what is luck philosophy
Concerning gradualness, control, like luck, comes in degrees. 5) understands control in similar terms as Coffman and Rescher, but he introduces additional epistemic constraints. However, as is also the case in all the other essays, McKinnon, in the course of defending her main thesis, makes some interesting conceptual observations. It makes clear, though, that more work on luck is needed. Finally, Hales (2014) thinks that there are cases of skillful achievements that lack of control accounts are compelled to consider lucky. As far as I know, this is the first edited volume to cover the notion of luck -- … The idea that more weight should be given to some possible worlds when fixing the degree of luck of an event serves to stipulate a different view of the gradualness of luck. During the lottery draw, a Laplacian demon predicts and tells that person that she will be the winner, so she comes to know in advance—and therefore is in a position to know—that she will be the winner. For example, Coffman (2009) thinks that an event is under an agent’s control just in case she is free to do something that would help produce it and something that would help prevent it. However, most of her essay is devoted to defending a slightly different claim, namely that people deserve credit for their skill proportional to the expected value, which means that we should be more parsimonious in doling out credit when they are successful and more generous in doling our credit when they are not. To put it differently, if we interpret that sort of attributions as conveying good or bad luck, it is probably because we read them as denoting such relationship. For that reason, the winner is lucky. Reviews "This is an essential guidebook for anyone whose work engages conceptual or empirical questions about luck and related phenomena. They might argue that knowing exactly how lucky someone is with respect to an event entails that the exact probability of the event’s occurrence is known. Pritchard, Duncan, & Smith, Matthew. Stoutenburg (2015) gives a similar evidential account of degrees of luck. Aristotle wrote ab… Broncano-Berrocal (2015) makes a further distinction between two ways in which we think of risk: the risk that an event has of occurring—or event-relative risk—and the risk at which an agent is with respect to an event—or agent-relative risk. Let’s start, then, by considering the question of whether we ought to try to equalise welfare or utility (for ‘utility’ read ‘happiness’, or better, ‘wellbeing’). For example, losing one’s keys and having to spend the night outdoors is bad luck if one gets a cold as a consequence, but it is also good luck if one thereby avoids an explosion in one’s apartment. We say things such as (1) an event E is lucky for an agent S and (2) S is lucky that E. We also say things such as (3) it is a matter of luck that E and (4) E is by luck. OP1 and OP2 are analyses of synchronic luck. Any of the already discussed counterexamples to the necessity for luck of (i) subjective probabilistic conditions—for example, cases of agents without beliefs about events that are lucky for them, (ii) objective probabilistic conditions—for example, cases of highly probable lucky events, (iii) modal conditions—for example, Lackey’s buried treasure case, and (iv) lack of control conditions—for example, Lackey’s demolition case—are troublesome for hybrid views. For example, goals from the corner kick in professional soccer matches are considered neither clearly lucky nor clearly produced by skill. Eudaimonia comes from two Greek words: Eu-: good Daimon: soul or “self.” A difficult word to translate into English. And, then, there are of course the events of there being bus bombings, there being two bus bombings, there being two bus bombings at those two locations, one's being at a place where there is a bus bombing (this event occurs twice), and so forth. In view of this, Levy thinks that it is better not to commit one’s modal account to a precise view of the issue. According to Pritchard (2014), the relevant initial conditions for an event are specific enough to allow a correct assessment of the luckiness of the target event, but not so specific as to guarantee its occurrence. But, consistently with what modal accounts say, that person goes to Paris in most of those worlds. But then, of course, that need not be done in the book itself. PLAY. Moreover, it isn't clear from these experiments that the subjects are often mistaken about luck in the first place. Thinking about luck. Riggs admits that although it is true that many nomic necessities—for example, sunrises—are beyond our control, we can still exploit them to our advantage. A key point of Broncano-Berrocal’s account is that, depending on the practical context, attributions of control such as “Event E is under S’s control” might refer either to effective control, to tracking control, or to both. Probabilistic accounts of luck explicitly appeal to the probability of an event’s occurrence to explain why it is by luck. Luck attributions and cognitive Bias. Accordingly, we should not expect an analysis of luck to remove this vagueness. It brings together and provides various new views on exactly what luck is and how particular analyses of luck make a difference to the position one adopts in various debates. In particular, the practical context provided by Lackey is such that A is responsible for the design of the demolition system but fails to check that the connection wires are damaged—sometimes, tracking control might be very difficult to achieve. His reply to Lackey’s buried treasure case is that luck in the circumstances—the lucky coincidence that someone places a plant at the same location in which someone has buried a treasure—is