4.3 Incoherence
According to this approach, it is simply incoherent to accept or deny the existence of some type(s) of moral luck. This approach has been used for constitutive luck in particular.
Among those who wish to preserve the centrality of morality in our lives, many have appealed to an idea formulated by Nicholas Rescher (1993), according to which “[o]ne cannot meaningfully said to be lucky in regard to who one is, but only with respect to what happens to one. Identity must precede luck” (155). It is easy to take Rescher's point out of context without realizing that he is working with a notion of luck that differs from the notion of “lack of control.” According to Rescher, something is lucky if (i) it came about “by accident” where this seems to mean something like “unplanned” or “unexpected” or “out of the ordinary” and (ii) the outcome “has a significantly evaluative status in representing a good or bad result, a benefit or loss”(145). Taken this way, it does seem at least very odd to say that one's identity is (or is not) a matter of luck. But it is less clear that there is anything odd—let alone incoherent—about saying that one's identity is not a matter within one's control.
Could there nevertheless be some truth to Rescher's claim even if we understand “luck” as “out of one's control?” Perhaps it does not make sense, for example, to say that a person is in control of who she is. For one could argue that this would amount to saying that a person is a self-creator. And in fact the Control Principle, taken to its logical extreme, seems to lead to just such a requirement (see, e.g., Browne 1992, Nagel 1986, 118). If it turns out that self-creation is conceptually impossible as many argue (e.g., Galen Strawson 1986), then perhaps there is a sense in which it is right to say that being in control of one's constitution makes no sense. But it does not follow from this that it is meaningless to deny that one can control one's constitution.
Perhaps the best way of deploying the insight that there is something special about luck and constitution is not to say that it is meaningless to discuss it, but to say that constitutive moral luck is simply unproblematic for morality in the way that resultant moral luck is. This would be to take up the “line-drawing” challenge as described in the last section. On this line of reasoning, for purposes of moral assessment, it does not matter how you came to be; what matters is what you do with what you are. Of course, as we saw, this requires defense and explanation, but it is a way of capturing the insight that constitutive luck is relevantly different from the resultant luck that has captivated a number of commentators.