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. Neil Levy develops an account of luck, which is then applied to the free will debate. He argues that the standard luck objection succeeds against common accounts of libertarian free will, but that it is possible to amend libertarian accounts so that they are no more vulnerable to luck (...) than is compatibilism. But compatibilist accounts of luck are themselves vulnerable to a powerful luck objection: historical compatibilisms cannot satisfactorily explain how agents can take responsibility for their constitutive luck; non-historical compatibilisms run into insurmountable difficulties with the epistemic condition on control over action. Levy argues that because epistemic conditions on control are so demanding that they are rarely satisfied, agents are not blameworthy for performing actions that they take to be best in a given situation. It follows that if there are any actions for which agents are responsible, they are akratic actions; but even these are unacceptably subject to luck. Levy goes on to discuss recent non-historical compatibilisms, and argues that they do not offer a viable alternative to control-based compatibilisms. He suggests that luck undermines our freedom and moral responsibility no matter whether determinism is true or not. (shrink)

This essay offers a rearticulation and defence of the modal account of luck that the author developed in earlier work . In particular, the proposal is situated within a certain methodology, a component of which is paying due attention to the cognitive science literature on luck ascriptions. It is shown that with the modal account of luck properly articulated it can adequately deal with some of the problems that have recently been offered against it, and that the view has a (...) number of attractions over competing proposals, such as the lack of control account. (shrink)

Lara Buchak sets out a new account of rational decision-making in the face of risk. She argues that the orthodox view is too narrow, and suggests an alternative, more permissive theory: one that allows individuals to pay attention to the worst-case or best-case scenario, and vindicates the ordinary decision-maker.

David McCarthy has recently suggested that our compensation and liability practices may be interpreted as reflecting a fundamental norm to hold people liable for imposing risk of harm on others. Independently, closely related ideas have been criticised by Stephen R. Perry and Arthur Ripstein as incompatible with central features of negligence law. We aim to show that these objections are unsuccessful against McCarthy’s Risk–liability theory, and that such an approach is a promising means both for understanding the moral basis of (...) liability for negligence and for reasoning about possible reforms of the institution of negligence law. (shrink)

Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.

In this paper, I critically examine the two dominant views of the concept of luck in the current literature: lack of control accounts and modal accounts. In particular, I argue that the conditions proposed by such views—that is, a lack of control and the absence of counterfactual robustness—are neither necessary nor sufficient for an event's being lucky. Hence, I conclude that the two main accounts in the current literature both fail to capture what is distinctive of, and central to, the (...) concept of luck. (shrink)

In this paper, I do three things. First, I offer an overview of an anti- luck epistemology, as set out in my book, Epistemic Luck. Second, I attempt to meet some of the main criticisms that one might level against the key theses that I propose in this work. And finally, third, I sketch some of the ways in which the strategy of anti- luck epistemology can be developed in new directions.

I hear the patter of little feet around the house, I expect Bruce. What I expect is a cat, a particular cat. If I heard such a patter in another house, I might expect a cat but no particular cat. What I expect then seems to be a Meinongian incomplete cat. I expect winter, expect stormy weather, expect to shovel snow, expect fatigue---a season, a phenomenon, an activity, a state. I expect that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. (...) This time what I expect is a state of affairs. If we let surface grammar be our guide, the objects of expectation seem quite a miscellany. The same goes for belief, since expectation is one kind of belief. The same goes for desire: I could want Bruce, want a cat but no particular cat, want winter, want stormy weather, want to shovel snow, want fatigue, or want that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. The same goes for other attitudes to the extent that they consist partly of beliefs or desires or lacks thereof. But the seeming diversity of objects might be an illusion. Perhaps the objects of attitudes are uniform in category, and it is our ways of speaking elliptically about these uniform objects that are diverse. That indeed is our consensus. We mostly think that the attitudes uniformly have propositions as their objects. That is why we speak habitually of "propositional attitudes.". (shrink)

The notion of credit plays a central role in virtue epistemology and in the literature on moral worth. While virtue epistemologists and ethicists have devoted a significant amount of work to providing an account of creditable success, a unified theory of credit applicable to both epistemology and ethics, as well as a discussion of the general form it should take, are largely missing from the literature. Our goal is to lay out a theory of credit that seems to underlie much (...) of the discussion in virtue epistemology, which we dub the Cake Theory. We argue that given the goals that virtue epistemologists and ethicists who discuss moral worth have, this theory is problematic, for it makes credit depend on the wrong facts. (shrink)