not inherited by the actions performed in those circumstances or by the events resulting from them—for example, the discovery of the treasure. Mundane as it is, the concept of luck nonetheless plays a pivotal role in central areas of philosophy, either because it is the key element of widespread philosophical theses or because it gives rise to challenging puzzles. Created by. That person’s going to Paris is not by luck—since it is the result of her self-conscious decision—but it would nevertheless fail to occur in most close possible worlds—since she has made the decision on a whim. However, the idea that a rigorous analysis of the general concept of luck might serve to make further progress in areas of philosophy where the notion plays a fundamental role has motivated a recent and growing philosophical literature on the nature of luck itself. According to Pritchard, the only two minor differences between the two notions are, on the one hand, that risk is typically associated to negative events, whereas luck can be predicated of both negative and positive events; on the other, that while we can talk of very low levels of risk, we cannot so clearly talk of low levels of luck. The concept of luck has played an important role in debates concerning free will and moral responsibility, yet participants in these debates have relied upon an intuitive notion of what luck is. First, a dominant—although not undisputed—idea is that necessary truths have probability 1. Moreover, since English speakers use the terms interchangeably, arguing that luck and fortune are two distinct concepts entails that speakers are systematically mistaken in their usage of the terms, which is a hardly tenable error theory. Luck certainly plays a large role in individual success and failure. For instance, he thinks that not even the best batter in history can plausibly be said to have control over whether he hits the ball, since there are many factors over which he cannot exercise any sort of control—for example, distractions, the pitches he receives, and the play of the opposing fielders. M1 has two important features. Genre: Philosophy Date Book: 2011-06-30 Editor by: OUP Oxford Format Book: PDF, ePUB & Audiobooks Download: 240 Languages: English, French and German Download eBook. Ballantyne argues that investigating the nature of luck does not allow to better understand knowledge. In a similar way, LC5 explains that, while we lack effective control over many physical events—for example, sunrises—the reason why they are not lucky is that they are under our tracking control, that is, they are things that we regularly monitor and thereby can exploit to our advantage. In reply, Broncano-Berrocal (2015) argues that Lackey’s objection obviates the clause on initial conditions of modal accounts: if someone decides to go—and goes—to Paris on a whim, close possible worlds in which the relevant initial conditions for that trip are the same as in the actual world—that is, the only possible worlds that according to modal views are relevant to assess whether the trip is by luck—are worlds in which that person makes the decision to go to Paris. Rescher (1969: 329) gives a similar account of control as the capacity to produce the occurrence of an event—what Rescher calls positive control—and the capacity to prevent it—what he calls negative control. Closeness is simply assumed to be a function of how intuitively similar possible worlds are to the actual world. We find various analyses of an event's being lucky, while others in the book argue that that is misguided and that we should focus on another analysandum. On the one hand, we exercise effective control over something by competently bringing it to a desired state—for example, by causally influencing it in a certain way. With that distinction in place, Pritchard distinguishes two competing ways to understand the notion of risk or of risk event. 2009. 2. For instance, suppose that someone decides to catch the next flight to Paris on a whim. (p. 113) Thus, we can control our own luck by controlling the extent to which we have opportunities to suffer from good or bad luck. Agents' control is the yardstick by which the bearing of luck on their freedom and moral responsibility is measured. 2013. For example, a common claim in philosophy of action is that acting because of luck prevents free action. Riggs (2007) argues that M1 is defective precisely because there is no non-arbitrary way to fix the relevant initial conditions. Strokes of luck. Riggs, Wayne 2007. Before considering an alternative approach to luck, let us see how subjective probabilistic accounts explain the three general features of luck presented at the beginning of the article. More precisely: SP1: A significant event E is lucky for an agent S at time t if only if, just before the occurrence of E at t, S had a low degree of belief that E would occur at t. A subjective probabilistic account might be also formulated in terms of the agent’s evidence for the occurrence of the event—see Steglich-Petersen (2010): SP2: A significant event E is lucky for an agent S at time t if only if, given S’s evidence just before the occurrence of E at t, there was low probability that E would occur at t. SP1 and SP2 characterize luck as a perspectival notion: if for A but not for B it is subjectively improbable that an event E will occur, then, if E occurs, E is lucky for A but not for B—Latus (2003) endorses this thesis. 