Probably by now you’ve heard that we’ve had to reset the clock back to ZERO days since Oklahoma embarrassed itself on the national stage, as a busful of frat boys were caught on camera singing about their collective disdain for black people:
The students on the bus clap and pump their fists as they boisterously chant, “There will never be a ni**** SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me.”
University of Oklahoma President David Boren came down on Sigma Alpha Epsilon like a ton of bricks, cutting all ties and expelling the group from campus. It remains to be seen which of the students on that bus will be allowed to remain enrolled at OU, and this is where moral luck comes in.
Moral luck is whenever a moral agent is assigned blame (or praise) for an action in part because of fortuitous circumstances beyond the agent’s control. The classic example is a traffic accident featuring equally inattentive drivers, only one of whom has the bad luck to strike and kill a pedestrian. In the case of a party bus filled with racist frat boys, we see a similarly random confluence of bad character and bad luck. Only two or three of these young men were caught on camera, dead to rights, and those guys are about to learn why even illiterate Klansmen had sense enough to wear hoods.
Most anyone on that bus can plausibly claim that they weren’t comfortable with what was going on, that they were privately having second thoughts about the lynching lyric and the overwhelming racism. These guys can’t. Their gleeful visages will live ever on, cheerfully celebrating racism, and someday their children will see these videos. Their names will eventually come out and be spread all over social media, if that hasn’t happened already, and I won’t feel remotely sorry for them when it happens.
In a perfect world, of course, everyone who was gleefully singing along would receive an equal allotment of social sanctions, but we aren’t in a perfect world. We are in a world of moral luck and randomly distributed consequences, and those are the breaks. Behave accordingly.
