Two drivers are equally careless; one of them, through no difference in conduct, kills a child who steps into the road. Our practices treat them very differently, and the intuition that they should be treated differently is as firm as the intuition that moral assessment should not depend on luck. The problem is not that one of these commitments is obviously mistaken but that both are deeply held and jointly untenable, and philosophical work on the question has largely consisted of attempts to save one by explaining away the other. Neither project has succeeded to the satisfaction of anyone not already committed to it. The honest description is that a contradiction sits inside ordinary moral thought, and that the discipline's inability to remove it may be evidence about morality rather than about the discipline.