2014. A related way to formulate a probabilistic view—suggested by Baumann 2012—is by means of conditional objective probabilities: OP2: A significant event E is lucky for an agent S at time t if only if, prior to the occurrence of E at t, there was low objective probability conditional on C that E would occur at t. C is whatever condition one uses to determine the probability that the event will occur. Milburn (2014) argues that (1) and (2) are plausibly equivalent: E is lucky for S if and only if S is lucky that E. (3) and (4) also seem equivalent: it is a matter of luck that E if and only if E is by luck. Mundane as it is, the concept of luck nonetheless plays a pivotal role in central areas of philosophy, either because it is the key element of widespread philosophical theses or because it gives rise to challenging puzzles. S1 requires that lucky agents have the capacity to ascribe significance. For example, Mark Heller (1999) contends that person S’s belief that p is epistemically lucky (and hence not knowledge) if p is true in the actual world, but there is at least one world, in a contextually-determined set of possible worlds, where S’s belief that p is false. Subject-involving luck. Coffman’s monograph includes extensive criticism of leading theories of luck and argues that luck can be explained in terms of the notion of stroke of luck; it also explores the applications in epistemology and philosophy of action of that idea. Broncano-Berrocal's account also raises traditional worries for lack of control accounts of luck. Concerning gradualness, it can be argued that the degree of luck of an event proportionally varies with its significance or value—Latus (2003), Levy (2011: 36), Rescher (1995: 211–12; 2014). I take it that that is rather uncontroversial, though: someone who buys a lottery ticket creates the opportunity for a specific lucky event to take place that someone who does not buy a lottery ticket does not. According to this view, justice demands that variations in how well-off people are should be wholly determined by the responsible choices people make and not by differences in their unchosen circumstances. Coffman gives a hybrid account of luck in terms of easy possibility and lack of control. In “Moral Luck,” Thomas Nagel describes the motivation for denying the existence of moral luck. Needless to say, Hales and Johnson are fully aware of how controversial their thesis and the argument that is meant to support it are. Philosophers have been concerned about the role of luck or, as it is sometimes referred to as fortune. The psychology and philosophy of luck. As usual in areas of philosophy where the notion of possibility is invoked, advocates of the modal approach use possible worlds terminology to explain that notion and in turn the concept of luck. Owens gives an account of coincidences according to which a coincidence is an event whose constituents are nomologically independent of each other. For example, we say things such as “S is lucky to live in an earthquake-free region” even though S ignores it and is therefore lucky that an earthquake will not make her house collapse. From Pritchard’s example, we might infer that if an agent acts with the intention of bringing about some result, then if it occurs, it is not an accident. On the one hand, the term “lucky” can be predicated of agents—for example, “Chloe is lucky to win the lottery.” In general, the kind of beings to which we attribute luck are beings with objective or subjective interests such as self-preservation or desires—see Ballantyne (2012) for further discussion. As in the case of modal conditions, and mainly for discussion purposes, the latter will be presented as if they constituted full-fledged analyses of luck—also as before, the analyses will be presented as analyses of significant events. There has been a great deal of interest in the concept of luck in the recent psychological and philosophical literature. Rescher, Nicholas. Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn 2010. These two complex issues are a matter of controversy in ethics and political philosophy, respectively. Then, they propose an error theory according to which most people would be mistaken to say that B’s discovery is by luck: B’s discovery is in reality fortunate, not lucky—see section 7 for the specific way in which Pritchard and Levy distinguish luck from fortune. Moral Luck and Moral Theory Michael Philips asks whether you have to be lucky in order to be good. And Whittington defends a revised version of the modal account of luck in order to make sense of resultant moral luck. Rescher provides an extensive examination of the concept of control. To illustrate how LC4 can distinguish between lucky and non-lucky physical events beyond our control, Riggs proposes a case in which two people, A and B, are about to be executed, but only A knows two important facts: first, that their captors believe that solar eclipses are in reality a message from the gods telling them to stop sacrifices; second, that, unbeknownst to their captors, a solar eclipse will take place at the exact time the execution is planned. Sam is so honest and committed that it is virtually psychologically impossible for him to be unfaithful towards Mary. The Philosophy Of Luck. By contrast, attributions of non-relational luck not so clearly convey good or bad luck—for example, “The discovery of Pluto was a matter of luck.” This is plausibly due to the fact that such attributions do not denote any relationship between a lucky event and an agent or group of agents. This, however, raises the question of exactly what is gained by explaining luck in terms of risk; doesn't this imply that the good old analysis of luck in terms of lack of control still holds? How high its risk of occurrence is—that is, how risky it is—depends on how large the proportion of close possible worlds in which it would occur is—call this the proportion view of degrees of risk—or on how distant possible worlds in which it would occur are—call this the distance view of degrees of risk. So, she