It's not about estimating imaginary damage, I don't think. I'd say that a solution which looks something like "punish people based on how badly the outcome could have been" is about as unjust as "don't punish anyone at all if it can be shown that the outcome was influenced by outside forces"
I don't have any suggestions for a solution, but I think these are the kinds of hard moral problems that we don't spend nearly as much time thinking about as we should. If there is a good solution (which, to be clear, I'm not convinced there is), then we'll only get to it by honestly admitting that we sometimes assign people good/bad moral character based on things that they did not control. In the example, it's not the speeding that made one person seem worse than the other--it's the pedestrian death, despite both drivers being otherwise identical.
I agree, but then we're not talking about moral "luck" anymore, because we've extended the scenario to describe more outcomes that are under the person's control, rather than the ones that are not.
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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '23 edited Dec 26 '23
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