Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: In this episode, we're talking about luck.
Speaker: What makes a lucky person lucky?
Speaker: Can we make our own luck or is it out of our control?
Speaker: And is even virtue itself subject to the whims of fortune?
Speaker: Welcome back to Philosophy on the Fringes.
Speaker: We have finally returned from our unintentionally extended winter break with episode 14.
Speaker: Today we're going to be talking about luck, which is a great topic for us because the reason that our winter break was so extended is that we just kind of had a string of bad luck ourselves.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Not terribly.
Speaker: I feel kind of bad calling it bad luck because
Speaker: Nothing like really bad happened.
Speaker: Really, we were just sick a lot.
Speaker: A lot of colds, nothing major.
Speaker: Yeah, nothing major.
Speaker: Well, I think we had RSV once.
Speaker: But yeah, like three distinct different illnesses throughout winter break.
Speaker: Plus just a lot of traveling strategically in between these illnesses and kind of some unexpected symptoms.
Speaker: traveling as well so we were just constantly busy and when we weren't busy which was well we were sick which was most of the time and and that made it just kind of impossible to record a podcast because one or the other of us was coughing or in bed or whatever so but uh
Speaker: On the bright side, we can use our string of bad luck as a kind of test case to analyze luck.
Speaker: Yeah, I was actually just going to say fingers crossed.
Speaker: We've been healthy for a while now because everyone knows crossing your fingers makes lucky things happen, prevents jinxes and such.
Speaker: Yeah, so we're really excited to talk about luck today.
Speaker: We've had this episode planned literally for months and we're just really excited to sit down and talk about it.
Speaker: So I have a question for you, Megan.
Speaker: I think this is like the fundamental question in the philosophy of luck.
Speaker: So it's Socrates inspired, so you'll recognize the form.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Do good things happen to people because they're lucky or are they lucky because good things happen to them?
Speaker: The youth of luck dilemma.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So obviously inspired by Socrates in Plato's dialogue, Euthyphro, where he asks a question about the nature of piety.
Speaker: So are things pious, that is morally good, because they're loved by the gods?
Speaker: Or do the gods love things because they're pious?
Speaker: That is, the actions have some kind of inherent quality, and that's why the gods love them.
Speaker: Do the gods make something pious by loving it?
Speaker: Or is it pious already?
Speaker: And that's why I love it.
Speaker: So I want to ask something similar about luck.
Speaker: Like what's the order of explanation?
Speaker: Or when we call someone a lucky person, are they lucky just because good things happen to them?
Speaker: It's kind of a summary of the good things that have happened to them.
Speaker: Or do good things happen to them because they are lucky?
Speaker: So how do people think about luck?
Speaker: What do you think?
Speaker: Yeah, well, it's interesting because we definitely use the term colloquially in both directions.
Speaker: I want to almost say that we use it more frequently when we're talking just about like events that happen to someone.
Speaker: I think it's more common to say someone's lucky in the case that just to refer to lucky things that have already happened to them.
Speaker: And not not to talk about some kind of like intrinsic property of theirs, although in certain contexts, we do use it that way.
Speaker: Like when we're talking about things that have become sort of a cultural feature, social media feature.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: So are you talking about lucky girl syndrome?
Speaker: I'm talking about lucky girl syndrome.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So I tweeted this article about lucky girl syndrome last night.
Speaker: I didn't read it because I got distracted by painting our entryway.
Speaker: So I think you know more about lucky girl syndrome than I do, Megan, because what we have different experiences on Instagram or different and the algorithm classifies us differently.
Speaker: So you've seen videos about lucky girl syndrome.
Speaker: So what is this?
Speaker: I have.
Speaker: I mean, part of the reason is that I have actively gone out looking for information on this phenomenon, which I find really amusing.
Speaker: It's your own fault.
Speaker: It is kind of.
Speaker: It's my own fault.
Speaker: I've also heard... I haven't heard that exact phrase used, but I've heard a related phrase used by students that I've taught.
Speaker: I'm sure you've encountered this phrase, this phrase called manifesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Manifesting is in the contemporary colloquial speech to manifest is to basically... It's kind of like...
Speaker: Using the force.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, it's a mental activity.