knows that her basic action will bring about the desired effect while failing to know how. Concerning goodness and badness, the explanation is straightforward: luck is good or bad because the significance that lucky events have for people is positive or negative. In this way, the closer those worlds are, the luckier the event is—Pritchard (2014) endorses the distance view. On the other hand, how close or immediate should an antecedent be in order to prevent two events from constituting a coincidence is a matter that usually becomes clear in context. Probabilistic and modal views have difficulties when it comes to accounting for highly probable or modally robust lucky events arising out of coincidence. moral luck is that our ordinary moral judgments routinely violate the control condition: people are praised and blamed for matters beyond their control. But as Pritchard (2005: 126) argues, there are paradigmatic cases of luck that involve no accidents. But that is problematic insofar as the condition prevents sentient nonhuman beings (Coffman 2007) and human beings with diminished capacities like newborns or comatose adults (Ballantyne 2012) from being lucky. Instead, Levy argues that there is no fixed proportion of close possible worlds where an event must not occur to be considered lucky in the actual world. Some authors give pure lack of control accounts—for example, Broncano-Berrocal (2015), Riggs (2009). For example, the unconditional probability that Lionel Messi will score a goal in the soccer match is high but given C—the fact that he is injured—the probability that he will score is low. 1. The machinations of luck. As we have seen, Levy (2011) thinks that the size of the proportion of close possible worlds in which an event needs not occur to count as lucky is sensitive to the significance that the event has for the agent. In reply, lack of control theorists might argue that Hales is illicitly raising the standards of control. None of the participants is in a position to know that they would win the lottery and survive as a result. Suppose that (i) A buries a treasure at location L and that (ii) B independently places a plant in the ground of L. When digging, B discovers A’s treasure. On the other hand, modal views have at least two interesting ways to account for degrees of luck—the terminology below is from Williamson (2009), who applies it to the safety condition for knowledge. After all, it is still a coincidence that she has purchased the ticket that corresponds to the accurate prediction of the demon. ISSN: 1538 - 1617 criticism of luck egalitarianism on the table and describe a doctrine of responsibility-catering prioritarianism (RCP) that can withstand both criticisms. The view, which can be called the distance view, says that the degree of luck of an event varies as a function of the distance to the actual world of possible worlds in which it would fail to occur. In his way, having good health or a good financial situation are instances of fortune, not of luck, while winning a fair lottery is only an instance of luck. This article gives an overview of current philosophical theorizing about the concept of luck itself. In other words, they focus on relational luck. McKinnon (2013; 2014) proposes a probabilistic account of diachronic luck instead. How should moral luck affect our judgments of responsibility? Events. The case is allegedly troublesome for S2 because the event, which is bad luck for the man, has no impact on the man’s mental states and, in particular, on his interior life, which is not altered. Email: fernando.broncanoberrocal@kuleuven.be Belgium. Test. A prominent exception is Pritchard (2005), who is the only author in the literature advocating a pure modal account of luck—in more recent work (2014), he drops the significance condition from his analysis, plausibly because he is mainly interested in giving an account of non-relational luck. Concerning vagueness, the notion of control is not as precise as to remove all vagueness from the analysis of luck. According to LC3, if we do not want to be exposed to the whims of luck not only we have to be able to perform—or omit performing—actions that causally influence the world, but we also need to know that, and how, the world is sensitive to them. In addition, they typically include a significance condition to explain why events are lucky for agents. Steglich-Petersen (2010) thinks that one way to fix this problem is to formulate a subjective view in terms of the agent’s total knowledge instead of her degree of belief or evidence for the occurrence of the event: SP4: A significant event E is lucky for an agent S at time t if only if, for all S knew just before the occurrence of E at t, there was low probability that E would occur at t. SP4 is compatible with an event being lucky for the agent when she has no prior evidence or doxastic state about its occurrence. It will be of great interest and use to anyone working in epistemology, philosophy of action, ethics, social and political philosophy, and the history of philosophy. After all, intuitions about whether the result of our actions is under our control go hand in hand with intuitions about whether the result of our actions is because of our skills. The view, called the expected outcome view, starts with the observation that we can determine the expected objective ratio of many events, including people’s performances. For example, a driver might know that by turning the steering wheel to the left she will avoid an obstacle in the road, but she might be completely mistaken about how exactly this works—for example, she might erroneously believe that, whenever she turns the steering wheel to the left, it is a magical dwarf who moves the car to the left. In sum, knowing