Skill, Control and Moral Luck

Abstract This essay addresses a position within the debate on moral luck according to which agents can be responsible for their actions in cases of moral luck, as long as they possess skills to control actions of that action type (Heuer 2016). In this essay, I introduce cases of “incapacitated skill”, in which agents possess a certain skill but are unable to exert this skill because the patterns of attention and motor control in which the skill would usually manifest are undermined by other effects such as fatigue. I argue that in at least some of these cases – specifically, cases of permanently incapacitated skill – agents are not responsible for their actions. I argue that such cases either provide a counterexample to the position or show that it requires further clarification. I conclude by proposing a possible adjustment to the view to address this issue.