Luck, Moral Guilt, and Legal Guilt The question of whether luck should play a role in our evaluation of other people is fundamental to human society. Our judicial laws express the view that we are responsible for our actions: in other words, luck has an impact on the determination of legal culpability; since legal guilt is theoretically based on moral guilt, this means that luck is usually thought to impact moral guilt as well. However, there are serious difficulties with this judging system. Indeed, I believe it is neither advantageous nor logically plausible to subscribe to either side of this debate: simply admitting one extreme (e.g., that luck should never be taken into account when evaluating others, or vice versa) creates automatically a multitude of problems. . If we consider luck when evaluating someone's moral character, we open ourselves up to the very real possibility of punishing two people differently for the exact same action or intention, which is inconsistent with our notion of justice. However, if we decide that luck should not be a factor, we are in effect embracing the idea that we are not responsible for our actions, and if so, punishment would be pointless; without legal guilt and punishment, however, society would be chaotic, which once again attacks our notion of justice. We will see that this problem is closely linked to the more general idea of ​​free will versus determinism, which in itself is a fundamentally disturbing problem. As long as the free will debate remains inconclusive, as most people believe it to be, the moral luck debate will also remain unresolved. To examine this issue, it's helpful to start with a specific example: Let's consider a person who happens to…middle of paper…leads to chaos. However, accounting for luck fails to punish those who are immoral but have good luck, while it only punishes those who have bad luck. I believe that a satisfactory answer to this question is impossible because, as I have stated before, the question of moral guilt in relation to luck relies heavily on the idea of ​​free will as opposed to determinism, a fundamentally problematic issue. Without a clear way to decide the question between free will and determinism, it is equally unclear how we should decide the question of moral blame. Should luck play a role in evaluating a person's character? As I stated at the beginning of this discussion, I believe that such a determination is logically implausible. WORKS CITED Nagel, Thomas. "Moral luck." Reason and Responsibility, 9th edition. Joel Feinberg, ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996: 515-521.