Abstract

There is a puzzle over Montaigne’s view of what Bernard Williams called moral luck: in “Of crueltyµ, Montaigne seems both to endorse and to subvert the intuition that moral merit is immune to luck. We present an interpretation on which Montaigne can be seen to make a distinctive contribution to contemporary debates about moral luck, a contribution that bears some points of contact with Gary Watson’s suggestion that moral responsibility has more than one “faceµ. Montaigne is not denying the force of the moral luck intuition, yet he deploys his considerable philosophical and literary skills to steer us away from it