Speaker: It's where you will something so hard that you get it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And the concept of manifesting in the contemporary discourse, I think, got popular with the book that was later turned into a movie called The Secret.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: which became this cultural phenomenon.
Speaker: It was something that like Oprah promoted.
Speaker: And it just talked about manifesting like all the things you want in life.
Speaker: Do you want, you know, to find romance?
Speaker: Well, you have to manifest that.
Speaker: You have to get yourself into the right like headspace where you're able to will it with enough force that by what the book calls the laws of attraction, it is like drawn to you.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So if you're willing it, though, that doesn't really seem lucky, right?
Speaker: Because we'll get to this.
Speaker: So we'll talk about different accounts of the nature of luck, some of which are discussed in contemporary philosophy.
Speaker: So this is not a super duper fringe topic.
Speaker: So there are accounts of luck in contemporary philosophy.
Speaker: But I think intuitively, it doesn't make sense to say that, you know, I willed it and it came to me and therefore I was lucky.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So lucky girl syndrome finds a way around this because what lucky girl syndrome is by definition, according to all the official sources, is manifesting good luck.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, manifesting good luck.
Speaker: You are manifesting that you become someone who is lucky to whom good things happen.
Speaker: And I don't know why it's called lucky girl syndrome and not lucky person syndrome, as only girls or young women can manifest this particular kind of thing.
Speaker: Or something.
Speaker: I don't really know.
Speaker: But so right.
Speaker: So in lucky girl syndrome, it's specifically focused on manifesting good luck.
Speaker: And you can do this through activities or like almost like art projects, like what they call vision boards.
Speaker: That's what that means.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: You make kind of like a collage or a poster of the things that you are manifesting.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So go back to my euthyphro-inspired dilemma.
Speaker: So like, it seems as though to me that those who speak of lucky girl syndrome, they are saying that because of their manifesting, they have developed this inherent quality.
Speaker: They are now lucky and now good things happen to them.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So they are speaking about luck as this kind of force or inherent quality or whatever.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it definitely happens and it happens in these really specific contexts.
Speaker: But I do think in general, when we call someone lucky, it's just because the good things have happened to them and we're not maybe specifically referring to an inherent property of theirs.
Speaker: And I think outside of the lucky girl syndrome context, we tend to think of like luck as an inherent property is maybe not in hearing in persons, but maybe in like objects.
Speaker: We have lucky charms, things like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then if you're near the object, the inherent luckiness gets extended to you.
Speaker: Exactly right.
Speaker: If you do the right ritual or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I find this really interesting because, yeah, I agree with you that we tend to think of luck as a kind of summary of the good things that happen to you.
Speaker: You're a lucky person because good things happen to you.
Speaker: So it seems pretty plausible to me, though, that this sort of use, this other use of luck, that is you're lucky because you think good things happen to you because you're lucky,
Speaker: This seems like a holdover from kind of like pre-modern ways of thinking about luck.
Speaker: So in the ancient world, luck was a goddess.
Speaker: For the Romans, it's Fortuna.
Speaker: For the Greeks, it's Taike.
Speaker: I'm sure other ancient polytheistic religions had a goddess of luck, too.
Speaker: So yeah, luck was viewed as this kind of goddess whose popularity, I guess, waxed and waned throughout history.
Speaker: I found this quote from our old friend Pliny.
Speaker: So you remember Pliny?
Speaker: We talked about Pliny in our episode on Bigfoot.
Speaker: So Pliny was this first century Roman author, natural historian, and admiral.
Speaker: He died trying to save people from the explosion at Mount Vesuvius.
Speaker: There's no way we haven't talked about Pliny.
Speaker: I love Pliny.
Speaker: My boy Pliny.
Speaker: We talked about him because he wrote about ancient dog-headed people.
Speaker: But there's this quote I found from Pliny where he's talking about the popularity of the goddess Luck during his time.
Speaker: So he says in his book, Natural History, that skepticism concerning God or the gods, like the traditional gods, the most important ones like Jupiter and all of that,
Speaker: He says,
Speaker: He says, we are so much in the power of chance that chance itself is considered a god and the existence of God becomes doubtful.
Speaker: So interesting quote about like skepticism concerning the gods.
Speaker: People are putting a lot of stock in the power of Fortuna, the power of luck, the power of chance.
