The luck argument raises a serious challenge for libertarianism about free will. In broad outline, if an action is undetermined, then it appears to be a matter of luck whether or not one performs it. And if it is a matter of luck whether or not one performs an action, then it seems that the action is not performed with free will. This argument is most effective against event-causal accounts of libertarianism. Recently, Franklin (Philosophical Studies (...) 156:199–230, 2011) has defended event-causal libertarianism against four formulations of the luck argument. I will argue that three of Franklin’s responses are unsuccessful and that there are important versions of the luck challenge that his defense has left unaddressed. (shrink)

In his book, The Last Word, Thomas Nagel expresses the hope that there exists no God. Guy Kahane, in his paper ‘Should We Want God to Exist?’, attempts to defend Nagel from an argument that concludes such a hope may be impermissible. In this paper we present a new defense for the hope that God does not exist.

Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument is that because self-creation is required to be truly morally responsible and self-creation is impossible, it is impossible to be truly morally responsible for anything. I contend that the Basic Argument is unpersuasive and unsound. First, I argue that the moral luck debate shows that the self-creation requirement appears to be contradicted and supported by various parts of our commonsense ideas about moral responsibility, and that this ambivalence undermines the only reason that Strawson (...) gives for the self-creation requirement. Second, I argue that the self-creation requirement is so demanding that either it is an implausible requirement for a species of true moral responsibility that we take ourselves to have or it is a plausible requirement of a species of true moral responsibility that we have never taken ourselves to have. Third, I explain that Strawson overgeneralizes from instances of constitutive luck that obviously undermine moral responsibility to all kinds of constitutive luck. (shrink)

Critics of luck egalitarianism have claimed that, far from providing a justification for the public insurance functions of a welfare state as its proponents claim, the view objectionably abandons those who are deemed responsible for their dire straits. This article considers seven arguments that can be made in response to this ‘abandonment objection’. Four of these arguments are found wanting, with a recurrent problem being their reliance on a dubious sufficientarian or quasi-sufficientarian commitment to provide a threshold of goods (...) unconditionally. Three arguments succeed, showing that luck egalitarians have good reasons for assisting ‘negligent victims’ on account of changes that may occur in an individual between the time of their choice and their subsequent disadvantage, bad option luck, and doubts about free will and responsibility. Luck egalitarianism is therefore shown to offer strong support for public insurance. (shrink)

In this paper, we give a new argument for the existence of moral luck. The argument is based on a manipulation case in which two agents both lack second-order control over their actions, but one of them has first-order control. Our argument is, we argue, in several respects stronger than standard arguments for moral luck. Five possible objections to the argument are considered, and its general significance for the debate on moral luck is (...) briefly discussed. (shrink)

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. 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. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that luck egalitarianism captures “desert-like” intuitions about justice. Some even think that luck egalitariansm distributes goods in accordance with desert. In this paper, we argue that this is wrong. Desertism conflicts with luck egalitarianism in three important contexts, and, in these contexts, desertism renders the proper moral judgment. First, compared to desertism, luck egalitarianism is sometimes too stingy: it fails to justly compensate people for their socially valuable contributions—when those contributions arose from “option (...) luck”. Second, luck egalitarianism is sometimes too restrictive: it fails to justly compensate people who make a social contribution when that contribution arose from “brute luck”. Third, luck egalitarianism is too limited in scope: it cannot diagnose economic injustice arising independently of comparative levels of justice. The lesson of this paper is that luck egalitarians should consider supplementing their theory with desert considerations. Or, even better, consider desertism as a superior alternative to their theory. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

ABSTRACTConventional wisdom holds that there is no lucky knowledge: if it is a matter of luck, in some relevant sense, that one's belief that p is true, then one does not know that p. Here I will argue that there is similarly no lucky understanding, at least in the case of one type of luck, namely environmental luck. This argument has three parts. First, we need to determine how we evaluate whether one has understanding, which requires (...) determining what I will call understanding's evaluative object. I argue that as the evaluative object of knowledge is a belief in a proposition, the evaluative object of understanding is a mental representation of a relational structure. Next, I show that arguments that environmental luck is incompatible with understanding miss the mark by considering cases in which one has a belief in a proposition is lucky to be true, instead of ones in which one's mental representation of a relational structure is lucky to obtain. I agree, then, with those who argue that one can have understanding when one's beliefs are environmentally lucky to be true, but that this compatibility is not relevant when considering the question of whether one can have environmentally lucky understanding. I then present what I take to be a properly constructed case which shows the incompatibility of environmental luck with understanding. (shrink)

It is a well-worn platitude that knowledge excludes luck. According to anti-luck virtue epistemology, making good on the anti-luck platitude requires an explicit anti-luck condition along the lines of safety: S knows that p only if S’s true belief that p could not have easily been mistaken. This paper offers an independent, virtue epistemological argument against the claim that safety is a necessary condition on knowledge, one that adequately captures the anti-luck platitude. The (...) class='Hi'>argument proceeds by way of analogy. I focus on two paradigmatic kinds of normative achievements that also exclude luck: (i) – having a doxastically justified belief, and (ii) – performing a morally worthy action. I then show that while (i) and (ii) exclude luck, they are nevertheless susceptible to what I call ‘modal luck’. I then move on to show that knowledge, or at least some instance of knowledge, is a normative achievement, which I claim provides strong reasons to expect that knowledge is also susceptible to modal luck. Since safety entails that knowledge is incompatible with modal luck, the argument provides strong reasons to reject safety as a necessary condition on knowledge. (shrink)

