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"Luck"
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Drawing a Line: Rejecting Resultant Moral Luck Alone
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.
Journal Article
The golden goose
Farmer Skint and his family on Woebegone Farm have fallen on hard times, but their luck changes with the arrival of a special golden goose.
Book
On luck and significance
It is often assumed that all lucky events are significant. The thought is that a chancy event such as winning the lottery is lucky for you in part because it affects your interests or well-being. But whether you win an Absurdist Raffle in which there are no prizes, is, intuitively, not a matter of luck. This is because this event—even if chancy—is not significant for any subject. However, a few philosophers have recently claimed not only that luck does not necessarily involve a significance condition but that we should not view luck involving claims in terms of significance. After reviewing the literature on this topic, I argue that lucky events are significant. A significance condition is necessary to distinguish between different kinds of luck: practical, epistemic, and moral. All lucky events are significant and chancy, but they can be significant for subjects in different ways. For example, an event is epistemically lucky for you if it is epistemically significant and chancy, but such events need not affect your practical interests or moral standing. Furthermore, I argue that events that are chancy but not significant should be thought of in terms of chance and not luck.
Journal Article
Did I ever tell you how lucky you are?
Compared to the problems of some of the creatures an old man describes, the boy in this story is really quite lucky.
Book
Moral Luck Defended
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.
Journal Article
The modal account of luck revisited
According to the canonical formulation of the modal account of luck [e.g. Pritchard (2005)], an event is lucky just when that event occurs in the actual world but not in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world. This paper argues, with reference to a novel variety of counterexample, that it is a mistake to focus, when assessing a given event for luckiness, on events distributed over just the nearest possible worlds. More specifically, our objection to the canonical formulation of the modal account of luck reveals that whether an event is lucky depends crucially on events distributed over all possible worlds–viz., across the modal universe. It is shown that an amended modal account of luck which respects this point has the additional virtue of avoiding a notable kind of counterexample to modal accounts of luck proposed by Lackey (2008).
Journal Article