On luck – Arianne Shahvisi in LRB:

“Anyone who’d like to look a Nazi in the eye is working against the clock. An eighteen-year-old member of the Nazi Party in 1945 would now be coming up to a hundred. Soon there will be none left. When the film director Luke Holland was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2015, he was interviewing the last surviving Nazis to build an archive of their first-hand accounts of complicity. He kept going as his health declined. One of my colleagues was Holland’s haematologist, and a few of us were invited to watch some unedited footage of German nonagenarians in dowdy sitting-rooms recounting, with nostalgia, unease or insouciance, their involvement in the operation of the Nazi state. Afterwards, another colleague broke our stunned silence with the remark: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ At first I thought she meant we were lucky to have not been Jewish, disabled, Romani or gay in Germany in the 1930s, but she meant we were lucky not to have been Nazis.”

(…)

“‘There but for the grace of God’ is now more commonly uttered in a broader sense. But Bradford’s version might be seen as a case of what Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams identified in the 1970s as ‘moral luck’: the observation that at least some, and perhaps all, right or wrongdoing is merely fortuitous. A person’s transgressions are the result of circumstances they could not have controlled; or of details of their character or upbringing which they did not choose; or, in its strongest form, are just what a deterministic universe had in store for them.”

(…)

“Most of us have God’s grace on our side: we’re not in the position of having to decide whether to participate directly in a genocide. But that comes with other responsibilities. It’s one thing to enact violence when you are raised on lies and fear in a racially segregated state and conscripted into its murderous machinery. It’s another to look on from the outside and do nothing, or to speak up only to make excuses.”

Read the article here.

If the whole world is responsible for the worst crimes committed somewhere, then moral luck doesn’t exist. Or moral is grey zone, some people have more moral luck than others.

As to privileges, moral luck has of course lots with nation state privilege.

But it’s an interesting concept; having moral luck without being part of a marginalized group it’s very rare. It’s a welcome euphemism for the hero: just a person who had moral luck.