The inescapable truth is that in life we all take occasional risks. Even when we know we shouldn’t. These risks are usually small, and subsequently the majority of people usually suffer no consequence. These are the lucky majority, some who have found themselves driving drunk (as much as one can in such a state) but who do not hit anything. Then there are those risk-takers who do the same but kill someone, and we villainize them. Appropriately perhaps. We need to disincentivize such dangerous behaviour. We punish precisely because such reckless action can have so grave a consequence. We want people to have serious cause not to gamble with the safety of others, or theirselves.

I argue that we should take seriously this aspect of fortune not because I want these people to be considered the merely “unlucky” and subsequently let off. While we rightfully penalise abandonment of sensibility which could potentially harm third parties I don’t think it is necessary we attach to it a sense of moral inferiority.

Each of us who have escaped criminal indictment is the person who didn’t kill the antagoniser when we pushed him, or managed to not knock over the old lady when we rushed down the stairs to our train. In a respect we’re lucky, let’s remember that.