A new parent preparing for the birth of her first baby wrestles with how to decide—especially when the evidence is incomplete and the consequences of getting it wrong can be devastating. The column leans on the philosopher Bernard Williams’ idea of “moral luck
The week before a first child arrives can feel like a countdown to both love and catastrophe. In one home, the waiting has turned into a new kind of vigilance—less about affection, more about fear of the irreversible mistake.
The partner in the household is “due to give birth to our first baby any day now. ” and as parenthood approaches. she’s started grappling with a question she can’t shake. The columnist who writes the advice column “Your Mileage May Vary” says she decided to take up her dilemma in a last piece before beginning parental leave—because the worry isn’t only about children. It belongs to anyone who fears failing someone, making lasting mistakes, and carrying the guilt that might come afterward.
The questions begin with specifics that sound ordinary until you hear what’s underneath them: “How soon after birth should we take the baby into crowded indoor places. knowing their immune system isn’t fully formed?” Then come smaller. equally loaded choices: “When should we introduce our kid to sugar?” And later on. the hard tradeoffs grow sharper—“How much unsupervised play time should we let them have as they get older?”.
There’s another reason the anxiety sticks. The columnist says there isn’t “a lot of definitive data” about many of these decisions. Some parenting choices involve situations where the likelihood of something bad is low—but the outcome. if it happens. is “really terrible.” She points to the example of sleepovers: she’s heard some parents aren’t letting kids go because they’re worried someone will touch them inappropriately. The likelihood, she writes, is that sleepovers are positive for most children. Still, there’s always a “small chance” of something negative—an uncertainty she describes as “a little bit of torture.”.
“What if I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens?” she asks. “Am I always going to blame myself?”
The author admits she felt the relief of recognition while hearing the question—because she says the same worry has been “secretly hammering” at her for months. She hadn’t spoken much about it. thinking maybe it was “a function of my own anxiety. ” but now she’s treating it as more common than she realized.
Her anchor is a philosophical term from Bernard Williams: “moral luck.” She introduces it as something that sounds almost backward—what does morality have to do with luck?—but says Williams’ point is that life frequently puts people in situations where their goodness or badness depends on factors outside their control. The world, in other words, can tilt the moral outcome even when the person’s intentions don’t.
Williams’ thought experiment begins with a truck driver who “accidentally runs over a kid.” The driver “isn’t drunk or careless or negligent.” He’s just driving until a child darts into the road. The child dies.
Then Williams asks readers to imagine a second driver who sets out that same day on that same road. This driver is also different in a way that matters morally: he is drunk and “careens down the road carelessly.” He “could easily hit somebody.” But in this version of events. the child never darts into the road. The driver makes it home without incident.
In one scenario, a harm occurs without wrongdoing as commonly understood. In the other, wrongdoing occurs without harm. Yet the author writes that in the second scenario, “no one’s been harmed,” while the first driver—through luck rather than intent—would forever be branded by the worst outcome.
Williams. she explains. makes a critical separation: harm and wrongdoing can occur separately. and that separation changes what guilt is supposed to mean. For the driver who wasn’t negligent but killed a child. she writes. “it wouldn’t make rational sense to feel remorse. per se. ” because the driver didn’t voluntarily do a bad thing. But the driver also “certainly won’t feel nothing.”.
Williams names the feeling: “agent-regret.” It’s the pained response to inadvertently causing harm “through bad luck.”
The column pivots from the truck to the household. The author’s goal, she argues, shouldn’t be to control every outcome. Luck makes that impossible: “You could do everything right and something terrible could still happen.” Trying to eliminate every possible harm. she writes. often doesn’t produce safety—it produces “exhaustion and paralysis. ” where “you’ll feel like you can’t make any decision or take any action” because every choice carries a “small chance of a bad outcome.”.
Instead. she says. the goal should be to live in line with values “as best you can.” She emphasizes that values aren’t singular. They can conflict. “keeping a kid safe from possible harm. ” for instance. can collide with “allowing a kid unsupervised time to play. grow. and form social bonds with other kids.” In those moments. she says. the job is to weigh different factors and act on what seems best “on balance.”.
Could something bad still happen?. Yes. and it’s “gutting.” But she draws the line that’s meant to steady people who fear self-condemnation: even if harm occurs. it doesn’t automatically mean guilt. “It doesn’t mean you deserve blame.” It means you deliberated “as well as anyone could have expected of you” and “something terrible happened anyway.” “That’s not your fault. ” she writes.
