![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2018\/10\/181001_Susan_Stark_Office_6441.jpg\")
<\/a>Susan Stark takes great pride in her great-grandmother. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n
Stark works in moral psychology and social philosophy. This semester she\u2019s teaching a course on \u201cmoral luck,\u201d the idea that individuals are morally good by virtue of the lucky or unlucky things that have happened to them.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur identity is largely a matter of luck: who our parents are, what time period we live in, which country, what our race or gender is, what our sexual identity or sexual orientation are,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Many of these factors are not really determined by us but rather by our genes. True, environment plays a part, at times, in some aspects of our identity. \u201cBut we don\u2019t get to pick the culture that we live in and how it regards our gender or race. A lot of it is not up to us.\u201d<\/p>\n
And simple luck plays a part in Stark\u2019s very existence, she says. In her early 20s, Flora had a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which infamously burned to the ground on March 25, 1911. One hundred forty-six garment workers \u2014 mostly recent Italian and Jewish female immigrants \u2014 died from fire, smoke inhalation, and jumping to their deaths in one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history.<\/p>\n
For some unknown reason, Stark\u2019s great-grandmother stayed home from work that day, perhaps escaping death. \u201cLuck not only affects these fine-grained aspects of our lives but my very own existence, the existence of my whole family. I\u2019ve often thought about how, if she had gone to work that day, my grandmother wouldn\u2019t have been born, my mother wouldn\u2019t have been born, and I wouldn\u2019t have been born.\u201d<\/p>\n