Wrong place, wrong time…

Moral luck and personal accountability: why you shouldn’t text while driving.

Think of a person who is out on the town. They drink five beers, so are well over the limit, but they still decide to drive home. They get home ok, go to bed and sleep it off. That same evening a different person is out on the town. They drink three beers, decide to drive home, but hit and kill a pedestrian with their car. Which person is worse?

We might say instinctively that the second person is worse because their conduct resulted in someone’s death, though in fact the first person was further over the legal alcohol limit for driving safely. Or we might ignore the result and say the first person is worse because they were even more irresponsible – but then what about the victim of the second person’s irresponsibility?

This popular thought experiment is also in some ways weighted to confuse our decision-making process.

What if both drivers had consumed exactly the same amount of beer? One is flagged down, breathalysed and arrested; the other is breathalysed and arrested after the fatal accident. Who should get the greater penalty? Yet in terms of personal responsibility, haven’t they both shown the same level of recklessness?

• In 2016, a lorry driver who killed a mother and three children when he smashed into stationary traffic while scrolling through music selections on his phone, was jailed for 10 years. The judge described the case as the most horrific she had ever seen, and said the driver’s attention had been so poor he "might as well have had his eyes closed". The court heard he had been so distracted he barely looked at the road for almost a kilometre.

  
  

• In 2022 Another lorry driver who was browsing dating sites at the wheel was jailed for a crash that killed three people. He admitted three counts of causing death by dangerous driving and was jailed for eight years and 10 months. His phone showed he was browsing sites for 40 minutes before the crash. Phone records confirmed he had been navigating between two dating sites, had spent almost £50 to engage with users and was looking at profiles and editing his own while driving.

  
  

• A third lorry driver was jailed for 10 years in 2025 for causing the death of another driver after he drove into the back of his car on the M58. The evidence presented by the Crown Prosecution Service proved he was looking at pornography on his phone while driving the lorry and this meant that he had little option but to admit his guilt. Because he was distracted by his mobile phone, the lorry driver failed to react to the traffic slowing ahead and collided with a Hyundai in front. The car was shunted into a second large lorry ahead, causing its fuel tank to rupture, and the Hyundai was engulfed in flames. *

What we don’t have information on is how many people have done similar things but without a serious consequence – simply because they weren’t unlucky that time.

This presents a paradox. Our ideas of ethical praise and blame are based on the idea that we should only be morally assessed for what is within our control, however in daily life we frequently judge people based on outcomes that are determined by chance.

And in fact, the law often works in this way: a person punches someone once and knocks them down and they get up, nursing a bruised face. Another person punches someone once and knocks them down, they hit their head by chance and die. The penalties for these assaults would be very different, though the assailant did the same thing in each case. Or conversely, two people attempt murder, but one is prevented from carrying it out by a random event – such as a gun misfiring or an object getting in the way - while the other succeeds.

Thomas Nagel takes this idea of Moral Luck further, suggesting key types…

• Constitutive luck: Your temperament, ability, inclination – the kind of person you are

• Circumstantial luck: The problems, situations and dilemmas you just happen to face

• Resultant luck: As outlined earlier – two people take the same risk, but only one of them causes harm

• Causal luck: How you are determined by previous circumstances – basically everything that has ever happened to you

So how do we respond to this? How do we morally rank these cases? Should laws be based on outcomes or intent? (The law often prioritises repairing the harm rather than assessing moral intent.)

And as a side issue, do you feel more strongly about the lorry drivers referenced above according to whether they were scrolling for music, looking for a hookup, or watching porn?

*The three cases cited above are all real - I've just removed names to avoid further distress for anyone involved