Fragility, Tragedy and Politics

在一周的双班工作后，一位厨师筋疲力尽地端上了一些受污染的食物，尽管她整个星期都在努力；这位顾客病得很重。尽管遵循了通常的惯例，但在资金紧张的地方当局，社会工作者忽视了严重精神痛苦的迹象；服务使用者随后会自我伤害。在一次大学晚宴上，一位年轻的贵族与一群工人阶级聊天，发现他说的某些话很容易被侮辱，尽管他整个星期都在和他那些独立富裕的朋友们说同样的话。这样的情况无疑会从我们自己的经历中熟悉，无论它们感觉是个人的、政治的还是介于两者之间的某个地方。它们表明，即使怀着世界上最好的意愿--即尽管有充分的理由或借口--有时人类生活的进程也会使我们对错误的行为和态度承担责任。它们表明，我们可以对不当行为承担无懈可击的责任。无懈可击的错误行为具有明显的道德利益，因为尽管它们无懈可击，但它们可以说进入了导致它们发生的生活的道德账簿，玷污了它们的道德地位。它们揭示了人们是如何被超出其代理能力的偶发事件导致道德低落的。当世界利用这一曝光时，人类生活遭受了道德上的厄运，并表现出其脆弱的本性。古典古代给坚持人性脆弱的文学形式取了个名字--悲剧，以及它给人们的生活带来的丰富性和复杂性。看到这一点，像亚里士多德这样的思想家在古代道德中为运气腾出了空间，这种道德将人类的状况视为一件无可救药的悲剧。一种更现代的理性倾向于回避被认为是古老概念的不公平，认为规范性的形而上学保证了超出人的代理能力的东西不会相应地被他们的人玷污。现代哲学认为，在正确的道德观念中，运气是没有立足之地的。古人--现代人辩证法的这种说法，可以称之为“标准故事”。根据其对概念空间的划分，我们可以接受人性的脆弱性，也可以以不公平为由拒绝它。被标准故事迷住了的当代道德运气辩论似乎无法超越辩证法，最能代表古代观点的是玛莎·努斯鲍姆(Martha Nussbaum)(2001)，现代观点可能是大卫·伊诺克(David Enoch)(2012)。尽管这些当代观点微妙而有力，但它们继承了标准故事的困难。虽然现代的观点试图解释人类脆弱的明显现实，但古代的观点不明智地将道德上的厄运视为类似于自然灾害，即悲剧。这两种观点都不能令人信服地解释了我们开始的例子中所有有趣的哲学特征。我在这个项目中的目的是为正在进行的道德运气辩论贡献一个新的立场。借鉴法律理论的最新发展，我将断言，道德运气是公平的政治社区在社会上分配严格责任的实践的一部分。对于现代人来说，这意味着人类的脆弱毕竟是一个现实，而对古人来说，这意味着它的现实是政治的，而不是残酷的自然。因此，人类的脆弱性并不是使我们的生活悲惨的不可改变的问题，而是人类政治的问题，需要通过物质和概念形式的斗争来解决。

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.