Case file
Moral Luck
- Filed under
- Not Enough Meaning
The charge
Moral luck is judging people differently for similar choices because luck changed the eventual outcome.
How it operates
Visible harm dominates moral evaluation even when the level of intent or carelessness was similar.
Logged incidents
- Incident 01
Two engineers skip the same safety check, but only the one whose service fails is condemned.
- Incident 02
Two drivers speed, but only one hits someone.
- Incident 03
Two PMs ship the same risky feature, but only one triggers backlash because of timing.
What to watch for
Ask: How much of my judgment is about what they controlled versus what luck did afterward?
Recommended action
Separate intent, negligence, and outcome in ethics or performance reviews.
Known associates
- Telescoping EffectTelescoping effect is misremembering when past events happened, often pulling distant events closer and…
- Rosy RetrospectionRosy retrospection is remembering past experiences as better than they felt at the time.
- Hindsight BiasHindsight bias is the tendency to feel, after an outcome is known, that it was predictable all along.
- Outcome BiasOutcome bias is judging the quality of a decision mainly by its result instead of by the information and…
- DeclinismDeclinism is seeing the past as better than it was and the future as likely worse than it will be.
- Impact BiasImpact bias is overestimating how intense and how long your future emotional reaction to an event will be.
Source of record