The epistemology of risk examines how risks bear on epistemic properties. A common framework for examining the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support is best modelled as numerical probability given the available evidence. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. I describe three loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on a belief for action, where those consequences (...) are significant if the belief is false. The second locus concerns whether beliefs themselves—regardless of action—can be risky, costly, or harmful. The third locus concerns epistemic risks we confront as social epistemic agents. I aim to motivate the relevant alternatives framework as a fruitful approach to the epistemology of risk. I first articulate a ‘relevant alternatives’ model of the relationship between stakes, evidence, and action. I then employ the relevant alternatives framework to undermine the motivation for moral encroachment. Finally, I argue the relevant alternatives framework illuminates epistemic phenomena such as gaslighting, conspiracy theories, and crying wolf, and I draw on the framework to diagnose the undue skepticism endemic to rape accusations. (shrink)

The modal account of luck has become very popular and influential in the past decade. More recently, some of its proponents have also put forth a modal account of risk and argued that we ought to apply it to problems both in and out of philosophy. This paper tries to show that modal conceptions of luck and risk are mistaken.

The notion of risk plays a central role in economics, finance, health, psychology, law and elsewhere, and is prevalent in managing challenges and resources in day-to-day life. In recent work, Duncan Pritchard (2015, 2016) has argued against the orthodox probabilistic conception of risk on which the risk of a hypothetical scenario is determined by how probable it is, and in favour of a modal conception on which the risk of a hypothetical scenario is determined by how modally close it is. (...) In this article, we use Pritchard’s discussion as a springboard for a more wide-ranging discussion of the notion of risk. We introduce three different conceptions of risk: the standard probabilistic conception, Pritchard’s modal conception, and a normalcy conception that is new (though it has some precursors in the psychological literature on risk perception). Ultimately, we argue that the modal conception is ill-suited to the roles that a notion of risk is required to play and explore the prospects for a form of pluralism about risk, embracing both the probabilistic and the normalcy conceptions. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that part of what makes an event lucky concerns how probable that event is. In this paper, I argue that an epistemic probability account of luck successfully resists recent arguments that all theories of luck, including probability theories, are subject to counterexample (Hales 2016). I argue that an event is lucky if and only if it is significant and sufficiently improbable. An event is significant when, given some reflection, the subject would regard the event as significant, and (...) the event’s epistemic probability, determined by the subject’s evidence, is the only kind of probability that directly bears on whether or not the event is lucky. I conclude with some lessons that are applicable to probability theorists of luck generally, including those defending non-epistemic probability theories. (shrink)

According to the safety condition, a subject knows that p only if she would believe that p only if p was true. The safety condition has been a very popular necessary condition for knowledge of late. However, it is well documented that the safety condition is trivially satisfied in cases where the subject believes in a necessary truth. This is for the simple reason that a necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, and therefore it is true in all (...) possible worlds where it is believed. But clearly, all beliefs concerning necessary truths do not amount to knowledge. The safety theorists have attempted to deal with the problem caused by necessary truths by restricting the safety condition to purely contingent truths and by globalizing the safety condition to a set of propositions. Both of these solutions are problematic. The principal aim of this paper is to develop a version of the safety condition that is able to deal with cases featuring necessary truths. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to mark the transition from an anti-luck epistemology to an anti-risk epistemology, and to explain in the process how the latter has advantages over the former. We begin with an account of anti-luck epistemology and the modal account of luck that underpins it. Then we consider the close inter-relationships between luck and risk, and in the process set out the modal account of risk that is a natural extension of the modal account of luck. (...) Finally, we apply the modal account of risk to epistemology in order to develop an anti-risk epistemology, and then explore the merits of this proposal. In particular, it is shown that this account can avoid a theoretical lacuna in anti-luck epistemology, and there is a stronger theoretical motivation for anti-risk epistemology compared with anti-luck epistemology, especially when it comes to explaining why environmental epistemic luck is incompatible with knowledge. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer a diagnosis. It focuses on the problem of moral luck, but, unlike most papers on that topic, offers no solution to the problem. Instead, what I do is discuss a number of attempts to show there is no such thing as moral luck, argue that they fail and, more importantly, that we should not be surprised they fail. I then suggest that the difficulty of the problem posed by moral luck is paralleled (...) by another problem about luck, namely the problem of coming up with an account of propositional knowledge that does not count certain lucky guesses as knowledge. The comparison is instructive. It brings home how hard it is to eliminate luck. As such, we should not expect a solution to either problem to be forthcoming. I also note an important disanalogy between the two problems. While we can quite easily accept that luck plays a role in knowledge, the existence of moral luck threatens to cause a good deal more trouble. (shrink)

