Perhaps it is no accident that we found ourselves discussing the issue of luck at a place that serves fortune cookies. Surrounded by large Chinese families, screaming babies, delicious food, a general hustle and bustle at this huge restaurant where we regularly meet friends, the talk turned to randomness and moral privilege.

I learned – since I grab my education even with my mouth full of fried rice – that the Babylonian Talmud’s Tractate Moed Katan quotes Rava, one of the rabbinic text’s greatest sages, saying that “length of life, children and sustenance depend not on merit but rather on Mazzal.”  That debate started around the belief that people who die young had been punished for a reason, while those who lived long did so on merits. Rava countered those assumptions with an examples of two equally upright rabbis, Rabba and Rav Hisdah, who died young and aged respectively, and whose families experienced corresponding economic decline and ascent. Rava’s assumption that outcome is not divinely predetermined but due to chance factors predates the copernican revolution by about 15oo years!

So what does Mazzal refer to? Plain luck? Matters outside of your control? Elements of our lives over which we have no direct influence – our genes, the place where we were born or when, the socio-economic class we grew up in – or simply randomness?

I am not sure if that was ever clarified by Jewish sages, but I know that the issue is not exactly resolved today either. So many people cling to the notion (phrased by psychologist Barry Schwartz) that People get what they deserve and they deserve what they get. In this case you assign credit for outcomes, good or bad by assuming it all or mostly lies within the realm of your own responsibility. Correspondingly, you have no moral obligation to help those who suffer bad outcomes, since it’s their own fault.

Alternatively, you acknowledge that outside chance factors play a huge role in outcome; if they systematically disenfranchise some we might be morally obliged to help them overcome harsh factors that led to their disadvantaged lives if we have been the more fortunate ones.

What we know from psychology is that you bring with you a genetic makeup that sets the path; you also encounter environmental influences that shape you and which play a role in your ability to escape a given path, should it be a bad one.  The interaction of these factors try to explain the range of control you have over your fate.

Note that both, genetic make-up and the context you find yourself in, happen to you – if you happen to be born with a certain genetic predisposition towards a disease and you are born in a country where that disease can be fought with easily accessible drugs you are in the clear. If you are born in a country without access to those meds you are sunk. Same for having a specific intelligence level and lucking out on having a rich daddy or not, access to a good school or not, neighborhoods without lead in the water etc…. in other words, both what you bring and what you encounter are pretty much outside of your control when you are young.

What about when you are an adult? Does the merit assumption kick in when you are old enough to take your fate into your own hands?  Can you take on responsibility over your life’s circumstances? Make god decisions based on deliberate, rational reasoning rather than following spontaneous base impulses? Maybe that is where you deserve moral credit and the whole idea of meritocracy resides: you keep your impulses in check and choose the high road? Miraculously your hard work gets you access to education, riches follow? You don’t smoke so don’t get cancer? Life improvement is all about personal choice?

Won’t work. Both the capacity for deliberate, rational thinking as well as the need to apply it are unevenly – and unjustly – distributed.

Using rational, deliberate, slow and measured thinking thinking is difficult; additional strain on your system leaves few resources that you can use to accomplish this difficult task. In other words, the capacity that leads to better behavior is dependent on having more basic needs already fulfilled: enough food, physical shelter, educational training and habituation. Your ability to use it depends on external factors, in other words.  And even if you were able to use it, say, to decide that hard works gets you into situations that improve your state – access to education which in the end is what it’s about in societies like ours, is not guaranteed. Exclusion on the basis of race and class and set early in life cannot be overcome by good decision making alone.

The need to apply self control is differentially distributed as well – again an external factor. If you have enough external resources – money, lawyers, social and political connections – you don’t need to curb your baser impulses. You just need to have someone clean up their horrid consequence. (Note, I didn’t need to mention any names.) In contrast if you are a female black tennis player and loose it with the umpire, you are held to the highest degree of demanded self-control, needed to not be censured and punished.

Of course if you acknowledge all this, the lucky feel threatened, since they cling to their belief that it is all about their own actions. That opportunistic assumption has moral consequences – how we all engage in projects to assure a more just distribution of resources.  Luck,then, has pretty harsh effects beyond the positive ones of singling out the lucky ones.

Below is a link to a good summary article.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/21/17687402/kylie-jenner-luck-human-life-moral-privilege

Photographs today are of swallows – long thought to bring luck to the farms where they nest.