Abstract
Luck exposes our limited powers and vulnerabilities in this worldly life. Stoics and Kant reject moral luck: we are responsible only for what we control. Thomas Nagel finds moral luck a paradox: though responsible for what I control, I am held responsible for what exceeds it. Stoicism, Kant, and Nagel offer three approaches to moral luck based on a common failure to grasp action. Stoics eliminate moral luck in affirming the mind’s uncompromised freedom alongside nature’s deterministic order. Kant’s transcendental turn dodges moral luck. The phenomenal world’s determinism is not absolute; a noumenal self rescues freedom. Nagel’s “view from nowhere” envisions an enveloping objectivity where I control nothing: action, responsibility, and luck stop making sense. Rejecting two-world solutions while embracing the subjective/objective split, Nagel must accept a forlorn antinomy. Stubborn belief in responsibility clashes against the necessity of events. But freedom and responsibility are not stifled by worldliness: facticity enables us to act.