Nagel states that one is often judged based on the outcome of one's actions rather than just the intent. Let's say that there are two men who are about to commit murder. One man shoots his victim in the heart and successfully commits murder. The other man shoots at his victim's heart, but right as the bullet is about to strike, a bird flies in the way and takes the bullet. The first man is charged with murder, whereas the second man is only charged with attempted murder.
On this account, I believe that moral luck should fail to be a factor in a moral assessment. Both men had the same intent, and therefore had the same fundamentally bad moral character. I think this holds true in a less obvious case as well. Suppose there are two drunk drivers driving home. One makes it home safely. The other hits a child who runs into the street. The first man might get reprimanded by his friends, whereas the second man is charged with manslaughter. While the results were very different, both men should be morally assessed the same way. Regardless of the end result, both men were careless enough to put themselves and others in danger by driving drunk. Both, therefore, have the same sort of moral character that would allow them to be so reckless. The second kind of moral luck that Nagel discusses is circumstantial luck. This is when factors out of one's control put the person in different circumstances that somehow affect the moral assessment of that person. For example, suppose there is a man in Germany before World War II starts. He has to move to Argentina for business, and therefore is out of the country for the duration of the war. However, without the circumstantial luck of moving to Argentina, he would have been a Nazi officer who committed horrible war atrocities. He is never morally judged as a monster because the opportunity never presented itself for him to become one.
I do not think that circumstantial moral luck should be taken into account while morally judging a person.