The late G.A. Cohen is routinely considered a founding father of luck egalitarianism, a prominent responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. David Miller argues that Cohen’s considered beliefs on distributive justice are not best understood as luck egalitarian. While the relationship between distributive justice and personal responsibility plays an important part in Cohen’s work, Miller maintains that it should be considered an isolated theme confined to Cohen’s exchange with Dworkin. We should not understand the view Cohen defends in this (...) exchange as Cohen’s considered view. Accepting this thesis would change both our understanding of Cohen’s political philosophy and many recent luck egalitarian contributions. Miller’s argument offers an opportunity to reassess Cohen’s writings as a whole. Ultimately, however, the textual evidence against Miller’s argument is overwhelming. Cohen clearly considers the exchange with Dworkin to be about egalitarianism as such rather than about the best responsibility-sensitive version of egalitarianism. Furthermore, Cohen often offers luck egalitarian formulations of his own view outside of the exchange with Dworkin and uses luck egalitarianism as an independent yardstick for evaluating principles and distributions. (shrink)

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 2002, Turri 2010, Pritchard 2011, 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. (shrink)

Abstract -/- Libertarians typically believe that we are morally responsible for the choices (or decisions) we make only if those choices are free, and our choices are free only if they are neither caused nor nomically necessitated by antecedent events. Recently, there have been a number of attempts by philosophers to refute libertarianism by arguing that because a libertarianly free decision (choice) is both causally and nomically undetermined, which decision an agent makes in a deliberative situation is a matter of (...) luck, which implies (due to the way these philosophers use 'luck') that the agent does not have control over which decision he makes. This argument has been dubbed "the Argument from Luck" or "the Luck Objection" against libertarianism – henceforth 'LO'. In this paper, we examine some versions of LO as reflected in the works of Alfred Mele (2006), Neil Levy (2011), and Peter van Inwagen (2000, 2011). We argue that libertarians have nothing to fear from LO. Deep down the objection reflects a failure, on the part of its proponents, really to come to grips with the libertarian position. (shrink)

Philosophers often consider problems of free will and moral luck in isolation from one another, but both are about control and moral responsibility. One problem of free will concerns the difficult task of specifying the kind of control over our actions that is necessary and sufficient to act freely. One problem of moral luck refers to the puzzling task of explaining whether and how people can be morally responsible for actions permeated by factors beyond their control. This chapter (...) explicates and assesses skeptical, compatibilist, and libertarian approaches to moral luck. First, I argue that what makes the above problems of free will and moral luck distinct is largely their emphasis on different kinds of luck. Second, I describe and evaluate skeptical arguments from constitutive and circumstantial luck that it is impossible to act freely. Third, I explicate and assess various support and implication relationships between various kinds of compatibilism and libertarianism, on the one hand, and causal, constitutive, circumstantial, and resultant moral luck, on the other. (shrink)

This article is divided into three sections. In the first and second, I examine Sartorio’s account of the causal structure of the famous Thirsty Traveler thought experiment. I argue that this account does not withstand critical scrutiny. In the third, I turn to a novel kind of moral luck that Sartorio uses the Thirsty Traveler to expose. I expand the scope of my argument to look also at other recently proposed categories of moral luck. I argue that (...) these proposals are overhasty. (shrink)

Recently, it has been debated as to whether understanding is a species of explanatory knowledge. Those who deny this claim frequently argue that understanding, unlike knowledge, can be lucky. In this paper I argue that current arguments do not support this alleged compatibility between understanding and epistemic luck. First, I argue that understanding requires reliable explanatory evaluation, yet the putative examples of lucky understanding underspecify the extent to which subjects possess this ability. In the course of defending this claim, (...) I also provide a new account of the kind of ‘grasping’ taken to be central to understanding. Second, I show that putative examples of lucky understanding unwittingly deploy a kind of luck that is compatible with knowledge. Finally, appealing to a number of works on explanation and its attendant epistemology, I argue that alleged instances of lucky understanding that overcome these two obstacles will invariably violate certain norms of explanatory inquiry – our paradigmatic understanding-oriented practice. By contrast, knowledge of the same information is immune to these criticisms. Consequently, if understanding is environmentally lucky, it is always inferior to the understanding that a corresponding case of knowledge would provide. (shrink)

Duncan Pritchard has argued that luck is fundamentally a modal notion: an event is lucky when it occurs in the actual world, but does not occur in more than half of the relevant nearby possible worlds. Jennifer Lackey has provided counterexamples to accounts which, like Pritchard’s, only allow for the existence of improbable lucky events. Neil Levy has responded to Lackey by offering a modal account of luck which attempts to respect the intuition that some lucky events occur (...) in more than half of the relevant nearby possible worlds. But his account rejects that events which are as likely as those in Lackey’s examples are lucky. Instead, they are merely fortunate. I argue that Levy’s argument to this effect fails. I then offer a substitute account of the improbability condition which respects this intuition. This condition says that the relevant notion of probability for luck is epistemic. (shrink)

I argue that certain kinds of luck can partially determine an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. To make this view clearer, consider some examples. Two identical agents drive recklessly around a curb, and one but not the other kills a pedestrian. Two identical corrupt judges would freely take a bribe if one were offered. Only one judge is offered a bribe, and so only one judge takes a bribe. Put in terms of these examples, I argue that the killer driver (...) and bribe taker are more blameworthy than their counterparts. I offer three arguments for that view, and, in doing so, I exemplify a general way to advance the moral luck debate. First, I argue against an account of moral responsibility that implies that the judges are equally blameworthy. Second, I argue that the killer driver is more blameworthy than the merely reckless driver. Third, I locate an alternative sense in which the agents in each case pair are morally on par. (shrink)

