Wang Yangming's Unity of Knowing and Acting Answers the Problem of Moral Luck — Epoche C2
The principle, and the thing it presupposes The problem of moral luck arises from a single principle and a single observation. The principle — call it the control principle — is that agents are morally assessable only for what lies within their control. The observation is that our actual practices of praise and blame violate it constantly and without embarrassment. Thomas Nagel, in the 1979 essay that fixed the vocabulary, sorted the violations into four kinds: constitutive luck in the temperament and capacities one has, circumstantial luck in the situations one is presented with, causal luck in how one's willing is itself produced by antecedent conditions, and luck in how one's actions and projects turn out. The published version of this essay listed three of the four and omitted the causal variety, which is worth restoring, since it is the one that connects the problem to the free-will literature and the one Nagel treats as the most intractable. This essay argues that Wang Yangming (王守仁, 1472–1529) supplies an answer to that problem, but not the answer the published version claimed. It will turn out that his doctrine dissolves circumstantial luck, takes a substantive and contestable position on constitutive luck, and — this is the correction — does not accommodate resultant luck at all, but lands close to those philosophers who deny that results affect responsibility. What it does supply, and what nothing in the Western debate supplies quite as cleanly, is a reason why the agent whom results have caught out cannot close his case by establishing that he was not at fault. Begin with what the control principle presupposes rather than what it asserts. Kant's image in the first section of the Groundwork is the cleanest statement of it: a good will that achieved nothing whatever, that was frustrated by every disfavour of fortune and left with nothing but the willing, would still shine like a jewel by its own light. The image is doing more work than it looks. For the good will to shine by itself, it must be identifiable by itself — there must be a determinate inner item, complete before and independent of anything it brings about, which the assessor can pick out and grade. Every version of the control principle needs this separability, because the principle is an instruction to assess one component and disregard the other, and an instruction of that form is idle unless the components come apart. Nagel's own conclusion, which is often reported as if he had solved something, is that they do not come apart in any way that saves the principle. Pressing the demand for control consistently, he argues, strips away temperament, circumstance and the antecedents of choice in turn, until the region of genuine agency has shrunk to a point with nothing in it, and the notion of the morally assessable self is threatened rather than refined. He offers this as a paradox with no resolution on the table, not as a puzzle he has answered. Bernard Williams, writing alongside him, was after something different again, and it is worth being exact because he is regularly misread. Williams's target was the ambition of what he later called the morality system to secure a domain of value immune to luck; his Gauguin case is about whether a decision can be justified retrospectively by an outcome the agent could not have known, and his lorry driver, who through no fault of his own runs over a child, is introduced to show that the agent's own relation to what he has done is not exhausted by the question of fault. Williams gave the feeling its name, agent-regret, and insisted that a spectator's verdict of blamelessness does not settle what the driver should feel. Neither philosopher argued that we should blame people for luck. Both argued that a moral theory built to exclude luck describes something other than our moral life. What the unity of knowing and acting claims, and against whom Wang's doctrine is zhixing heyi (知行合一), the unity of knowing and acting. He began teaching it in 1509, in Guizhou, in the years following his exile there: in 1506 he had submitted a memorial against the eunuch Liu Jin, was beaten at court and banished to a postal station at Longchang, and it was there, in 1508, that he reported the insight from which his mature philosophy proceeds. The circumstance is worth recording in an essay on moral luck, since the doctrine was formed under precisely the sort of contingency it will be asked to handle. Its polemical target was not Kant, who was born nearly two centuries after Wang died and whose Groundwork of 1785 appeared some two hundred and seventy-six years after Wang started teaching the doctrine. The published version of this essay described Wang as offering "a counter-narrative to the Kantian insistence on the purity of the will", which reads the chronology backwards. Wang's opponent was Zhu Xi (1130–1200), whose synthesis was the orthodoxy of the examination system, and specifically Zhu Xi's ordering of the moral life: first exhaustive investigation of things and the principles in them, then action informed by what one has learnt. Wang's objection to that programme is practical before it is metaphysical. An ordering in which knowing comes first and acting after licenses indefinite postponement, and produces people who can discourse correctly about filial duty and do not serve their parents. The argument itself is set out in the opening exchanges of the Chuanxilu (傳習錄), Wang's recorded conversations — the published version gave the title in its Japanese orthography, 伝習録, which should be corrected. Wang's student Xu Ai raises the obvious objection: everyone knows they ought to be filial and fraternal, and many are not, so knowing and acting are plainly two things. Wang's reply is that such a person's knowing has been cut off by selfish desire and is not knowing in its original condition at all. Then comes the argument, which turns on how mental states are individuated. Take the model, he says, from t