Minimising Resultant Moral Luck by Aligning Retrospective Ethical to Prospective Agential Causal Responsibility

Resultant moral luck arises where we attribute to an agent a degree of ethical responsibility for an outcome that diverges from the agent’s anticipated causal contribution to that outcome. Against this, I invoke work on agency and on the metaphysics of causation in the special sciences to align retrospective to prospective and ethical to causal responsibility. This double-edged alignment resolves conundrums relating to responsibility for unintended omissions and collateral damage, as well as Bernstein’s (2017) Moral Difference Puzzle, regarding whether responsibility comes in degrees. I argue that: Agents bear ethical responsibility for all and only the outcomes that they cause as agents to the degree that they cause them. And that: What agents cause as agents is defined as what is caused by their choice of intention (relative to a normative alternative available mind-state) to the degree to which that kind of intention raises the chances of the specified kind of outcome. But that: the characterization of the intention-kind must include its tolerance of reasonably-foreseeable consequences. This proposal recognises that agency is probabilistic in impact, a fact that we acknowledge in prospect but typically forget in our retrospective judgments.