To speak of being religious lucky certainly sounds odd. But then, so does “My faith holds value in God’s plan, while yours does not.” This book argues that these two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — are inextricably connected. It argues that religious luck attributions can profitably be studied from a number of directions, not just theological, but also social scientific and philosophical. There is a (...) strong tendency among adherents of different faith traditions to invoke asymmetric explanations of the religious value or salvific status of the home religion vis-à-vis all others. Attributions of good/bad religious luck and exclusivist dismissal of the significance of religious disagreement are the central phenomena that the book studies. Part I lays out a taxonomy of kinds of religious luck, a taxonomy that draws upon but extends work on moral and epistemic luck. It asks: What is going on when persons, theologies, or purported revelations ascribe various kinds of religiously-relevant traits to insiders and outsiders of a faith tradition in sharply asymmetric fashion? “I am saved but you are lost”; “My religion is holy but yours is idolatrous”; “My faith tradition is true, and valued by God, but yours is false and valueless.” Part II further develops the theory introduced in Part I, pushing forward both the descriptive/explanatory and normative sides of what the author terms his inductive risk account. Firstly, the concept of inductive risk is shown to contribute to the needed field of comparative fundamentalism by suggesting new psychological markers of fundamentalist orientation. The second side of what is termed an inductive risk account is concerned with the epistemology of religious belief, but more especially with an account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. Problems of inductively risky modes of belief-formation problematize claims to religion-specific knowledge. But the inductive risk account does not aim to set religion apart, or to challenge the reasonableness of religious belief tout court. Rather the burden of the argument is to challenge the reasonableness of attitudes of religious exclusivism, and to demotivate the “polemical apologetics” that exclusivists practice and hope to normalize. Lexington Books Pages: 290 978-1-4985-5017-8 • Hardback • December 2018 • $95.00 • (£65.00) 978-1-4985-5018-5 • eBook • December 2018 • $90.00 • (£60.00) ISBN 978-1-4985-5018-5 (pbk: alk. paper) (coming 2020) [Download the 30% personal use Discount Order Form I uploaded for hardcover or e-book, and please ask your library to purchase a copy for their collection.]. (shrink)

In the paper, I defend the skeptical view that no one is ever morally responsible in the basic desert sense since luck universally undermines responsibility-level control. I begin in Section 1 by defining a number of different varieties of luck and examining their relevance to moral responsibility. I then turn, in Section 2, to outlining and defending what I consider to be the best argument for the skeptical view--the luck pincer (Levy 2011). I conclude in Section (...) 3 by addressing Robert Hartman's (2017) numerous objections to the luck pincer. I argue that the luck pincer emerges unscathed and the pervasiveness of luck (still) undermines moral responsibility. (shrink)

This paper argues that "moral luck", understood as a susceptibility of moral desert to lucky or unlucky outcomes, does not exist. The argument turns on the claim that epistemic inquiry is an indissoluble part of moral responsibility, and that judgment on the moral decision making of others should and can adjust for this fact; test cases which aim to isolate moral dilemmas from epistemic consideration misrepresent our moral experience. If the phenomena believed by some philosophers to exemplify the (...) need to admit moral luck as part of their explanation are analysed in the light of this insight, the case for "moral luck" dissolves. (shrink)

In addition to having an institutional site or scope, a theory of distributive justice might also have an institutional ‘reach’ or currency. It has the first when it applies to only social phenomena. It has the second when it distributes only socially produced goods. One objection to luck egalitarianism is that it has absurd implications. In response, Tan has defended a luck egalitarian account that has a strictly institutional reach. I argue, first, that Tan’s view contains two fatal (...) ambiguities and, second, that, to be sound, it requires an institutional currency. This second argument implies that virtually all extant luck egalitarian currencies are incompatible with his approach. I argue, third, that the alleged absurd implications often have little to do with the extent of luck egalitarianism’s reach. (shrink)

There is no such thing as moral luck or everyone is profoundly mistaken about its nature and a radical rethinking of moral luck is needed. The argument to be developed is not complicated, and relies almost entirely on premises that should seem obviously correct to anyone who follows the moral luck literature. The conclusion, however, is surprising and disturbing. The classic cases of moral luck always involve an agent who lacks control over an event whose (...) occurrence affects her praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. Close examination of what it is to have control or to lack it reveals the logical space for counterexamples that do not fit the pattern constitutive of moral luck, and so unravel the whole. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism makes a fundamental distinction between inequalities for which agents are responsible and inequalities stemming from luck. I give several reasons to find luck egalitarianism a compelling view of distributive justice. I then argue that it is an incomplete theory of equality. Luck egalitarianism lacks the normative resources to achieve its ends. It is unable to specify the prior conditions under which persons are situated equivalently such that their choices can bear this tremendous weight. This (...) means that luck egalitarians need to become pluralists who understand equality not merely in terms of choice, luck, and responsibility. After developing my critical argument that luck egalitarianism is incomplete, I sketch a strategy for rehabilitating and filling out the theory. (shrink)

I argue that considerations pertaining to constitutive luck undermine historicism—the view that an agent’s history can determine whether or not she is morally responsible. The main way that historicists have motivated their view is by appealing to certain cases of manipulation. I argue, however, that since agents can be morally responsible for performing some actions from characters with respect to which they are entirely constitutively lucky, and since there is no relevant difference between these agents and agents who have (...) been manipulated into acting from a character bestowed upon them by their manipulators, we should give up historicism. After presenting this argument and defending it against some potential objections, I briefly criticize the standard structuralist alternative and propose a new structuralist position that is shaped by reflection on constitutive luck. (shrink)

*As mentioned in Peter Coy's NYT essay "When Being Good Is Just a Matter of Being Lucky" (2023) -/- ----- -/- How is the problem of free will related to the problem of moral luck? In this essay, I answer that question and outline a new solution to the paradox of moral luck, the source-paradox solution. This solution both explains why the paradox arises and why moral luck does not exist. To make my case, I highlight a (...) few key connections between the paradox of moral luck and two related problems, namely the problem of free will and determinism and the paradox of self-creation. Piecing together intuitions, arguments, and insights from recent work on each of these three problems, I argue that the type of control necessary for moral responsibility can only be had by someone who is a genuine source of his own actions, but the relevant notion of sourcehood admits no coherent characterization. If our commonsense view of moral responsibility is incoherent, it is unsurprising that our commitment to the existence of morally responsible agents commits us to some paradoxical things—e.g. to both the existence and impossibility of moral luck. For more information about this article, please write to gmail account: kristin.mickelson.42. (shrink)

