Commentary on commentary on commentary

Read Thomas Nagel's "Moral Luck" today after having read Bernard Williams's "Moral Luck" last week--prompted, unpromptly, by Darren Domsky's "There is No Door: Finally Solving the Problem of Moral Luck", out last fall in Journal of Philosophy, but sent to me last summer, read over Christmas. Had wanted to read Martha Nussbaum's _Fragility of Goodness_ to respond to Domsky--got that out of the library the other day too, but it's long, and Nussbaum is not a catchy writer (unlike Domsky!), so don't know when I might get around to reading that.

Anyway: apparently Nagel and Nussbaum's pieces both grew out of a seminar run by Williams (or a symposium starring Williams, or something) on moral luck. Nagel, at least, is responding somewhat directly to Williams; in the final versions of their pieces, they respond to each other. But: they basically engage with no one else, except Nagel invoking Kant. Mostly, they're spinning stuff out of their own heads (or so it would seem).

Now, if I want to write something on moral luck--and I do *want* to write something on moral luck--I'd have to talk about Williams and Nagel and eventually Nussbaum ... and Domsky ... and God knows who. God knows who! I can't even think about writing something about moral luck because *I don't know the literature*. (Though I could probably fake it from Domsky's footnotes.)

So, this "moral luck" thing, as a topic, seems to be something that Williams et al. made up in the early 1970s (my guess in response to it's being a theme, though not made a *topic*, in Rawls's _Theory of Justice_). You make up a topic, you get to say what you want about it.

Are there any topics left to be made up?

Well, you know, people were probably asking that in 1970, too.