moral luck
ethicsComments
Does this necessarily make morality a lottery, or just our social reactions? Someone might still feel the same internal guilt regardless of whether the risk actually caused harm.
The law backs this up. The difference between a reckless driving charge and a vehicular manslaughter charge is often just whether a pedestrian happened to be crossing the street at that exact second.
I wonder how this applies to things like algorithmic bias... if a piece of code causes harm by accident, we blame the dev, but we don't treat the 'lucky' devs who wrote similar buggy code as moral failures... does that shift the goalposts?
You're forgetting about circumstantial luck. It is not just the outcome of the act, but the luck of never being put in a position where your character is tested in the first place.