Moral Luck

TL;DR

This book chapter applies the philosophical literature on moral luck—Nagel's and Williams's three categories plus Kvalnes's own addition of relational moral luck—to organizational decisions about whether to grant someone a second chance after an ethical misstep. It argues that distinguishing internal from external causes of wrongdoing, and how the wrongdoer themselves draws that distinction, is central to second-chance judgments.

Key findings

• Four categories of moral luck are proposed as lenses for second-chance decisions: constitutive (character-shaping nature/nurture), situational (which moral tests one faces or avoids), resultant (how outcomes beyond one's control affect praise/blame), and relational moral luck—the author's own earlier addition (Kvalnes, 2019, p. 35)—which focuses on who was present to provide "ethical friction" during a decision.
• People tend to judge identical recklessness differently by outcome: two drunk drivers expose others to the same risk, but the one who kills a pedestrian receives far more blame than the one who gets home safely; similarly, a successful rescue is praised more than an equally brave failed one (Nagel, p. 203).
• One cited study finds that the influence of resultant moral luck decreases with reflection (Kneer & Machery, 2019), suggesting that given time to think, people differentiate less between harmful and harmless reckless drivers.
• Appeals to bad moral luck can explain misconduct without justifying it: the dental health researcher who fabricated data and invented patients attributed his fraud to bipolarity (constitutive luck) and to fierce competition for funding and top journals (situational luck); he was barred from research and later denied a second chance. In the Volkswagen diesel case, at least 50 engineers, technicians, and managers were reported to have known about the cheating (Mansouri, 2016), despite the company's prize-winning compliance practices.
• Attribution theory frames the analysis: the fundamental attribution error (overestimating dispositions, underestimating situations; Ross, 1977) and actor–observer bias (attributing one's own behavior to situations and others' to dispositions) both distort accounts of misconduct. Icelandic bankers convicted after the 2008 collapse denied wrongdoing and blamed unfortunate circumstances; reluctance to grant them second chances hinged on that denial.

Methods

Conceptual/philosophical book chapter, not an empirical study; it synthesizes Nagel (1979), Williams (1981), and attribution theory (Ross, 1977; Kelley & Michela, 1980; Weiner, 1985) into a framework for second-chance decisions. Illustrative cases are used rather than systematic data: the dental health researcher, Accenture's 2025 withdrawal from its DEI strategy under US federal pressure (with Transport for London ending ties in response), the Icelandic banking crisis, Volkswagen's emissions cheating, and a Norwegian seafood representative who accepted a foreign client's hospitality in breach of his company's code. No sample, dataset, or statistical analysis is reported.

Limitations

The chapter states no formal limitations. Evident from the text: it is a single-author conceptual piece whose cases are illustrative and drawn largely from media and secondary sources (e.g., Darley, 2025; Mansouri, 2016), so no systematic evidence is offered that the four-category framework improves actual second-chance decisions; the empirical claim that reflection reduces resultant moral luck rests on a single cited study (Kneer & Machery, 2019); and several examples (the hospitality case, the Icelandic crisis, reparation and trust) are deferred to later chapters, so the treatment here is partial.