A good surgeon knows how to perform a surgery; a good architect knows how to design a house. We value their know-how. We ordinarily look for it. What makes it so valuable? A natural response is that know-how is valuable because it explains success. A surgeon’s know-how explains their success at performing a surgery. And an architect’s know-how explains their success at designing houses that stand up. We value know-how because of its special explanatory link to success. But in virtue (...) of what is know-how explanatorily linked to success? This essay provides a novel argument for the thesis that know-how’s special link to success is to be explained at least in part in terms of its being, or involving, a doxastic attitude that is epistemically alike propositional knowledge. It is argued that the role played by know-how in explaining intentional success shows that the epistemic differences between know-how and knowledge, if any, are less than usually thought; and that "revisionary intellectualism", the view that know-how is true belief that might well fall short of knowledge, is not really a stable position. If its explanatory link to success is what makes know-how valuable, an upshot of my argument is that the value of know-how is due, to a considerable extent, to its being, or involving, a kind of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

This paper considers issues raised by Elizabeth Anderson’s recent critique of the position she terms ‘luck egalitarianism’. It is maintained that luck egalitarianism, once clarified and elaborated in certain regards, remains the strongest egalitarian stance. Anderson’s arguments that luck egalitarians abandon both the negligent and prudent dependent caretakers fails to account for the moderate positions open to luck egalitarians and overemphasizes their commitment to unregulated market choices. The claim that luck egalitarianism insults citizens by redistributing (...) on the grounds of paternalistic beliefs, pity and envy, and by making intrusive and stigmatizing judgments of responsibility, fails accurately to characterize the luck egalitarian’s rationale for redistribution and relies upon luck egalitarians being insensitive to the danger of stigmatization. The luck egalitarian position is reinforced by the fact that Anderson’s favoured conception of equality, ‘democratic equality’, is counterintuitively indifferent to all unchosen inequalities, including intergenerational inequalities, once bare social minima are met. (shrink)

This book examines the moral luck paradox, relating it to Kantian, consequentialist and virtue-based approaches to ethics. It also applies the paradox to areas in medical ethics, including allocation of scarce medical resources, informed consent to treatment, withholding life-sustaining treatment, psychiatry, reproductive ethics, genetic testing and medical research. If risk and luck are taken seriously, it might seem to follow that we cannot develop any definite moral standards, that we are doomed to moral relativism. However, Dickenson offers strong (...) counter-arguments to this view that enable us to think in terms of universal standards. (shrink)

Luck skepticism is the view that no one is ever morally responsible for anything because of the nature and ubiquity of luck. One acclaimed argument in favor of this view is Neil Levy’s luck pincer. The luck pincer holds that all morally significant acts or events involve either present luck, constitutive luck, or both and that present and constitutive luck each negate moral responsibility. Therefore, no one is ever morally responsible for any (...) action or event. I argue that this argument is unsound as both of its premises are false. First, not all morally significant events involve present or constitutive luck. Some morally significant events are non-lucky. Second, present and constitutive luck do not always negate moral responsibility. Luck – independent of ontological concerns – is not as threatening to free will as is often thought. (shrink)

I here sketch a reply to Peter van Inwagen’s Rollback Argument, which suggests that libertarian accounts of free agency are beset by problems involving luck. Van Inwagen imagines an indeterministic agent whose universe is repeatedly ‘rolled back’ by God to the time of her choice. Since the agent’s choice is indeterministic, her choices are sometimes di erent in the imaginary rollback scenarios. I show that although this is true, this need not impair her control over what she does. (...) I develop an account of when and why the fact that an agent would choose di erently impairs control, which provides a novel response to the Rollback Argument. (shrink)

The similarities between the philosophical debates surrounding assessment sensitivity and moral luck run so deep that one can easily adapt almost any argument from one debate, change some terms, adapt the examples, and end up with an argument relevant to the other. This article takes Brian Rosebury's strategy for resisting moral luck in “Moral Responsibility and ‘Moral Luck' ” (1995) and turns it into a strategy for resisting assessment sensitivity. The article shows that one of (...) Bernard Williams's examples motivating moral luck is very similar to one of the examples John MacFarlane uses to motivate the assessment sensitivity of epistemic modals, and in particular the assessment sensitivity of the auxiliary verb “might.” This means that, if Rosebury is right and we do not actually need moral luck to explain Williams's example, we may not need assessment sensitivity to account for the semantic behaviour of the epistemic modal verb “might” either. (shrink)

The incorporation of post-event testimonial information into an agent’s memory representation of the event via constructive memory processes gives rise to the misinformation effect, in which the incorporation of inaccurate testimonial information results in the formation of a false memory belief. While psychological research has focussed primarily on the incorporation of inaccurate information, the incorporation of accurate information raises a particularly interesting epistemological question: do the resulting memory beliefs qualify as knowledge? It is intuitively plausible that they do not, for (...) they appear to be only luckily true. I argue, however, that, despite its intuitive plausibility, this view is mistaken: once we adopt an adequate (modal) conception of epistemic luck and an adequate (adaptive) general approach to memory, it becomes clear that memory beliefs resulting from the incorporation of accurate testimonial information are not in general luckily true. I conclude by sketching some implications of this argument for the psychology of memory, suggesting that the misinformation effect would better be investigated in the context of a broader “information effect”. (shrink)

I recently argued that reductive physicalist versions of libertarian free will face a physical indeterminism luck objection. John Lemos claims that one potential advocate of reductive physicalist libertarianism, Robert Kane, avoids this physical indeterminism luck objection. I here show how the problem remains.

