Moral Luck – Interesting Article

Two people drive drunk at night: one kills a pedestrian, one doesn’t. Does the unlucky killer deserve more blame or not?

Found an interesting article in Aeon, in answer to the above question. I am usually not a person who reads long reads (blaming it on short attention span)  but this one was very interesting. It does make one think of our reasoning behind our moral decision.

Just My Luck

• It hardly rains when I carry my BIG umbrella (like I am going to save the whole town from getting wet) with me and when I don’t, that is when it pours.
• When I had long hair, it kept falling and falling until it started to look like a rat’s tail. Now that I have cut it too short, it grows enough to make it look like a birds nest.
• I decide to beat the traffic and start early from home, sacrificing my early morning sleep and guess what, the whole town decides to beat the traffic the very same day.
• When I do  work from home because it is a festival day (not an official holiday though) and to watch all those special programmes on TV, that is when all the channels decide to play all the crappy movies and I end up actually working the whole day.
• When I have a demo (aka demonstration of my product’s features) scheduled (for which I spend around half a day to set it up) to the higher management, that is when the meeting is either cancelled or is hijacked by another team.

Sounds like perfect examples of Murphy’s law isn’t. I guess I should be happy about my once-in-a-while bad luck. At least I don’t have Stark Luck.