that one will be lucky—and therefore being in a position to know it—does not necessarily prevent one from being lucky. However, Lackey (2008) argues that the fact that a significant event is beyond our control is neither necessary nor sufficient for the event being lucky. My first book, Responsibility & Luck: A Defense of Praise and Blame, is available for purchase in paperback and kindle formats. In the same way, as causally relevant intentional action prevents an event from being an accident, causally relevant intentional action seems to prevent a pair of events—someone’s flipping of the coin and the coin landing heads—from being a coincidence. As Lackey’s buried treasure case illustrates, if the occurrence of the components of a coincidence—A’s burial of the treasure and B’s digging at the same location—is highly probable or modally robust, the occurrence of the resulting coincidental event—B’s discovery of A’s treasure—is also highly probable or modally robust. If two people act in the same way but the consequences of one of their actions are worse due to luck, should we morally assess them in the same way? Williamson, Timothy. Can two people who make the same bad decision bear different levels of moral responsibility? Since I can't do justice to all the essays in this short review, let me just briefly discuss three of them. Leaving aside the question of what the correct formulation of the significance condition is, it is interesting to see how a significance condition can help explain the three general features of luck outlined above, that is, the goodness, badness, vagueness, and gradualness of luck. Although Levy thinks that it is a mistake to seek much clarity about how the latter affects the former, he also believes that there is a relation of inverse proportionality between the two: the more significant an event for an agent is, the smaller needs to be the proportion of close possible worlds in which it would not occur to be considered lucky for the agent—Coffman (2014) calls this the inverse proportionality thesis; see Levy (2011: 36). (pp. Duncan Pritchard and Lee John Whittington (eds. Without further ado, let us consider the following modal account by Pritchard (2005: 128): M1: A significant event E is lucky for an agent S at time t if only if E occurs in the actual world at t but does not occur at t or at times close to t in a wide proportion of close possible worlds in which the relevant initial conditions for E are the same as in the actual world. The Myth of Luck helps us to regain our own agency in the world - telling the entertaining story of the philosophy and history of luck along the way. Does luck exclude control? On the other hand, advocates of the subjective approach might explain borderline cases of luck by appealing to the fact that the relevant subjective probabilities are not always transparent, so if we cannot determine whether an event is lucky or non-lucky, it is plausibly because the relevant subjective probabilities cannot be determined either. For example, she challenges the distinction between intervening and environmental luck by pointing to the possibility of a situation in which something is about to intervene but then something or someone else intervenes, so that the former intervention doesn't take place and the situation proceeds normally. However, Hales (2014) argues that luck may be predicated not only synchronically—that is, of an event’s occurrence at a certain time—but also diachronically—that is, of a series or streak of events occurring at different times. More specifically, coincidences are such that we cannot explain why they occur because there is no common nomological antecedent of their components or a nomological connection between them. Not all lucky events are coincidental events. For it gives rise to at least as many questions as it attempts to answer. That's a good reason to apply a modus ponens of the kind mentioned earlier rather than a modus tollens. The corresponding account of luck is the following: LC5: A significant event E is lucky for an agent S at time t if only if E is beyond S’s control at t, where E is beyond S’s control at t either if (i) S lacks effective control over E, or (ii) E is not under S’s tracking control, or (iii) both. Coffman (2007) proposes an alternative significance condition in terms of the positive or negative effect of lucky events on the agent: S2: An event E is lucky for an agent S only if (i) S is sentient and (ii) E has some objective evaluative status for S—that is, E has some objectively good or bad, positive or negative, effect on S. Ballantyne (2012) gives a counterexample to S2 by arguing, first, that (ii) should be read as follows: (ii)* E has some objectively positive or negative effect on S’s mental states. The idea that morality is immune from luck finds inspiration inKant: Thomas Nagel approvingly cites this passage in the opening of his 1979article, “Moral Luck.” Nagel’s article began as areply to Williams’ paper of the same name, and the two articlestogether articulated in a new and powerful way a challenge for anyonewishing to defend the Kantian idea that an important aspect ofmorality is immune from luck, or independent of what is outside of ourcontrol. Nonetheless, Pritchard leaves as a contextual matter what features of the actual world need to be fixed in our evaluation of close possible worlds. Coffman, E. J. For instance, when the relevant event is an action by the agent—for example, that S scores a goal—the luck-involving expressions in (3) and (4) apply to the agent—for example, it is a matter of luck that S scores a goal—but fail to establish a relationship between the agent—S—and the event—S’s scoring of a goal.
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