This paper is based on the comments I gave to Alfred Mele regarding his original Zygote Argument during my presentation at a small workshop on manipulation arguments in Budapest back in 2012. After those comments, Mele changed the conclusion of his original Zygote Argument (OZA) from a positive, explanatory conclusion to a negative, non-explanatory conclusion--and, correspondingly, redefined 'incompatibilism' so that it would no longer refer in his work to the view that determinism precludes (undermines, eliminates, destroys, etc.) free (...) will, but refers narrowly to the perhaps spurious association claim that appears in the conclusion of the revised Zygote Argument (Mele 2013+). Yet, over the last decade, Mele has made no comment in print about the changes he made, the invalidity objection that led to them, nor to the fact that his revised Zygote Argument was originally presented by me as a (non-optimal) reaction to my invalidity objection to his original Zygote Argument. To my knowledge, Mele has only mentioned this 2015 paper once, at it was not in the context of understanding manipulation arguments; it was, rather, in the context of defending his revised, non-explanatory definition of 'incompatibilism' at the opening of Aspects of Agency (p. 6, n. 4). There, Mele singles out *just this 2015 paper* as a place where they'll find what Mele degrades as a type of nonstandard/nontraditional definition of 'incompatibilism' that he rejects. This is notable because Mele provides no empirical evidence that his preferred definition is standard, and most (including Lehrer, who coined the term) reject the negative, non-explanatory, association-based definition that Mele came to endorse in the aftermath of my invalidity objection to OZA. So, if Mele had a genuine concern about philosophers who use the term 'incompatibilism', then Mele could have--and should have--named almost any leading figure in free will for this purpose (since most--including Pereboom, Vihvelin, Haji, etc.) reject the non-explanatory definition that Mele-2013+ now endorses. Yet, for untold reasons, Mele isolated the working definition of 'incompatibilism' used in one paper by one unemployed junior researcher to use as his example--even though Neil Levy had used this same definition in previously published work (eg. Levy 2011). Moreover, if Mele were genuinely interested in helping his readers understand the ambiguity of terms like 'compatibilism' and 'incompatibilism' it is a mystery that he referenced a paper in which nothing of substance hung on the definitions given to these terms -- especially considering that he might have instead pointed them to my OTHER 2015 paper, "A Critique of Vihvelin's Three-Fold Classification" in which the MAIN AIM of the paper is to expose the difficulties facing anyone who wants to define the terms 'compatibilism' and 'incompatibilism' in a way that everyone will accept (including a critique of the negative, non-explanatory "incompossibilist" definition that Mele adopted after my objection to OZA). By all appearances, Mele's main aim in citing specifically THIS paper and none of my other work was to give readers the false impression that my working definition of 'incompatibilism' played some role in my charge that his argument is invalid (which it doesn't, given that the term doesn't appear in either the premises or conclusion of that argument). Mele adds to this unseemly rhetorical campaign in his book *Manipulation Agents* where he mentions an invalidity objection in the intro (p. 84) and then discusses that objection in the final lines of Chapter 5 of the book (p. 120-121). The invalidity objection discussed here is completely pedantic, has never been seriously raised in the primary literature (and was previously addressed in multiple places my multiple philosophers, including me), and has nothing whatever to do with my invalidity objection. In other words, Mele was content to discuss an invalidity objection that no one has ever had to an argument that is clearly valid while completely ignoring the ONLY substantive invalidity objection to his argument in print. This is unfortunate, because it has led to serious confusion --including the patently false description of my invalidity objection to OZA as an objection to the revised version of the Zygote Argument that Mele adopted in *response* my objection (e.g., Capes mistakenly claims "Mickelson (2015) contends that arguments like this [i.e. like the revised Zygote Argument] are invalid. But that’s because she defines “incompatibilism” differently than I’ve defined it here" in his "Manipulation Arguments and Direct Arguments" chapter in the 2023 Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Free Will; I did not say this, and the definition of 'incompatibilism' is irrelevant to my objection). In "The Zygote Argument Is Invalid--Now What?", I simply use the invalidity of the simple 2-premise Zygote Argument as a foil to make a series of more philosophically significant points (e.g. regarding the dialectical structure of the free-will debate, the role of best-explanation reasoning, and to develop the first-ever "master manipulation argument"). Mele has yet to address my reasons for calling attention to the non-trivial invalidity of his OZA or to any of my answers to the "Now What?" question in this paper, even though this question and my proposed answers to this question are the paper's main point. For those interested in a more recent discussion of how the logical and metaphilosophical observations made in this "Now What?" paper have helped to move the free-will debate forward, I suggest looking at the discussions of the "paradigm shift" in the free-will debate that helps to explain why the free-will debate has become mired in stalemates and empty verbal disputes that are found, for example, in my contributions to the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Free Will (Intro and Chapter 4, 2023) and my paper "Free Will, Self-Creation, and the Paradox of Moral Luck" (2019). (shrink)

Duncan Pritchard has, in the years following his (2005) defence of a safety-based account of knowledge in Epistemic Luck, abjured his (2005) view that knowledge can be analysed exclusively in terms of a modal safety condition. He has since (Pritchard in Synthese 158:277–297, 2007; J Philosophic Res 34:33–45, 2009a, 2010) opted for an account according to which two distinct conditions function with equal importance and weight within an analysis of knowledge: an anti-luck condition (safety) and an ability condition-the (...) latter being a condition aimed at preserving what Pritchard now takes to be a fundamental insight about knowledge: that it arises from cognitive ability (Greco 2010; Sosa 2007, 2009). Pritchard calls his new view anti-luck virtue epistemology (ALVE). A key premise in Pritchard’s argument for ALVE is what I call the independence thesis; the thesis that satisfying neither the anti-luck condition nor the ability condition entails that the other is satisfied. Pritchard’s argument for the independence thesis relies crucially upon the case he makes for thinking that cognitive achievements are compatible with knowledge-undermining environmental luck—that is, the sort of luck widely thought to undermine knowledge in standard barn facade cases. In the first part of this paper, I outline the key steps in Pritchard’s argument for anti-luck virtue epistemology and highlight how it is that the compatibility of cognitive achievement and knowledge- undermining environmental luck is indispensible to the argument’s success. The second part of this paper aims to show that this compatibility premise crucial to Pritchard’s argument is incorrect. (shrink)

