FIRST
Objective morality is typically framed in terms of justice, love, respect, and the principles that ought to guide human action regardless of circumstance. It asks what is right or wrong in a normative sense and assumes that moral evaluation should track intentions, duties, or values that apply universally. Moral luck, however, presses a deeper and more unsettling question beneath this framework: to what extent are agents genuinely responsible when factors beyond their control shape both their actions and their outcomes? By highlighting how chance influences who we become, what situations we face, and how our choices turn out, moral luck challenges the coherence of holding people equally accountable under objective moral standards. In this way, it does not merely compete with objective morality but destabilizes its foundations, forcing us to reconsider whether justice and blame can be fully disentangled from luck at all.
THE ARGUMENT
Traditional moral theories—especially Kantian deontology and utilitarianism—aim to provide objective, universal principles that guide human action. These systems emphasize impartiality, consistency, and moral rules that apply equally to everyone. Thomas Nagel, one of the most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century, challenged this picture by exposing deep tensions within traditional morality. Rather than rejecting morality outright, Nagel revealed its internal conflicts, showing that moral life is fractured by competing perspectives that cannot be fully reconciled. Through his analyses of moral luck, agent-relative reasons, and the conflict between personal and impersonal standpoints, Nagel demonstrated that traditional morality oversimplifies the complexity of human ethical experience.
If you hold that God makes a moral system based on them objective, you run into a worse mess. Now there is a God involved - not just morality. More about that later.
One of Nagel’s most famous critiques concerns the problem of moral luck. Traditional morality assumes that moral responsibility depends only on factors within an agent’s control, such as intentions or choices. However, Nagel argued that in real life, outcomes influenced by luck deeply affect our moral judgments. For example, two reckless drivers may behave identically, but if one happens to hit a pedestrian while the other does not, we judge the former more harshly. According to traditional morality, this difference should not matter morally, yet our intuitions suggest otherwise. Nagel used this tension to show that moral judgment is unavoidably influenced by factors beyond individual control, undermining the idea that morality can be perfectly fair or consistent. Moral luck exposes a gap between moral theory and actual moral practice that traditional frameworks struggle to explain.
One might wonder if the agent who hurts somebody deserves a greater - perhaps a vastly greater - blame, deserves it for a God says so. Perhaps God decrees it and inspires us to blame.
It seems to rescue moral luck from arbitrariness. One of Nagel’s deepest worries is that moral luck makes judgment unfair: two agents act the same way, yet one is condemned more harshly because of chance. If God is directing moral judgment—through conscience, grace, or divine law—then the outcome isn’t morally relevant by accident. It’s relevant because it fits into a morally ordered universe. The pedestrian’s death isn’t just bad luck; it’s morally significant because God allows it to be so.
This approach explains why our moral intuitions feel authoritative rather than optional. When we judge the driver who killed someone more harshly, it doesn’t feel like a mere emotional reaction or social convention. It feels like a demand. Appealing to divine guidance makes sense of that experience in a way Nagel’s secular framework struggles to do. Nagel can describe the conflict, but he can’t explain why one side should ultimately bind us.
But the issue is that if God has to make the person deserve, it means they do not deserve it in the first place.
Nagel would argue that once you appeal to God, you’ve stepped outside moral theory as a rational, publicly accessible enterprise. Traditional morality, as he critiques it, aims to justify moral judgments using reasons that any rational agent could accept. Inner divine prompting is, by definition, private and unverifiable. Two people could sincerely feel opposite divine signals about the same act, and there’s no neutral way to adjudicate between them. So while your view may make moral luck meaningful, it makes it less rational in Nagel’s sense.
There’s also a tension with responsibility. If God is guiding our judgments, are we condemning the driver for his action, or interpreting a divine message embedded in events? Nagel worries that this shifts moral assessment away from agency and toward metaphysical interpretation—reading moral significance into outcomes rather than grounding blame in choice.
The introduction of God actually highlights Nagel’s deepest point rather than refuting him.
Yet secular morality cannot fully justify moral luck without importing something extra—whether that’s God, fate, or cosmic meaning. Nagel doesn’t say moral luck is irrational; he says it’s a problem we cannot solve from within traditional moral reasoning. Your proposal shows one way to solve it—but only by abandoning the assumptions of that tradition.
There is a fork in the road.
OPTION 1, If morality must be purely rational and impartial, moral luck will always look incoherent (Nagel’s conclusion).
OPTION 2, If morality is ultimately grounded in divine order, then moral luck can be rational—but no longer secular or universally demonstrable. We have to throw that out for it only shifts the problem - it does not resolve it. Even God cannot make a person deserve condemnation if they do not deserve it anyway. He cannot override the incoherence of moral luck.
Nagel did not argue that morality is meaningless or arbitrary. Instead, he exposed its incompleteness. He showed that traditional morality aspires to an objectivity that human life cannot fully support. Moral reasoning is pulled in different directions by fairness, personal concern, outcome, intention, and luck, and no single principle can harmonize them all. By highlighting these tensions, Nagel shifted moral philosophy away from the search for perfect systems and toward a more honest understanding of moral complexity.
FINALLY
Objective morality, a morality that is true and free from self-contradiction, does not exist. Moral luck is its Achilles' Heel.
EITHER/OR TEST
The either/or test is good for testing our values - and what we are really like.
There is the option of moral luck without thinking of a God.
There is the option of moral luck including a God.
Both are incoherent. But which one should we literally forget - if it has to be one or the other?
The second has to be forgotten for it is bringing an extra problem in - God.
Plus, we just reason that 1 + 1 = 2. We do not start with, "I will only reason that way if there is a God, a God who grounds math." That leads to a vicious circle, "1+1 are not 2 unless a God agrees or says so. I think he says so therefore 1 + 1 = 2." That throws out reason altogether.
Same with moral luck. Seeing it through secular eyes comes first.
FURTHER QUESTIONS:
God surely is responsible - he permitted - somebody to get hurt. Why he is off the hook for moral luck? He makes the situation - the driver who hurts only works within the situation that God has made.