Luck's Mischief ─ Obligation and Blameworthiness on a Thread

Something is subject to luck if it is beyond our control. In this book, Haji shows that luck detrimentally affects both moral obligation and moral responsibility. He argues that factors influencing the way we are, together with considerations that link motivation and ability to perform intentional actions, frequently preclude our being able to do otherwise. Since obligation requires that we can do otherwise, luck compromises the range of what is morally obligatory for us. This result, together with principles that conjoin responsibility and obligation, is then exploited to derive the further skeptical conclusion that behavior for which we are morally responsible is limited as well. Throughout these explorations, Haji makes extensive use of concrete cases to test the limits of how we should understand free will moral responsibility, blameworthiness, determinism, and luck itself.

Ish Haji is professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary. He has research interests in action theory, ethical theory, metaphysics, and philosophical psychology. His publications includeMoral Appraisability (1998), Deontic Morality and Control (2002), Moral Responsibility, Authenticity, andEducation (2008, with S. Cuypers), Freedom and Value (2009), andIncompatibilism's Allure (2009), and Reason's Debt to Freedom (2012).