Most right-libertarians deny the permissibility of government redistribution, referring to the inviolability of private property rights. In a rare exception, Eric Mack offers a right-libertarian argument for luck sufficientarianism based on the catastrophe clause. In this view, people who find themselves in trouble through no fault of their own may violate someone else’s property rights in minor ways to save their own lives. But since a literal interpretation of this clause makes property rights too uncertain, Mack proposes a (...) system of redistribution that will protect people from dire circumstances. As it only applies to those who find themselves in poverty through no fault of their own, Mack’s argument rules out a basic income. However, one can combine Mack’s argument with basic income by arguing that responsibility-insensitive sufficientarianism is superior to luck sufficientarianism. First, luck sufficientarianism allows for the counterintuitive conclusion that people who have made mistakes in their lives do not deserve help from the rest of the community, even if they are engaged in some socially important activity. Second, luck sufficientarianism unduly interferes with people’s private lives to distinguish between deserving and undeserving recipients of social assistance, and inevitably excludes some deserving recipients from the pool of recipients. Third, a condition for holding people responsible for their choices is that they have agency. But maintaining agency requires the presence of some kind of material resources that would protect people from the fear and stress associated with poverty. Thus, responsibility-insensitive sufficientarianism is superior to luck sufficientarianism as an interpretation of the catastrophe clause. And within a libertarian framework, this requires introducing a basic income. First, a basic income technically guarantees everyone protection from extreme poverty and destitution. Second, a basic income guarantees everyone autonomy in how they manage their resources. Third, a basic income does not require means testing and is therefore responsibility-insensitive. Mack’s catastrophe clause therefore offers a right-libertarian argument for a basic income. (shrink)

This chapter sharpens the book’s criticism of exclusivist responsible to religious multiplicity, firstly through close critical attention to arguments which religious exclusivists provide, and secondly through the introduction of several new, formal arguments / dilemmas. Self-described ‘post-liberals’ like Paul Griffiths bid philosophers to accept exclusivist attitudes and beliefs as just one among other aspects of religious identity. They bid us to normalize the discourse Griffiths refers to as “polemical apologetics,” and to view its acceptance as the only viable form of (...) pluralism. This reasoning may seem initially plausible, but on closer examination his and other’s defence of the reasonableness of exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity fall apart. Informed by our study of luck-leaning theological explanations of religious difference and the counter-inductive thinking they exemplify, I argue that exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity are best explained by personal and group bias, and that a discourse between exclusivist authors or sects is beyond the pale of reasonable disagreement. Our study of descriptive (psychological) and prescriptive (religious) fideism in the first sections of Chapter Five suggests that we turn back to formal features of doxastic methods (i.e., of how people process), features that may be straightforwardly tested for in studies utilizing scales of religious orientation. These formal features allow us to better recognize not only the multiplicity of models of faith that religious adherents adhere to, but also that the relationship between forms of fideism is scalar: there is a spectrum of views running from rationalism to fideism, and at the fideistic end from moderate to strong forms of religious fideism. I further explain why developing tests and markers for a high degree of fideistic orientation is important to all those who study religion. The second half of the chapter turns to criticism or censure of exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, in contrast to apologetic defenses of exclusivism. While we have examined the close connections between fideism and fundamentalism, and again between fundamentalism and exclusivism in earlier chapters, a sharper focus reveals an important but little-recognized distinction reflected in the literature: the distinction between religion-specific (or particularist) and mutualist exclusivism. The mutualist doesn’t talk just about the right of adherents of one specific religion to assert exclusivism, but the adherents of any and all “home” religions. I argue that some previously unrecognized problems for the reasonableness of exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity are brought to light when we make the distinction between the two basic ways to understand the claim that exclusivists are making. I put particularist (Barth, Lindbeck, Plantinga) and mutualist (Griffiths, Gellman, Margalit, D’Costa) defenses of exclusivism on the horns of a dilemma, and argue that despite the popularity it presently enjoys among post-liberal theologians, a close examination reveals that the very conceptual coherence of mutualist exclusivism is in serious doubt. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen famously offers a version of the luck objection to libertarianism called the ‘Rollback Argument.’ It involves a thought experiment in which God repeatedly rolls time backward to provide an agent with many opportunities to act in the same circumstance. Because the agent has the kind of freedom that affords her alternative possibilities at the moment of choice, she performs different actions in some of these opportunities. The upshot is that whichever action she performs in the (...) actual-sequence is intuitively a matter of mere chance. I explore a new response to the Rollback Argument. If there are true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom, then the agent performs the same action each time she is placed in the same circumstance, because that is what she would freely do in that circumstance. This response appears to negate the chancy intuition. Ultimately, however, I argue that this new response is unsuccessful, because there is a variant of the Rollback Argument that presents the same basic challenge to the libertarian on the assumption that there are true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom. Thus, true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom do not provide the libertarian with a solution to the Rollback Argument. (shrink)

A surprisingly large number of scholars believe that (a) we are blameworthy, and therefore punishable, only for what we have control over; (b) we have control only over our actions and intentions, not the consequences of our actions; and therefore (c) if two agents perform the very same action (e.g., attempting to kill) with the very same intentions, then they are equally blameworthy and deserving of equal punishment – even if only one of them succeeds in killing. This paper argues (...) against these “equivalence theorists” that harmful consequences do make a moral difference, that the harm produced by the killer’s attempt retroactively makes her action more blameworthy, and therefore deserving of more punishment, than the failed attempter’s attempt. The primary argument for this “non-equivalence theory” is an analogy with gambling. Just as a gambler makes a deal with the casino to allow metaphysical luck to retroactively determine the “profit status” of her bet, so too the attempted killer makes a deal with “the casino of morality” to allow metaphysical luck to retroactively determine the moral status of her attempt. She makes the “moral deal” that if her attempt succeeds, her attempt was more blameworthy than if her attempt does not succeed. And it is the greater blameworthiness of the killer’s attempt that justifies our intuition that the killer should be punished more harshly than the failed attempter. (shrink)