Could it be right to convict and punish defendants using only statistical evidence? In this paper, I argue that it is not and explain why it would be wrong. This is difficult to do because there is a powerful argument for thinking that we should convict and punish defendants using statistical evidence. It looks as if the relevant cases are cases of decision under risk and it seems we know what we should do in such cases (i.e., maximize expected value). (...) Given some standard assumptions about the values at stake, the case for convicting and punishing using statistical evidence seems solid. In trying to show where this argument goes wrong, I shall argue (against Lockeans, reliabilists, and others) that beliefs supported only by statistical evidence are epistemically defective and (against Enoch, Fisher, and Spectre) that these epistemic considerations should matter to the law. To solve the puzzle about the role of statistical evidence in the law, we need to revise some commonly held assumptions about epistemic value and defend the relevance of epistemology to this practical question. (shrink)

What is the epistemological structure of situations where many small risks amount to a large one? Lottery and preface paradoxes and puzzles about quantum-mechanical blips threaten the idea that competent deduction is a way of extending our knowledge. Seemingly, everyday knowledge involves small risks, and competently deducing the conjunction of many such truths from them yields a conclusion too risky to constitute knowledge. But the dilemma between scepticism and abandoning MPC is false. In extreme cases, objectively improbable truths are known. (...) Safety is modal, not probabilistic, in structure, with closure and factiveness conditions. It is modelled using closeness of worlds. Safety is analogous to knowledge. It suggests an interpretation of possible worlds semantics for epistemic logic. To avoid logical omniscience, a relation of epistemic counterparthood between formulas is introduced. This supports a safety conception of knowledge and formalizes how extending knowledge by deduction depends on logical competence. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that an event is lucky for an agent only if it was suitably improbable, but there is considerable disagreement about how to understand this improbability condition. This paper argues for a hitherto overlooked construal of the improbability condition in terms of the lucky agent’s epistemic situation. According to the proposed account, an event is lucky for an agent only if the agent was not in a position to know that the event would occur. It is also (...) explored whether this new account threatens the anti- luck program in epistemology. It is argued that although not detrimental to the anti- luck program, the epistemic account of luck sets certain important limits to its scope and feasibility. (shrink)

It is nearly universally acknowledged among epistemologists that a belief, even if true, cannot count as knowledge if it is somehow largely a matter of luck that the person so arrived at the truth. A striking feature of this literature, however, is that while many epistemologists are busy arguing about which particular technical condition most effectively rules out the offensive presence of luck in true believing, almost no one is asking why it matters so much that knowledge be immune from (...) luck in the first place. I argue that the best explanation for the consensus that luck undermines knowledge is that knowledge is, complications aside, credit-worthy true believing. To make this case, I develop both the notions of luck and credit, and sketch a theory of knowledge in those terms. Furthermore, this account also holds promise for being able to solve the “value problem” for knowledge, and it explains why both internal and external conditions are necessary to turn true belief into knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an account of epistemic anxiety as an emotional response to epistemic risk: the risk of believing in error. The motivation for this account is threefold. First, it makes epistemic anxiety a species of anxiety, thus rendering psychologically respectable a notion that has heretofore been taken seriously only by epistemologists. Second, it illuminates the relationship between anxiety and risk. It is standard in psychology to conceive of anxiety as a response to risk, but psychologists – very (...) reasonably – have little to say about risk itself, as opposed to risk judgement. In this paper, I specify what risk must be like to be the kind of thing to which anxiety can be a response. Third, my account improves on extant accounts of epistemic anxiety in the literature. It is more fleshed out than Jennifer Nagel’s, which is largely agnostic about the nature of epistemic anxiety, focusing instead on what work it does in our epistemic lives. In offering an account of epistemic anxiety as an emotion, my account explains how it is able to do the epistemological work to which Nagel puts it. My account is also more plausible than Juliette Vazard’s, on which epistemic anxiety is an emotional response to potential threat to one’s practical interests. Vazard’s account cannot distinguish epistemic anxiety from anxiety in general, and also fails to capture all instances of what we want to call epistemic anxiety. My account does better on both counts. (shrink)

