Fragility, Tragedy and Politics

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Exhausted after a week of double-shifts, a chef plates up some contaminated food, despite having been as diligent as she had been all week; the customer falls severely ill. Despite following the usual protocol, a social worker at a cash-strapped local authority overlooks the indicators of severe mental distress; the service user subsequently self-harms. At a university dinner, a young patrician gets chatting to a working-class group, and finds that certain things he says are liable to insult, though they are the same things he has been saying all week amongst his independently wealthy friends. Situations like these will no doubt be familiar from our own experiences, whether they feel personal, political or somewhere in between. They show that even with the best will in the world-that is, despite having sufficient reason or excuse-sometimes the course of human life renders us responsible for wrongful acts and attitudes. They show that we can be faultlessly responsible for wrongdoing. Faultless wrongdoings are of a distinctively moral interest because despite their faultlessness they get entered, as it were, into the moral ledgers of the lives that incur them, blemishing their moral status. They reveal how people are brought morally low by contingencies that lie beyond their powers of agency. When the world exploits this exposure, human life suffers bad moral luck, and is exhibited in its fragile nature.Classical antiquity gave the name 'tragedy' to the literary form that insisted on human fragility, and the richness and complexity it brings to people's lives. Seeing this, thinkers like Aristotle made room for luck in ancient morality, which took the human condition to be an irredeemably tragic affair. A more modern sensibility has tended to recoil from the perceived unfairness of the ancient conception, arguing that the metaphysics of normativity guarantees that what lies beyond people's powers of agency is not relevantly theirs to be blemished by. Modern philosophy recognises no place for luck within the correct conception of morality.Call this telling of the ancients-moderns dialectic the 'standard story.' According to its division of conceptual space, we can either accept the fragility of human nature or reject it as unfair. Captivated by the standard story, the contemporary moral luck debate has seemed unable to move beyond the dialectic, with the ancient view best represented by Martha Nussbaum (2001), and the modern view perhaps by David Enoch (2012). Though these contemporary views are subtle and powerful, they nevertheless inherit the difficulties of the standard story. Whilst the modern view attempts to explain away the palpable reality of human fragility, the ancient view ineptly conceives of bad moral luck as akin to natural disasters, that is, as tragedy. Neither view convincingly explains all the philosophically interesting features of the examples we began with.My aim in this project is to contribute a novel position to the ongoing moral luck debate. Drawing on recent developments in legal theory, I will claim that moral luck is part and parcel of the practices by which fair political communities socially distribute strict duties. Against the moderns this implies that human fragility is after all a reality, whilst against the ancients this implies that its reality is political rather than brutely natural. Human fragility is therefore not an unchangeable matter that renders our lives tragic, but rather a matter for human politics, to be settled by material and conceptual forms of struggle.