Moral luck
Etymology
A coinage introduced by Bernard Williams in 1976 and developed by Thomas Nagel in a parallel essay. "Moral" comes from Latin "moralis" (Cicero’s rendering of Greek "ēthikos") and "luck" from Middle Dutch "luc" (fortune) — the pairing deliberately jars, since morality is supposed to be immune to luck.
noun phrase · /MOR-ul LUK/
The unsettling fact that we praise or blame people for outcomes that were partly beyond their control.
What it names
A handle for the tension between holding people responsible and admitting chance shapes their actions — useful whenever a drunk driver who hits no one is judged less harshly than one who does.
Example
Two equally reckless drivers differ only in that one hit a child — moral luck is why we jail one and forgive the other.
Related idea
Related to the fundamental attribution error but distinct: that bias is about misreading causes, while moral luck is a genuine puzzle about whether luck should affect blame at all.