Four years ago, I read in the news that a boy I went to school with had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. On a different day, in a different place, he’d probably have just walked home, and no one would have said a thing.

It happened on a night out. Nick has always been a little bit lairy — a shouty, bargy, aggressive sort of boy. He was great on the rugby pitch, and we would just let him scream or punch a wall whenever he got into a tantrum. But at 19 years old, Nick was outside of a pub having a drink with his friends. Someone shoved past him and knocked his beer everywhere. Nick got angry. Nick always got angry. There was a bit of jostling, a bit of screaming, and Nick threw a punch.

The punch landed on the other man’s chin and threw him back into a shop window’s glass front. The glass shattered, and the shards sliced into this man’s carotid artery. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. Nick was arrested. He’s still in prison.

Many people reading this article will have thrown a punch in their lives. Many will have pushed or barged someone. And yet you are freely reading among the general population. According to the philosophical literature, you have “moral luck.” Your punch or your shove didn’t end up killing someone.

The moral luck of walking away

The term “moral luck” first appeared in a 1976 paper by the British philosopher Bernard Williams. Williams asked whether “moral judgment” should only apply to things within our control. The standard view — a view inherited from Immanuel Kant — was that if you tried your best, you should be judged on that. Good intentions make something moral; bad intentions make it immoral. How things happened to turn out is by the by.

Williams thought this was wrong, or at least far too neat. He asked us to consider cases where two people do exactly the same thing — act with the same intention, the same recklessness, the same character — and yet one ends up a killer and the other walks home. The difference between them isn’t in their effort or virtue or intention. It’s just what happened next. In one situation, the glass breaks and a man dies. In another, the glass stays fixed and two men walk home. It’s naïve to assume that the sometimes-horrific consequences of an action are irrelevant to whether we call an event good or bad.

For Williams, our moral lives aren’t sealed off from the world in some protected inner chamber. They’re tangled up with circumstance, with timing, and with physics. The Kantian idea that a good will is the only thing that matters “without limitation” struck Williams as a kind of philosophical fantasy — a desire to make morality invulnerable to the mess of actual living.

Laying roots in a messy world

In this week’s Mini Philosophy newsletter, I interviewed Sebastian Purcell, author of The Outward Path: The Wisdom of the Aztecs, about Aztec philosophy. Our conversation ambled over various areas, and moral luck came up a lot. What’s striking is that the Aztecs arrived at something remarkably similar to Williams — thousands of miles away and centuries earlier.

According to Purcell, there’s a passage recorded in the Florentine Codex that reads almost like Bernard Williams: A man strikes another man, the man stumbles, and things go badly. The moral weight of the act shifts depending on what happens after the fist lands.

For the Aztecs, this wasn’t a puzzle to be solved. It was simply how things are. As Purcell puts it, “Sometimes we end up being good people because of luck. Sometimes we end up being bad people because of luck. And that is just an inherent feature of our cosmos.”

For Purcell, the Aztecs were pessimists — not in the despairing sense, but in the honest sense. They believed that “good and bad things happen [but] not in proportion to how good and bad people were.”

There’s a passage Purcell describes in which a father speaks to his daughter. He tells her plainly: There is pain. There is love and pleasure, but there is pain. “The cold wind glides and passes by. You can’t avoid that.”

Philosophers love to categorize. The structuralists among us might even say that the human mind loves to categorize. We like to create dichotomies and labels. Good and bad; virtuous and vicious; intentional and unintentional; and so on. But the Aztecs argued that the world is just a mess. Try as we might to rationalize things, those things will resist rationalization. Sometimes, a thing is bad because of bad luck.

And yet, the Aztecs weren’t fatalistic. Their response to moral luck wasn’t to throw up their hands and say, “Well, I hope I stay good today!” Instead, Aztec philosophy asks us to turn outward — to lean on friends, family, community. Purcell calls this “the outward path.” You can’t control the chaos of the world by retreating inward, as the Stoics counseled. Your mind is too fragile, too plural, too easily bypassed. Instead, you root yourself in other people. You set up what the Aztecs called “decision circles.” You find someone who will tell you the truth. You build a life that is meaningful not because it is safe, but because it is shared.

It won’t protect you from bad luck. Nothing will. But it might help you live well in a world that is vulnerable to it.