The author then brings in Susan Wolf. a philosopher who she describes as one of Williams’ “best interpreters.” Wolf challenges what people should take from moral luck. Williams wrote that “Morality is deeply and disquietingly subject to luck. ” and Wolf asks whether that’s just the result of irrational judgments.
Wolf’s own truck-driver scenario keeps the negligence but changes the luck. Two negligent truck drivers set out. One has good luck—“No child darts into the road, so no one gets hurt.” The other has bad luck—a child darts out and is “instantly killed.”
The author says that if humans were purely rational. people would judge the two drivers just as harshly because they’re equally guilty of wrongdoing. But Wolf observes that in real life, the driver who strikes the child likely feels much more guilt. And society is likely to direct much more blame at him too. because he actually killed someone. while others won’t even know the second driver was negligent.
It might be tempting, the author writes, to dismiss that condemnation as irrational artifact and throw it out entirely. Wolf doesn’t go that far. She thinks it would be “positively eerie” if the unlucky driver saw himself as morally identical to the driver who didn’t hit a child. He’d be revealing a sense of himself “as one who is. at least in principle. distinct from his effects on the world.”.
Wolf’s alternative is described as a way of seeing human beings that doesn’t pretend they stand outside consequences. The author quotes Wolf at length. describing people as “beings who are thoroughly in-the-world. ” shaped by interactions that can’t be fully controlled. whose lives affect others and are affected accidentally and involuntarily as well as intentionally and deliberately. Wolf argues that trying to judge oneself solely by will and intention. drawing sharp lines between responsibility and what is “up to the rest of the world. ” would mean removing oneself from “the only ground on which it is possible for beings like ourselves to meet.”.
That virtue is unnamed in Western philosophy. Wolf says. so she calls it “the nameless virtue.” The author then claims the idea is not only nameless in Western thought; it also has a corresponding concept in Buddhism: “dependent co-arising” or “interbeing.” She explains it as a principle that nothing has a fixed essence. and everything changes with “different causes and conditions” that act upon it. including human beings.
“We are constantly remaking each other,” she writes—through kindness and unkindness, through the ideas people expose one another to, through actions performed or not performed. “We are all each other’s causes and conditions.”
From there, she argues that the Buddhist perspective undercuts a traditional Western understanding of agency. In that view. she writes. an individual is a discrete agent whose decision starts the causal chain in the mind; intent sets motion. so if harm results from a bad decision the person is blameworthy. But from the Buddhist perspective. she writes. the “I” that decides isn’t a self-contained originator—it’s “a node in a web that runs in every direction.”.
That, she says, makes the “clean line” between “what I did” and “what the world did” a fiction. And that means blame, “in the clean Western sense,” doesn’t hold up.
The question that started the column comes back one last time: “If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens. am I always going to blame myself?” The author’s answer is direct. “No,” she writes. She says people will probably still feel pained if a decision leads to harm. but that pain doesn’t have to settle into “I’m a terrible person.” Instead. she says it can take the form of wishing conditions had been different—“I was doing the best I could with the information and awareness I had at the time — with the conditions I was given. I wish that the conditions could have been different.”.
She adds that she expects self-blame is common because Western agency assumptions are deeply ingrained, and during crisis the brain defaults to them. She plans to “remind you of this other understanding,” and she writes, “I feel lucky knowing you’ll do the same for me.”
The column then ends with what it calls a bonus list of what the author is reading. including a book titled Prophecy: Prediction. Power. and the Fight for the Future. from Ancient Oracles to AI. by the philosopher Carissa Véliz. She writes that Véliz argues predictions are often power plays in disguise. She also mentions an episode of the podcast Philosophy Bites featuring a professor of Buddhist philosophy tackling: “Without an enduring self. can there be moral responsibility?” And she says she’s “loving” the illustrated book Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts. which. she writes. shows how normal it is for new parents to have an inner monologue such as: “What if I drop him?. What if I snap and hurt my baby?. Mothering is so hard. I don’t know if I really want to do this anymore. Gosh, I’m so terrible for thinking that!”.
Swati Sharma, Vox Editor-in-Chief, appears in the piece as part of a membership message at the end, describing Vox’s coverage priorities and inviting readers to become Vox Members.
moral luck Bernard Williams parenting anxiety guilt philosophy Susan Wolf agent-regret first baby