Journal of Philosophical Research

ONLINE FIRST

published on September 15, 2022

Jeff EngelhardtOrcid-ID, Patrick Mayer

Unlucky on Twin Earth

This paper proposes that there is a kind of moral luck that hasn’t been recognized in the philosophical literature: luck in the ‘wide’ contents of one’s concepts. We will treat moral luck as occurring when an agent is morally responsible for X—when X is a matter of luck for that agent. If moral luck is possible and content externalism is true, then there is a heretofore unrecognized kind of moral luck. We call it “conceptual moral luck.” This new kind of moral luck poses significant problems for two major theories of morally responsible agency, Agent-Causal Libertarianism and the Real Self View.