Patient Moral Luck

This chapter argues for a fundamentally different kind of moral luck, Patient Moral Luck (PML). Unlike traditional moral luck, PML concerns the amount of moral consideration that different moral patients—that is, creatures (including human beings) with moral status—will be owed, independent of factors in their control. PML, the chapter argues, entails that morality itself appears to sanction and even obligate actions which, along predictable patterns, involve repeatedly failing to equally consider certain moral patients—and repeatedly the same people—over sustained periods of time, through no fault of their own. And often these people will be members of groups who are already worse off through no fault of their own, thus exacerbating unjust inequalities. I defend the existence and normative puzzle of PML by introducing the notion of “moral force”—roughly, the amount of considerative weight for a given moral patient is owed by some deliberating agent or group of agents. It is then argued that this will vary widely between different moral patients through no fault or credit of their own. This, I claim, is inconsistent with the intuition that supports Equal Consideration principles in moral theory. I conclude by considering how we can minimize or mitigate PML without a radically revisionary normative theory.