intentions, a notion central to McKenna (2012). Because outcomes are an unreliable proxy, the intuitions this mechanism generates should be trumped by direct evidence about mental states whenever both are available; the puzzle of resultant moral luck is thereby both explained and 'dissolved'. Three elements are deliberately left incomplete in the source paper. (1) The relation to hindsight bias, the well-documented distortion by which knowing that an event occurred raises its perceived ex-post probability and foreseeability (Roese & Vohs 2012; the phenomenon itself decomposes into memory distortion, inevitability, and foreseeability components). Levy's proxy mechanism might be a special case of hindsight bias — outcome knowledge distorting perceived foreseeability, which then feeds inferences about the agent's mind — and he explicitly calls for research dissociating these elements. (2) The cognitive architecture: following Cushman (2008), who found that blame and punishment judgments, unlike wrongness and permissibility judgments, are strongly sensitive to causal factors such as outcomes, Levy conjectures that blame judgments are driven by an early-developing, encapsulated process — modular in the sense of being informationally isolated from domain-general reasoning — and predicts, for example, longer reaction times for participants who effortfully override it. This conjecture calls for direct developmental and neuroscientific testing. (3) The normative completion: once outcome-sensitive intuitions are discarded, blame should be commensurate with quality of will assessed through the likely (not actual) consequences of actions, 'controlling for luck' by a metric Levy only sketches in his earlier monograph (Levy 2011), and a full theory of blame specifying what constitutes a culpable mental state is explicitly left as future work. Adjacent empirical results frame these questions: moral-luck asymmetries appear driven more by assessments of agents' beliefs than by outcomes as such (Young, Nichols & Saxe 2010), and lay blame of lucky versus unlucky agents is strongly mediated by perceived intentions and negligence (Lench et al. 2015).

Problem Statement

Levy's (2016) evolutionary debunking account of resultant moral luck leaves a joint research task: establish, empirically, the cognitive mechanism that generates outcome-sensitive blame judgments, and complete, normatively, the theory of blame that replaces the judgments the account discards. The common objective is to determine whether Levy's evolutionary debunking account holds and what completion it requires: the debunking argument succeeds only if it is established that outcome-driven blame arises from an unreliable process, and it is usable only once a replacement theory says what blame should track instead. Concretely: (1) Mechanism. Determine whether outcome-driven moral luck judgments are a special case of hindsight bias — outcome knowledge systematically distorting perceived probability and foreseeability, which then feeds negligence and quality-of-will ascriptions — a distinct encapsulated proxy mechanism (encapsulated in the sense of being informationally isolated from domain-general reasoning) that directly treats outcomes as evidence of agents' quality of will — the regard for morality and for others' moral standing expressed by an agent's beliefs about likely consequences, desires, and intentions — or a hybrid; in particular, determine whether blame judgments are generated by an early-developing, modular process dissociable from the domain-general processes underlying wrongness and permissibility judgments, across both negligence and risk cases and canonical moral-luck cases with stipulated identical mental states, and whether outcome-sensitive judgments are better explained by the debunking account or by the rationalist alternative that they reflect legitimate mental-state assessment. (2) Theory of blame. Specify what constitutes a culpable mental state (the precise nature of quality of will), define the metric by which luck is controlled for when blame is assessed on the likely rather than actual consequences of actions, and derive determinate blame assignments for the canonical cases, including the treatment of negligence versus recklessness. The dissolution stands only if both the mechanism finding and the normative theory are supplied: the hindsight-bias versus distinct-proxy-mechanism question and the encapsulated-module architecture question are separate parts of the mechanism component, and settling the first does not settle the second. No dissociation evidence yet distinguishes the encapsulated-proxy hypothesis from the hindsight-bias reading. A secondary and explicitly separable question left by the source — whether the dissolution extends to other forms of moral luck such as constitutive luck (luck in which mental states and character one comes to have) — is excluded by Levy's own argument that it cannot.

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