Luck has become an increasingly important factor in epistemology during recent years as either a preventor of knowledge (Pritchard 2013) or even as one of the conditions of knowledge (Zagzebski 1994, Hetherington 2013), thus begging the question of its definition. Following the probabilistic and degree-minding "new paradigm psychology of reasoning" (Evans 2012, Elqayam & Over 2012, Pfeifer & Douven 2014) and renouncing the "old paradigm" of bivalence, the first main feature of this article lies in the introduction of "gradualism" (...) according to which vast parts of reality comes in degrees (=metaphysical or ontological gradualism) and, given that theoretical constructs are supposed to accurately correspond to reality, according to which gradualistic or degree-minding frameworks need to be established in all of philosophy or science (=theoretical gradualism). As the second and more central feature of this article, and building on gradualism and Riggs' (2007) pivotal idea that "luck comes in degrees", I will then develop my own gradualistic account of luck with two always necessary gradual conditions (low enough chance and high enough significance) and one sometimes necessary gradual condition (low enough control or high enough lack of control). During the presentation of this new account of luck, I will also deliver decisive arguments against prominent luck philosopher Duncan Pritchard's latest version of the modal account of luck (forthcoming) which contains major mistakes in respect to all three conditions of luck. (shrink)

This chapter explores global debunking arguments, debunking arguments that aim to give one a global defeater. I defend Alvin Plantinga’s view that global defeaters are possible and, once gained, are impossible to escape by reasoning. They thereby must be extinguished by other means: epistemically propitious actions, luck, or grace. I then distinguish between three types of global defeater—pure-undercutters, undercutters-because-rebutters, and undercutters-while-rebutters—and systematically consider how one can deflect such defeaters. Lastly, since I draw insights from the literature on perhaps the (...) most widely discussed global debunking argument in the literature, Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, I end up responding to many potential problems for it. This includes the so-called conditionalization problem, as well as those raised by Bergmann (2002), Law (2012), Deem (2018), Hendricks and Anderson (2020), and Wielenberg (in Craig and Wielenberg (2021)). (shrink)

In “The Zygote Argument is Invalid: Now What?” (2015), Kristin Mickelson published an objection to the Zygote Argument that she first presented in 2012 as workshop comments on a draft of Mele's "Manipulation, Moral Responsibility, and Bullet-Biting" (2013). Assuming that the phrase "determinism precludes free will" means something like determinism-related causal factors are what prevent people from acting freely when determinism is true, Mele's original Zygote Argument was invalid. At the workshop, Mickelson presented Mele with two options (...) to address the problem, a premise-preserving option and a conclusion-preserving option. That is, Mele could change the conclusion of the original argument to the negative, non-explanatory thesis entailed by its original two premises, or find a way to add premises that would support the positive, explanatory conclusion of the original argument (which, notably, is the conclusion that Pereboom supports using best-explanation reasoning in his Four-Case Argument). Mickelson used this as an opportunity to explain the key contribution that best-explanation reasoning makes to manipulation arguments -- and why the best variant of the manipulation argument might conclude that incompatibilism is FALSE. In response to Mickelson's objection, Mele changed the conclusion of the argument before "Manipulation, Moral Responsibility, and Bullet-Biting" went to print, choosing Mickelson's proposal to change its conclusion over the suggestion to change its premises. However, Mele failed to mention Mickelson's invalidity objection in print and that he changed the conclusion of his argument as a direct response to it; nor did Mele mention the costs that Mickelson outlined for the premise-preserving solution that he adopted or the benefits of a conclusion-preserving solution. At the same time, Mele began using the term 'incompatibilism' to pick out the negative, non-explanatory claim supported by the newly revised Zygote Argument--and also started to claim (without providing evidence) that those who use the term 'incompatibilism' to denote the explanatory claim deterministic causal factors *make it the case* that no one acts freely when determinism is true" is guilty of using the term in a nonstandard and nontraditional way that he had "never had any use for"--failing to mention that he clearly used the term in this explanatory sense in his 2005 critique of the Four-Case Argument, which is to be expected give that Derk Pereboom uses the explanatory definition (as do Kadri Vihvelin, Carolina Sartorio, and *most* other contributors to the free-will literature). In THIS reply essay, Mickelson responds to an attempt by Gabriel De Marco (FSU, advisor Alfred Mele) to defend the original Zygote Argument from Mickelson's 2012/2015 critique. Unfortunately, both of De Marco's proposed "solutions" are non-starters. The first is a non-starter because De Marco merely repeats the premise-preserving solution that Mickelson offered to Mele in 2012 and that Mele adopted in print in 2013. In other words, De Marco took credit for the premise-preserving solution to the invalidity objection that Mickelson developed (although he does *redescribe* Mickelson's solution in his own idiosyncratic jargon) and Mele had already adopted in print. De Marco's second solution is a non-starter because it is constituted by a patently invalid argument. Contrary to De Marco's proposal, it's not true that the conjunction of possibilism and incompossibilism deductively entails the positive, diagnostic claim that deterministic causal factors beyond one's control preclude (destroy, undermine, is antagonistically relevant to) free will when determinism is true. *My thanks to the editors of Philosophia for publishing this reply when PhilStudies would not. (shrink)

Christian Munthe, David Fumagalli and Erik Malmqvist argue that well-known healthcare resource allocation principles, such as need, prognosis, equal treatment and cost-effectiveness, should be supplemented with a principle of sustainability.1 Employing such a principle would entail that the allocation of healthcare resources should take into account whether a specific allocation causes negative dynamics, which would limit the amount of resources available in the future. As examples of allocation decisions, which may have such negative dynamics, they mention those who cause a (...) lack of vaccines, anti-bioethics resistance and drug shortages. Thus, the overall thought is that we can spend and allocate healthcare resources in a certain way at t1, which means that we will have fewer resources available at a later point, t2. The authors argue that we should include a principle of sustainability to justify allocations, which avoids or diminishes the negative dynamics. The authors argue that existing principles cannot sufficiently include proper regard for how our current decisions affect future allocation decisions and, therefore, the people who need healthcare resources in the future. I am sympathetic to the developed argument and believe that the authors are correct that negative dynamics provide reasons to take our ability to meet future health needs …. (shrink)