Many activities impose risks of harm on other people. One such class of risks are those that individuals culpably impose on others, such as the risk arising from reckless driving. Do such risks in themselves constitute a harm, over and above any harm that actually eventuates? This paper considers three recent views that each answer in the affirmative. I argue that each fails to overcome what I call the ‘interference objection’. The risk of harm itself, whether taken as a subjective (...) or an objective risk, is unable to interfere with the interests of victims in order to constitute a harm. This does not mean that a risk of harm cannot itself be wrongful, but the conclusion does weaken the moral objectionableness of impositions of risks of harm. (shrink)

How should we make decisions when we're uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do? Decision-making in the face of fundamental moral uncertainty is underexplored terrain: MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord argue that there are distinctive norms by which it is governed, and which depend on the nature of one's moral beliefs.

This essay answers two questions that continue to drive debate in moral and legal philosophy; namely, ‘Is a risk of harm a wrong?’ and ‘Is a risk of harm a harm?’. The essay’s central claim is that to risk harm can be both to wrong and to harm. This stands in contrast to the respective positions of Heidi Hurd and Stephen Perry, whose views represent prominent extremes in this debate about risks. The essay shows that there is at least one (...) category of risks – intentional impositions of risk on unconsenting agents – which can be both wrongful and harmful. The wrongfulness of these risks can be established when, on the balance of reasons, one ought not to impose them. The harmfulness of these risks can be established when the risks are shown to set back legitimate interests. In those cases where risks constitute a denial of the moral status of agents, risks set back agents’ interest in dignity. In these ways, the essay shows that there are instances when a risk can constitute both a wrong and a harm. (shrink)

Robust Virtue Epistemology maintains that knowledge is achieved just when an agent gets to the truth through, or because of, the manifestation of intellectual virtue or ability. A notorious objection to the view is that the satisfaction of the virtue condition will be insufficient to ensure the safety of the target belief; that is, RVE is no anti-luck epistemology. Some of the most promising recent attempts to get around this problem are considered and shown to ultimately fail. Finally, a new (...) proposal for defending RVE as a kind of anti-luck epistemology is defended. The view developed here turns importantly on the idea that knowledge depends on ability and luck in a way that is gradient, not rigid, and that we know just when our cognitive success depends on ability not rather, but more so, than luck. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that the standard theoretical account of risk in the contemporary literature, which is cast along probabilistic lines, is flawed, in that it is unable to account for a particular kind of risk. In its place a modal account of risk is offered. Two applications of the modal account of risk are then explored. First, to epistemology, via the defence of an anti-risk condition on knowledge in place of the normal anti-luck condition. Second, to legal (...) theory, where it is shown that this account of risk can cast light on the debate regarding the extent to which a criminal justice system can countenance the possibility of wrongful convictions. (shrink)

This essay explains the notion of luck in terms of risk. It starts by distinguishing two senses of risk, the risk that an event has of occurring and the risk at which an agent is with respect to an event. It cashes out the former in modal terms and the latter in terms of lack of control. It then argues that the presence or absence of event-relative risk marks a distinction between two types of luck or fortune commonly overlooked in (...) ordinary usage of the terms “luck” and “fortune.” After offering a detailed account of the notion of control, the essay advances a new version of the so-called lack of control account of luck: lucky events are events with respect to which one is at risk and hence events over which one lacks control in the specified way. Finally, it argues that its account steers clear of counterexamples to the lack of control account of luck. (shrink)

It is argued that the standard way that the criminal justice debate regarding the permissible extent of wrongful convictions is cast is fundamentally flawed. In particular, it is claimed that there is an inherent danger in focussing our attention in this debate on different ways of measuring the probabilistic likelihood of wrongful conviction and then evaluating whether these probabilities are unacceptably high. This is because such probabilistic measures are clumsy ways of capturing the level of risk involved, to the extent (...) that a defendant can be subject to an unacceptably high level of legal risk in this regard even where the relevant probabilities are very low. An alternative conception of legal risk – one that is primarily cast along modal rather than probabilistic lines – is set out which offers a much better way of framing the debate regarding what would be an acceptable level of wrongful conviction. It is further argued that with this modal conception of legal risk in play we can capture an important necessary condition that should be imposed on legal evidence, one that has application beyond the context of the criminal trial. (shrink)

