Larissa MacFarquhar: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m sure you know of Bernard Williams and his concept of moral luck, that how good you are may, in some cases, be a function of how lucky you become, that you make an initial investment, and you could end up as a kind of nobody with no impact. Or luck could be in your favor, and you could end up doing the world a great amount of good or, possibly, a great amount of harm. How do you see the moral luck notion as applying to extreme altruists or, for that matter, Rwandan killers? I love Bernard Williams. I think he’s a beautiful, beautiful writer and a very interesting thinker. His classic example in this regard was Gauguin. Here is a painter who abandons his wife and, I believe, children to go to Tahiti and paint and find his artistic muse. Fortunately for Gauguin, he had the moral luck to be an excellent painter, so everyone forgives him. They say, “How wonderful that he did what he needed to do to make this extraordinary art.” What if he had been a terrible painter? That wouldn’t have made a moral difference, but it would have made a difference to how we would judge him. So in that sense, he had moral luck. With extreme altruists, there’s this sense that I think most of us have that morality should be judged by motive, and therefore it is, to some extent, divorced from luck. That’s why Bernard Williams’s idea of moral luck was so strange and so startling to many people. The idea is, if you try to do good, that’s what counts, and whether you are able to in fact do good is a result of luck of various kinds, like your own ability, the situation in the world that you find yourself in, all kinds of things like that. But more ancient notions of morality find this paradox less strange because they believe that you can hold someone to account for how wise they are and how able they are to judge their actions and successfully anticipate whether they will produce wrong or not. So you can blame someone for having a terrible idea of the good. That is part of how you judge them, and therefore, even though it may be because you grow up in a society where terrible ideas of the good are predominant, and you somewhat haplessly find yourself swept along in them, you’re still held to account. In your profile of Noam Chomsky, he seems to say that motives shouldn’t matter at all for assessing political action.…

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