Kymlicka has offered an influential luck egalitarian justification for a catalogue of polyethnic rights addressing cultural disadvantages of immigrant minorities. In response, Quong argues that while the items on the list are justified, in the light of the fact that the relevant disadvantages of immigrants result from their choice to immigrate, (i) these rights cannot be derived from luck egalitarianism and (ii) that this casts doubt on luck egalitarianism as a theory of cultural justice. As an alternative (...) to Kymlicka’s argument, Quong offers his own justification of polyethnic rights based on a Rawlsian ideal of fair equality of opportunity. I defend luck egalitarianism against Quong’s objection arguing that if choice ever matters, it matters in relation to cultural disadvantages too. Also, the Rawlsian ideal of fair equality of opportunity cannot justify the sort of polyethnic rights that Quong wants it to justify, once we set aside an unwarranted statist focus in Quong’s conception of fair equality of opportunity. Whatever the weaknesses of luck egalitarianism are, the inadequacy of the position in relation to accommodating cultural disadvantages of immigrants is not among them. (shrink)

I argue that the three strongest arguments against metaphysical libertarianism—the randomness objection, the constitutive luck objection, and the physicalist objection—are actually unsuccessful and therefore that metaphysical libertarianism is more plausible than the common philosophical wisdom allows. My more positive thesis, what I will refer to as “Agent Exceptionalism,” is that, when making decisions and performing actions, human beings can indeed satisfy the four conditions of metaphysical libertarianism: the control condition, the rationality condition, the ultimacy condition, and the physicalism condition.

I review Shlomi Segall's book 'Why Inequality Matters'. I argue that it conclusively establishes that alongside egalitarians, prioritarians and sufficientarians must sometimes regard a prospect as better (in at least one respect) when it is not better (in terms of well-being) for anyone. Sufficientarians and prioritarians must therefore relinquish a treasured anti-egalitarian argument. It also makes a powerful case that among these three views, egalitarians are in the best position to explain such departures from what is in each person’s (...) prudential interest. For egalitarians can point to the natural idea that it is unfair when, due to pure chance, some fare much better than others. By contrast, it remains unclear what value, if any, sufficientarians or prioritarians can appeal to in order to justify their departures from what best promotes people’s well-being. (shrink)

In this paper I will address a specific luck argument that has been put forward against event causal libertarianism: the disappearing agent objection. I will show why some replies are unsatisfactory while dealing with this objection and, by criticizing the notion of settling and the conception of selfhood invoked by this objection I’ll suggest that the event causal libertarian should reject the objection as it rests on an unacceptable ontology and that consequently, he should bite the bullet and (...) admit that there is some residual arbitrariness in torn decision making. (shrink)

In the luck egalitarian literature, one influential formulation of luck egalitarianism does not specify whether equalities that do not reflect people’s equivalent exercises of responsibility are bad with regard to inequality. This equivocation gives rise to two competing versions of luck egalitarianism: asymmetrical and symmetrical luck egalitarianism. According to the former, while inequalities due to luck are unjust, equalities due to luck are not necessarily so. The latter view, by contrast, affirms the undesirability of (...) equalities as well as inequalities insofar as they are due to luck. The symmetrical view, we argue, is by far the more compelling, both by internal luck egalitarian standards and in light of the external rightist emphasis on choice and responsibility to which luck egalitarianism may partly be seen as a response. Our main case for the symmetrical view is that when some people, against a background of equal opportunities, do not exercise their responsibility to the same degree as others, they cannot justifiably call for equalizing measures to be put in place. Indeed, such measures would be positively unfair. The symmetrical view, accordingly, rejects compensation in such cases, whereas the asymmetrical view, implausibly, enjoins it. We also examine two objections to this argument. First, that this view fails to qualify as genuinely egalitarian, instead collapsing the notion of equality into the notion of desert. Second, that the opposing asymmetrical view, in contrast to the symmetrical view, can draw support from its compatibility with sufficientarian concerns. Both objections are rebutted. We conclude that luck egalitarians are best served by endorsing the symmetrical, luck-neutralizing stance. (shrink)

The terms ‘compatibilism’ and ‘incompatibilism’ were introduced in the mid-20th century to name conflicting views about the logical relationship between the thesis of determinism and the thesis that someone has free will. These technical terms were originally introduced within a specific research paradigm, the classical analytic paradigm. This paradigm is now in its final stages of degeneration and few free-will theorists still work within it (i.e. using its methods, granting its substantive background assumptions, etc.). This chapter discusses how the ambiguity (...) of the terms ‘incompatibilism’ and ‘compatibilism’ took root as the classical analytic paradigm declined and why this matters to the contemporary debate. Among other things, I explain why the ambiguity of these anachronistic terms, though relatively innocuous when they were first introduced, is now encouraging theorists to tolerate and perpetuate serious philosophical errors (e.g. to conflate relations as different in kind and importance as correlation and causation, to promote uncontentiously invalid arguments, and to equivocate in ways that keep the free-will debate mired in pseudo-stalemates). I also suggest a new framework for anyone looking for relief from the confusion and deadlock created by quixotic attempts to redefine classical narratives and jargon so that they adequately describe the dialectical contours of the contemporary free-will debate. In addition, this new framework allows philosophers to start cross-pollinating work on free will and other problems, e.g. the paradox of moral luck. -/- A selection from the publication is available to download here. For full version, please gmail me, username: kristin.mickelson.42 -/- . (shrink)