Speaker: Well, it's also, I mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding this quote, but it also seems like Pliny's making a point about there being kind of like too much overlap between like when you have a goddess of fortune, that seems like that overlaps with like every other god.
Speaker: Like, well, why do you need a god of war?
Speaker: If you have a god of fortune, you'll be fortunate in war.
Speaker: Yeah, we talked about this in our polytheism episode, right?
Speaker: This is the Agostin critique.
Speaker: But I'm guessing that he is saying this sort of thing because the world seems like it's governed by chance.
Speaker: Good things happen to bad people.
Speaker: Bad things happen to good people.
Speaker: Cities are destroyed by volcanoes.
Speaker: That hasn't happened yet when he wrote this.
Speaker: So it seems like that's sort of underlying his judgment.
Speaker: The world seems really chancy.
Speaker: The world seems really contingent.
Speaker: Okay, so maybe, yeah, so maybe, like, say we have a god of war or something like that, or we're hypothesizing about a god of war, and some nation wins a war, but then, like, 10 years later, their enemy nation wins a war, and then maybe that kind of seems more like random chance or fortuna than, like, a god of war, because why would the gods suddenly switch sides or something like that?
Speaker: Yeah, maybe something like that, yeah.
Speaker: Hmm, that's fascinating.
Speaker: I really like that.
Speaker: So you brought up Socrates earlier, who I think is an interesting character to think about with respect to Locke, because famously, I think Socrates, more so than a lot of his other, you know, students or contemporary philosophers, thought that like...
Speaker: The good was extremely immune to luck, particularly like human virtue and happiness.
Speaker: How Socrates understood happiness, which was the possession of virtue, is basically entirely immune to luck.
Speaker: So in at least as Plato presents his position in the Apology of Socrates, where he is defending himself against charges brought against him by the city, Socrates makes this argument that
Speaker: no matter what the sentence handed down to him consists in, nobody can really do him any harm as long as he possesses virtue, which for him, contra Aristotle, for him is totally immune to life circumstances.
Speaker: My virtue is something that I can cultivate no matter how much money I have, no matter how much health I have, no matter how much freedom I have.
Speaker: It's something kind of like just like an internal disposition that I can cultivate under any circumstances.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Socrates is going to say then the plenty.
Speaker: Well, you know, bad things don't happen to good people because those things you think are bad or not bad.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The jury can put Socrates to death, but assuming Socrates possesses virtue, they're not harming him, according to Socrates.
Speaker: They can't do anything that actually harms him.
Speaker: Putting him to death won't harm him because the only thing that could harm him would be to lose his virtue.
Speaker: Yeah, this is obviously a really counterintuitive view, especially if you think about the etymology of our English word happiness.
Speaker: So I love etymology.
Speaker: So happiness is related to the word happenstance.
Speaker: Hap is like an old Norse word that means like luck or chance.
Speaker: And you can still see this in the English word hapless.
Speaker: Someone who's hapless, bad things happen to them.
Speaker: They're unlucky.
Speaker: So I think our notion of happiness seems to have embedded within it some element of chance.
Speaker: Aristotle would agree with that, right?
Speaker: Like you said, you need some good luck in order to flourish.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's hard for me to think of people who would completely agree with Socrates point on this, even in his own time, right?
Speaker: Aristotle was almost in the exact opposite direction.
Speaker: Virtue depends quite a lot on external circumstances, and a lot of those are governed by chance.
Speaker: Whether I'm born with good health or poor health, whether I'm born into a wealthy family or a poor family or a ruling family or a slave family.
Speaker: I don't control that to any extent, but that does have an effect on what kinds of virtues I'm able to cultivate and therefore on the extent to which I'm happy in this full sense that the Greeks talk about happiness, eudaimoniae.
Speaker: So do you think then that one's conception of happiness or well-being has implications for whether you think the world is governed by luck or chance?
Speaker: I mean, Socrates is going to say then that the world is governed by luck.
Speaker: Because the only reason Pliny is really saying this is because, yeah, bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people.
Speaker: But it sounds like Socrates is not going to say that.
Speaker: So then do you think then that he would reject this idea?
Speaker: that like chance rules the world because our happiness, our well-being is up to us, right, for Socrates.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, well, certainly what one thinks of as good or bad, like what's truly good or bad, that's going to determine or have an effect on your view of fortune or luck, because to be lucky is to have good things happen to you.