This essay explains the notion of luck in terms of risk. It starts by distinguishing two senses of risk, the risk that an event has of occurring and the risk at which an agent is with respect to an event. It cashes out the former in modal terms and the latter in terms of lack of control. It then argues that the presence or absence of event-relative risk marks a distinction between two types of luck or fortune commonly overlooked in (...) ordinary usage of the terms “luck” and “fortune.” After offering a detailed account of the notion of control, the essay advances a new version of the so-called lack of control account of luck: lucky events are events with respect to which one is at risk and hence events over which one lacks control in the specified way. Finally, it argues that its account steers clear of counterexamples to the lack of control account of luck. (shrink)

My interest is in how shifting from an anti-luck epistemology to an anti-risk epistemology can enable us to make sense of some important epistemic phenomena. After rehearsing the more general arguments for preferring anti-risk epistemology over its anti-luck cousin, I argue that a further advantage of this transition lies in how it puts us in a better position to understand certain trade-offs with regard to epistemic risk. In particular, there can be ways of forming beliefs that are epistemically low risk (...) along one axis of evaluation while being epistemically high risk along another axis of evaluation. I further show how this idea plays out in terms of collaborative inquiries, where the framework provided by anti-risk epistemology enables us to understand how epistemic risk can be distributed across such a collective enterprise and thereby effectively managed. (shrink)

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. Lhe condition of humankind 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. (shrink)

The concept of luck is important in various areas of philosophy. In this paper, I argue that two prominent accounts of luck, the modal and the probabilistic account of luck, need to be combined to accommodate the various ways in which luck comes in degrees. I briefly sketch such a hybrid account of luck, distinguish it from two similar accounts recently proposed, and consider some objections.

An esteemed American philosopher reflects on the nature of luck and its historical role in war, business, lotteries, and romance, and delineates the differences ...

Many philosophers hold that luck excludes control-more precisely, that an event is lucky for you only if that event lies beyond your control. Call this the Lack of Control Requirement (LCR) on luck. Jennifer Lackey [2008] has recently argued that there is no such requirement on luck. Should such an argument succeed, it would (among other things) disable a main objection to the "libertarian" position in the free will debate. After clarifying the LCR, I defend it against both Lackey's argument (...) and a novel argument different in kind from Lackey's. I undermine each of these arguments by sketching a plausible error theory for its key intuition. For each argument, there's a natural reply available to its proponents. I show that these natural replies depend on certain mistaken general principles about luck. Neither Lackey's argument nor the novel argument I consider casts serious doubt on the LCR. [Word count: 147]. (shrink)

This paper advances new theses about the relationship between luck and risk, using recent work by Duncan Pritchard (2014, 2015, 2016) as its foil. Once Pritchard’s views are introduced in section 1, the rest of the paper completes two different tasks, one critical and one constructive. By focussing on some epistemological cases that Pritchard’s model would fail to identify, section 2 shows that it relies on a difference that is in fact inessential: the one between the occurrence and the non‐occurrence (...) of an event. Section 3 sketches and defends an alternative account of the luck/risk distinction, based on the consideration of situations (instead of events) from different temporal perspectives: luck assessments track a situation’s past, considering it the actual outcome of some previous event, whereas risk assessments look at the situation’s future, regarding it as the initial condition of some unsettled event. (shrink)

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 as the probability of failure in a chancy situation and the stake as the difference between a favorable and an unfavorable outcome, luck can be measured as the product of these quantities: L = R × S. The condition of humankind 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. (shrink)

The concept of luck is important in various areas of philosophy. In this paper I argue that two prominent accounts of luck, the modal and the probabilistic account of luck, need to be combined to accommodate the various ways in which luck comes in degrees. I briefly sketch such a hybrid account of luck, distinguish it from two similar accounts recently proposed, and consider some objections.

This essay aims to reorient current theorizing about luck as an aid to our discerning this concept's true philosophical significance. After introducing the literature's leading theories of luck, it presents and defends counterexamples to each of them. It then argues that recent luck theorists’ main target of analysis—the concept of an event's being lucky for a subject—is parasitic on the more fundamental notion of an event's being a stroke of luck for a subject, which thesis serves as at least a (...) partial diagnosis of the leading theories’ failure. Next, it develops an analysis of strokes of luck that utilizes insights from the recent luck literature. Finally, having set out a comprehensive new analysis of luck—the Enriched Strokes Account of lucky events—the essay revisits the initial counterexamples to the literature's leading theories and argues that the Enriched Strokes Account properly handles all of them. (shrink)