Level 2 RC 10 — Same choices. Different outcomes. Who should be held responsible?

Consider two drivers, identical in every respect — same blood alcohol level, same speed, same momentary lapse in attention as they reach for a dropped phone. One drives through an empty intersection and arrives home unharmed, having broken no law that anyone noticed. The other, at the same moment of inattention, strikes and kills a child who happens to step into the street. We judge the second driver as a killer, deserving of years in prison; we judge the first as merely careless, deserving perhaps of a fine. Yet the two drivers made identical choices, exercised identical care, and differed only in a matter — whether a child happened to be crossing the street at that instant — entirely outside either driver's control. Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams, writing independently in the late 1970s, called this asymmetry moral luck: the phenomenon whereby factors beyond an agent's control are permitted to determine the moral judgment we pass on that agent, even though our ordinary theory of morality insists that only what is within a person's control should count.

This ordinary theory has a name: the control principle. It holds that a person cannot be more or less morally responsible for anything due to factors not under that person's control. The principle is not a fringe philosophical preference; it underwrites basic intuitions about fairness that most legal and moral systems claim to honour — we do not, in general, think it fair to punish someone for an outcome they could not have foreseen or prevented. And yet moral luck appears to be everywhere once one begins looking for it. There is resultant luck, as in the drivers, where the outcome of an action depends on chance. There is circumstantial luck, where the situations one happens to be placed in determine whether one's character is tested at all — a person raised in peacetime may never discover whether they would have collaborated with an occupying regime, while their otherwise identical counterpart, born a few years earlier in a different country, is forced to find out. There is even constitutive luck, the deepest and least escapable form, covering the temperament, capacities, and inclinations one is simply born with and did not choose.

Philosophers confronted with this puzzle have tended to split into three camps rather than converge on a single resolution. The first camp, control-principle purists, holds that the principle is correct and that our ordinary practice of judging the drivers differently is simply an error we should discipline ourselves out of — a bias to be corrected once exposed, not a datum to be respected. The second camp, led by Williams himself, argues the reverse: that the persistence and depth of our differential judgments across every culture and legal tradition is itself evidence that the control principle, however intuitively appealing in the abstract, is not actually the principle that governs our moral life, and that philosophy should revise the principle to fit the practice rather than revise the practice to fit the principle. A third camp attempts a compromise, distinguishing between an agent's blameworthiness, which they concede should track only what was within the agent's control, and the appropriateness of certain reactive emotions — guilt, regret, indignation — which they argue can legitimately track outcomes even when blameworthiness does not, on the grounds that emotional responses and moral verdicts are not obliged to move in lockstep.

The dispute is not merely academic. Sentencing guidelines in most jurisdictions distinguish sharply between attempted and completed crimes, and between reckless conduct that causes harm and identical conduct that does not — a practice the control-principle purists regard as a legal system built on a philosophical mistake, codifying moral luck rather than eliminating it. Defenders of existing practice respond that a legal system answerable to a purist reading of the control principle would have to punish every reckless driver as though each had killed someone, since only the reckless act itself was within the driver's control — a conclusion that strikes most people, including many philosophers otherwise sympathetic to the purist position, as its own kind of absurdity. The disagreement, in other words, has not stayed confined to seminar rooms; it sits underneath one of the more consequential and least examined design choices in criminal law.

Q1. All of the following inferences are supported by the passage EXCEPT that:

A) The passage suggests that constitutive luck is, in the terms the passage sets out, harder for an agent to escape or avoid than resultant luck.

B) The passage indicates that all three philosophical camps discussed agree the control principle should be abandoned entirely as a description of moral life.

C) The passage implies that existing legal practice around sentencing already reflects a form of moral luck rather than eliminating it.

D) The passage suggests that a purist application of the control principle to sentencing would treat the reckless driver who kills and the reckless driver who does not identically.

Q2. The passage's third camp distinguishes blameworthiness from the appropriateness of reactive emotions. Which one of the assumptions below is most necessary for that distinction to do the work the camp wants it to do?

A) Blameworthiness and reactive emotions such as guilt or regret are, as a conceptual matter, capable of coming apart, such that one can be appropriate without the other necessarily being so.

B) Reactive emotions such as guilt and regret are experienced with identical intensity by all agents regardless of the outcome of their actions or the circumstances in which those actions occurred.

C) Legal systems across all jurisdictions already formally recognise and codify the distinction between blameworthiness and reactive emotion in their sentencing statutes.

D) The control principle is false as applied to blameworthiness but true without qualification as applied to every other morally relevant category philosophers have proposed.

Q3. Which one of the options below best summarises the passage?

A) The passage argues that moral luck is a myth invented by legal theorists to excuse inconsistent sentencing, and that a rigorous application of the control principle would resolve the inconsistency without remainder.

B) The passage introduces the puzzle of moral luck through a case, explains the control principle it appears to violate, surveys three competing philosophical responses, and shows the dispute's stakes for how criminal law actually punishes outcomes.

C) The passage concludes that constitutive luck is the only genuine form of moral luck, since resultant and circumstantial luck can always be traced back to choices the agent did, in some sense, control.

D) The passage argues that Williams and Nagel's account of moral luck has been fully superseded by the compromise position and that the control-principle purists no longer have a live position in the debate.

Q4. Which one of the following observations would most strengthen Williams's position, as described in the passage, that the control principle should be revised rather than the practice of differential judgment?

A) A cross-cultural survey finds that legal and moral systems with no historical contact independently converge on punishing completed harmful outcomes more severely than identical but harmless conduct, despite explicit philosophical education in the control principle.

B) A philosophical treatise demonstrates, through formal logical proof, that the control principle is internally consistent and free of contradiction when applied strictly to hypothetical cases.

C) A legal historian shows that sentencing guidelines distinguishing attempted from completed crimes were introduced only recently, replacing older systems that punished intent alone regardless of outcome.

D) A psychological study finds that when experimental subjects are explicitly taught the control principle and asked to judge the two drivers in the abstract, they endorse identical culpability for both — but when shown a video of the actual outcome, the same subjects immediately revert to judging the driver who caused the death more harshly, and this reversion persists even after repeated retesting.