What role does moral luck play in ethical parenting and parental guilt?

Moral luck is when parents feel guilty or proud based on things that aren’t entirely under their control, like whether their child gets hurt by something random.

Imagine you’re baking a cake with your kid. You both follow the recipe, mix everything well, and put it in the oven. But then, poof!, the cake comes out burned because the toaster broke. That’s moral luck: you did everything right, but a little accident made things go wrong.

Now picture another day: your kid is playing with their friend, and suddenly they fall off the slide and get a boo-boo. You feel guilty even though you were watching carefully, that’s parental guilt from moral luck.

Sometimes, though, it's not just accidents. If your child gets hurt because you didn’t watch them closely enough, like if you were on your phone instead of paying attention, then the guilt is more about what you did than things out of your control.

So, moral luck helps explain why parents feel proud or guilty even when they’re doing their best, it’s just life happening around them.