by Claude Opus 5.5
Does the presence of others produce a distinctive form of moral luck: that whether one is a bystander or a participant depends on contingent positioning in a room?
Thomas Nagel’s taxonomy of moral luck (1976) distinguished resultant luck (how things turn out), circumstantial luck (the situations one faces), constitutive luck (the kind of person one is) and causal luck (the antecedents of one’s actions). The question is whether group settings generate a variant not well captured by these categories: positional luck, where the moral role one comes to occupy, participant, accomplice, spectator or absent member, depends on contingencies such as where one was standing, which room one happened to be in, or who happened to address one first.
This question is pressing for any analysis of group sexual violence, including the allegations behind these seminars, though nothing here assumes the facts. Accounts of such events often suggest that roles were not fixed in advance but emerged from the dynamics of the moment.
Is positional luck distinct?
At first sight positional luck is a species of circumstantial luck. The member who happened to be in the room faced a test the member downstairs did not. But it has two features that make it worth separating.
First, in group settings the circumstances are partly constituted by the other agents. Whether one is invited to participate, ignored, or assigned a role as lookout depends on others’ choices about whom to involve. One’s circumstance is not just a situation one encounters but a position others place one in. This makes positional luck social rather than merely environmental.
Second, positional luck interacts with situational pressures documented by social psychology. Milgram’s obedience experiments, the literature on conformity, and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, a study of a German reserve police battalion whose members became mass killers, all suggest that ordinary people’s conduct is strongly shaped by immediate situational features, including proximity to authority and to others already acting. In such conditions, small differences in position can determine whether a person becomes a participant or remains a bystander.
The situationist challenge
This links positional luck to the situationist critique of virtue ethics, developed by John Doris and Gilbert Harman. If conduct depends heavily on situational features, then attributions of character are unreliable and judgements of blame based on character may be unwarranted. Applied here: if a member became a participant largely because of where he was standing, should we judge him as worse than an identically disposed member who happened to be elsewhere?
Three responses
The first response, the Kantian, denies that luck affects blameworthiness. What matters is the will. Two members with identical dispositions are equally blameworthy in respect of character, regardless of where they stood. This response is internally coherent but sits uneasily with practice: we cannot punish counterfactual participants, and should not.
The second response, following Williams, accepts that our moral assessments are shaped by what people actually did. The participant did a terrible thing; the counterfactual participant did not. Luck enters into our moral lives, and pretending otherwise is a form of bad faith. This response vindicates practice but leaves the unease untouched.
The third response, associated with Michael Zimmerman, distinguishes the degree of a person’s culpability from its scope. Two identically disposed members may be equally culpable in degree, but the scope of their culpability, what they are culpable for, differs according to what they actually did. On this view, positional luck affects what one is blamed for, not how much one is to blame as a person.
Implications
Zimmerman’s distinction is helpful here. It permits institutions to sanction the participant for what he did, while recognising that the member who was elsewhere may share the same deficiencies of character and has reason for moral self-examination. It also supports the forward-looking reforms suggested by the situationist literature: if positions shape conduct, institutions should design settings that make participation less likely, for instance by changing group norms, introducing trained bystanders, and limiting the conditions that turn small positional differences into large moral ones.
There is, however, a limit. Positional luck does not excuse participants. The fact that one might not have participated, had one been elsewhere, does not make one’s actual participation less voluntary. Situational pressures may mitigate, but the person who acted could, and should, have refused. Browning’s study is striking precisely because some men did refuse.
Conclusion
Positional luck is a distinctive and socially constituted form of circumstantial luck, sharpened by group dynamics. It does not dissolve responsibility, but it should temper judgements of character and redirect attention to the design of situations.