Moral Luck

Moral Luck says that "In order to qualify for this trope, a character has to carry out an action whose consequences depend mostly on luck, and be praised (or blamed) by other characters (or by the work itself) for their morality/immorality."

I can see this, but I think there's also another requirement: that their action itself is morally questionable. The description mentions the painter Gauguin, who abandoned his family in order to pursue his artistic muse. The "abandoned his family" part is important, right?

The description hasn't mentioned it yet.

I think Well-Intentioned Extremist (and The Extremist Was Right) and Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right! would be related too.

Edited by 4tell0life4 on Mar 31st 2020 at 7:22:52 AM

That's not at all a requirement; it's just that a character's actions are luck based, and if it works they're "good" and if it fails they're "bad", despite that they weren't fully in control of what happened; they get praised for being moral and great despite their action being the result of luck.

It doesn't matter if the act is morally questionable.

What I'm saying is: if the character does morally unquestionable (or even harmless) things to achieve something, then something such as "luck" wouldn't be relevant in their judgment, right? That's why I think Moral Luck should count only questionable actions.

I mean, actions can be morally neutral too.

The key is that the morality is judged based solely on the consequences, not the action itself; a character could theoretically be doing great acts from the audience's POV all the time, but if it backfires in such a way that the unlucky character somehow caused problems for others, the work would deem them "immoral". It's about how the work labels the action based solely on a character's luck or lack-thereof. What the action actually was doesn't seem relevant, at least that's what I'm getting from the description, specifically this line:

"the resident Butt-Monkey's actions will always result in failure and they will be blamed for it, while the Karma Houdini protagonist's or other character's will always succeed and they will receive praise."

So while yes, a lot of the times the actions will be questionable, that's not inherent and shouldn't be a qualification.

that part of the description doesn't make sense. It just reads to me that the "karma" is skewed, not any kind of "luck".

That Butt-Monkey and the hero aren't said to do either the same or different things. For Moral Luck to qualify, they have to have done the same or similar thing, which ended badly/rightly respectively and then gets blamed/bashed and praised respectively, right?

Kinda doesn't help that many of the examples are written in the "looking back" sense, which means that Fridge Logic is definitely involved here. Which makes me praise examples that tried to "play" with this trope.

Edited by 4tell0life4 on Mar 31st 2020 at 7:51:24 AM

I guess?

...I'll be honest man, I barely understand what the trope is because it's such an abstract concept, but the one thing I do think I understand is that the action doesn't need to be morally questionable first.