Some authors give pure lack of control accounts—for example, Broncano-Berrocal (2015), Riggs (2009). On the other hand, defenders of objective probabilistic views might in principle explain why luck is vague notion in epistemic terms. 2015. For example, if Jack the Ripper is terrorizing the neighborhood and it is one’s dearest friend Bob knocking on one’s door, one might be lucky that Bob is not Jack the Ripper, but it is metaphysically impossible that Bob is Jack the Ripper because things are self-identical—Hales gives credit to John Hawthorne for the example. 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. Since the significance condition establishes a relationship between an agent and an event, whether one thinks that such a condition is needed or not depends on what the target of one’s account is. There are several concepts that are closely related to the concept of luck. 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. Luck egalitarianism is a view about distributive justice espoused by a variety of egalitarian and other political philosophers. Pritchard, Duncan, & Whittington, Lee John (eds.). On the contrary, an adequate account should predict borderline cases, that is, cases that are neither clearly lucky nor clearly non-lucky. 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. On the one hand, they can explain why luck is a gradual notion in a natural way. In this sense, that a lucky event could have easily not occurred means that, although it occurs in the actual world, it would fail to occur in close possible worlds. Reviewed by Rik Peels, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Clearly, all this calls for mutual critical engagement and discussion. 2. 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. While Rescher defends a probabilistic account of luck, Coffman thinks that lack of both negative and positive control—when understood in terms of freedom—is necessary for luck. 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. For Broncano-Berrocal, the modal and probabilistic accounts of event-relative risk are both correct: while the probabilistic conception is the one that is typically used or assumed in scientific and technical contexts, the modal conception better fits our everyday thinking about risky events. Created by. Luck as risk and the lack of control account of luck. Philosophy Nagel "Moral Luck" STUDY. 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. 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. In reply, defenders of lack of control views might argue that it is not unreasonable to say that such a person is lucky that the sun rises every morning and keeps, unbeknownst to her, her facility running. 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. 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. But they face at least two problems. The Philosophy Of Luck. 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. McKinnon gives an answer to the question of what does it mean to say that someone creates her own luck and uses her account of diachronic luck to explain how we evaluate performances. Joe Milburn also argues that we haven't zoomed in on the right analysandum. Ballantyne, Nathan. The concept of accident is closely related to the concept of luck. Interestingly, winning the prize of an ordinary lottery is luckier than winning the same amount of money by tossing a coin, that is, when the odds are lower. Like.....When and where a person was conceived, gestated, and born The genes of the ancestors are a matter of luck, as is the manner in which the parents genetic contribution combined at the time of conception. Hales and Johnson even argue that strong biases in our luck attributions suggest that there probably isn't such a thing as luck. The epistemic analysis of luck. For example, if it is by bad luck that a manufacturing company fails to achieve its yearly revenue goal—so it is bad luck for the company—it does not necessary follow that each and every one of its workers—for example, people working on the assembly line—are also unlucky, if, say, they cannot be fired by law and the company is not compromised. Perhaps, the following slightly different formulation is to be preferred—see Coffman (2007): M2: 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 at least half the close possible worlds in which the relevant initial conditions for E are the same as in the actual world. 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. To see exactly how the challenge arises, let us begin with … 2014. Cases like this motivate philosophers who theorize about the concept of luck to endorse a significance condition, that is, a requirement to the effect that an event is lucky for an agent only if the event is significant to the agent. moral luck is that our ordinary moral judgments routinely violate the control condition: people are praised and blamed for matters beyond their control. But if one holds—with many theorists working on collective intentionality—that groups can be the bearers of intentional states, it might turn out that group luck cannot be so easily reduced to individual luck. It might be thought that lucky events are events whose occurrence was not predetermined in that way. 2007. Test. According to Anderson, luck egalitarianism is defective in a deeper way than has been noted to this point. Milburn distinguishes between subject-relative and subject-involving luck and argues that one of the upshots of focusing on the latter is that lack of control accounts of luck become more attractive. 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. 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. No one would say that a stick of wood is lucky not to have been destroyed by a rockfall if its existence bore absolutely no significance to anyone’s interests, and if one would, one would only say it figuratively. 2008. Nagel classifies the various cases of moral luck as resultant, circumstantial, or constitutive luck—based on that which is affected by luck.9 In cases of resultant luck, a person The first one is that it does not consider any close possible world relevant to determine whether an event is lucky or not: only those in which the relevant initial conditions are the same as in the actual world. This claim implies that resources will end up unequally distributed: if Aisha is myopic, then she will get glasses, whilst Beryl, who has 20:20 vision, will not, because she does not need them. All the essays elucidate the concept of luck in some way or another, except for Sabine Roeser's interesting paper on the Uncertainty Paradox -- the fact that sometimes people prefer a certain outcome at all costs, even when it is the worst case. 1. For example, he contends that organisms—humans included—are lucky to be alive because the gravitational constant, G, is the one that actually is, but the probability that G made life possible is 1. ISBN 9781906659950 What also makes a difference is where the critical element is put in the narrative that describes the series of events: in the beginning, in the middle, or at the end. However, that person is not less lucky to win the lottery because of that knowledge or because of being in that position. For instance, Rescher (1995: 211–12; 2014) thinks that luck varies with not only significance but also chance. On a related note, modal theorists can explore the relation between the significance of a lucky event and its modal profile. 2009. In Haddock, A., Millar, A. 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. 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