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Moral luck occurs when someone's moral standing is affected by factors beyond her control, i.e., luck. Many philosophers reject moral luck. Hanna defends a particular kind of it: circumstantial luck. Circumstantial luck is luck in one's circumstances that affects one's moral standing, e.g., luck involving one's choices and opportunities. Hanna criticizes the standard argument against circumstantial luck. Most philosophers discussed restricted their anti-moral luck claims to claims about responsibility, insisting that degrees of praiseworthiness, blameworthiness, laudability, and culpability can't be affected by luck in circumstances.

Current epistemological orthodoxy has it that knowledge is incompatible with luck. More precisely: Knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck (of a certain, interesting kind). This is often treated as a truism which is not even in need of argumentative support. In this paper, I argue that there is lucky knowledge. In the first part, I use an intuitive and not very developed notion of luck to show that there are cases of knowledge which are \"lucky\" in that sense. In the second part, I look at philosophical conceptions of luck (modal and probabilistic ones) and come to the conclusion that knowledge can be lucky in those senses, too. I also turns out that a probabilistic notion of luck can help us see in what ways a particular piece of knowledge or belief can be lucky or not lucky.

Every account of moral responsibility has conditions that distinguish between the consequences, actions, or traits that warrant praise or blame and those that do not. One intuitive condition is that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness cannot be affected by luck, that is, by factors beyond the agent's control. Several philosophers build their accounts of moral responsibility on this luck-free condition, and we may call their views Luck-Free Moral Responsibility (LFMR). I offer moral and metaphysical arguments against LFMR. First, I maintain that considerations of fairness that often motivate LFMR do not require its adoption. Second, I contend that LFMR has counterintuitive implications for the nature and scope of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and that LFMR is vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum. Third, I state some common reasons for thinking that LFMR's commitment to true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom is problematic, and I argue that if there are no such true counterfactuals and if LFMR is true, a person is praiseworthy and blameworthy at most for a tiny fraction of her actions. Fourth, I argue that proponents of LFMR cannot escape this skeptical cost by appealing to a different kind of counterfactual of freedom. Fifth, I develop an anti-skeptical motivation to affirm the idea that luck can affect moral responsibility.

My article is organized as follows. In Section I, I will summarize a familiar version of the recent history of political philosophy--a version that locates the origins of luck egalitarianism in Rawls's thought but insists that he himself fails to develop the view in a consistent or thoroughgoing way. Although I will make clear my disagreement with the interpretation of Rawls as an incipient luck egalitarian, I will postpone a complete account of the bases for my disagreement until Section III. In the intervening section (Section II), I will present some reasons for doubting the plausibility of the luck-egalitarian position. In the course of my discussion, I will argue that any form of distributive egalitarianism, if it is to be persuasive, must be rooted in a more general conception of equality as a moral value or normative ideal. With that argument as background, I will return in Section III to Rawls. I will attempt to show that his work, properly understood, provides no support for luck egalitarianism; his position is better understood as helping to illustrate how a plausible form of distributive egalitarianism can be anchored in a conception of equality as a social and political ideal. Finally, in Section IV, I will consider some attempts to demonstrate that luck-egalitarian principles can also be anchored in a broader conception of equality.

The most popular position in the moral luck debate is to reject resultant moral luck while accepting the possibility of other types of moral luck. But it is unclear whether this position is stable. Some argue that luck is luck and if it is relevant for moral responsibility anywhere, it is relevant everywhere, and vice versa. Some argue that given the similarities between circumstantial moral luck and resultant moral luck, there is good evidence that if the former exists, so does the latter. The challenge is especially pressing for the large group that exclusively deny resultant moral luck. I argue that rejecting resultant moral luck alone is a stable and plausible position. This is because, in a nutshell, the other types of luck can but the results of an action cannot affect what makes one morally responsible.

Looking out the window, I see that it's raining outside. Do I know that it's raining outside? According to proponents of the Entailment Thesis, I do. If I see that p, I know that p. In general, the Entailment Thesis is the thesis that if S perceives that p, S knows that p. But recently, some philosophers (McDowell, in Smith (ed.) Reading McDowell on mind and world, 2002; Turri, Theoria 76(3):197–206, 2010; Pritchard, Philos Issues (Supplement to Nous) 21:434–455, 2011; Pritchard, Epistemological disjunctivism, 2012) have argued that the Entailment Thesis is false. On their view, we can see p and not know that p. In this paper, I argue that their arguments are unsuccessful.

Luck is at issue when it is a matter of pure chance that a result of significant positive of negative value ensues for someone. Luck differs from fate, which pivots on an individual's condition, and from fortune, which pivots on an individual's talent and effort. It is by luck that you are rich when you win the lottery, by fortune if your wealth comes from talent and hard work, and by fate if you inherit those millions. On this basis luck lies beyond anyone's rational control. With risk (R) as the probability of failure in a chancy situation and the stake (S) as the difference between a favorable and an unfavorable outcome, luck (L) can be measured as the product of these quantities: L = R × S. The condition of human-kind in an uncertain world being as it is, luck cannot be eliminated as a key factor of our existence, be it in cognitive, practical, or ethical regards.

Robert Hartman's parallelism argument aims to show that resultant moral luck exists. The gist of the argument is this: because there is circumstantial moral luck in a particular circumstantial luck scenario and that scenario is analogous in important ways to a particular resultant luck scenario, the resultant luck scenario is plausibly an instance of resultant moral luck (and hence, resultant moral luck exists). I argue that there is a principled way of denying that circumstantial moral luck is present in the circumstantial luck scenario. Doing so is not enough, however, to reject Hartman's general analogical line of reasoning since an alternative parallelism argument based on a resultant luck scenario and a circumstantial luck scenario of another kind can be made. Nevertheless, I argue that the analogy between the circumstantial luck scenario and the resultant luck scenario in both the alternative parallelism argument and its original counterpart is too weak to support the claim that resultant moral luck is present in the resultant luck scenario.