Speaker: Unlucky is to have bad things happen to you.
Speaker: So it matters what's good and bad.
Speaker: And right.
Speaker: For Socrates, that class of things is like really narrow, the things that are actually good and bad, or they depend at least on really, really narrow conditions.
Speaker: And right, Aristotle is going to completely go in the opposite direction of this.
Speaker: And in fact, for Aristotle, I mean, for Aristotle, it's not even the luck that you get in your life that counts toward your happiness.
Speaker: For Aristotle, it's also, you also need to be lucky in, I want to say you're after, he didn't really believe in like an afterlife, how we think of afterlife, but it matters what happens after you die.
Speaker: Your legacy.
Speaker: Your legacy.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, so he has this passage in the Nicomachean Ethics where he's talking about the happiest person who's maybe ever lived, this guy named Solon.
Speaker: The lawgiver of Athens, yes.
Speaker: And he, so he's considered to be the happiest person to ever live, at least that Aristotle knows of, because...
Speaker: Because not only did he have the virtues in this life, but his legacy, his children, their lives were also brought him honor.
Speaker: They didn't bring him shame.
Speaker: They continued his virtuous legacy.
Speaker: So that even matters toward your own fortune for Aristotle.
Speaker: So it's like really, really contingent.
Speaker: Yeah, poor Marcus Aurelius, his son Commodus, bad emperor, bad for Marcus Aurelius' life.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Yeah, as famously portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix.
Speaker: Yeah, cool.
Speaker: So jumping ahead like a thousand years or so, one philosopher that talks a lot about luck is our old friend Machiavelli, the Italian Renaissance Florentine philosopher.
Speaker: So in his book, The Prince, he has a discussion of the nature of luck and its role in the rise and fall of states.
Speaker: So he mentions Fortuna a lot throughout the book, but his most extended discussion of luck is in chapter 25.
Speaker: So it's called What Fortune Can Effect in Human Affairs and How to Withstand Her.
Speaker: So the basic gist of his view is that a lot of times a prince will get control of a state due purely to luck, due to chance.
Speaker: And when that happens, that's very unstable.
Speaker: So the best sort of prince is the person who can get control of a state through his own virtu, which for Machiavelli, that means his ability.
Speaker: He has control over this sort of thing.
Speaker: His own manliness.
Speaker: Yeah, his own manly ability.
Speaker: So yeah, it's interesting to read Machiavelli because we're out of the ancient world.
Speaker: This is medieval Europe.
Speaker: This is a Christian context.
Speaker: But Machiavelli is still talking about fortune as if it were a goddess.
Speaker: So in fact, I was reading a book about a year or so ago.
Speaker: So I was interested in
Speaker: Roman conceptions of Fortuna even before we conceived this podcast.
Speaker: And so there's one book called Fortuna, Deity and Concepts in Archaic and Republican Italy by the Italian classicist Daniele Maino.
Speaker: He says that Machiavelli, in Machiavelli's theological thought, it seems as though luck is a power independent from God, if not a fully-fledged deity.
Speaker: So I find that really interesting.
Speaker: I'm not sure if Machiavelli was this kind of die theist who believed in God, the God of traditional Christianity.
Speaker: And and Fortuna, that'd be a really interesting theology.
Speaker: But he certainly talks about luck as a kind of force, as this kind of thing that governs the world.
Speaker: And he says, he says, sometimes pondering over luck's role in the rise and fall of nations, I am in some degree inclined to the opinion that luck rules the world.
Speaker: But nevertheless, he goes on to say, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be that true that fortune is the arbiter of only like one half of our actions.
Speaker: The other half is our own ability.
Speaker: So this is an interesting contrast, right?
Speaker: We've already hinted at this.
Speaker: You can contrast luck with control.
Speaker: Like one idea is that lucky things for us, things that are good luck for us, are good things that happen to us that are outside of our control.
Speaker: Something like that.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, that's an interesting idea.
Speaker: So no matter how unlucky we are, we could, in theory, if we honed our skills and discipline enough, we might be able to overcome some amount of that bad luck and vice versa.
Speaker: No matter how lucky we might be, we can always still mess things up through our own inability or lack of discipline or something.
Speaker: Yeah, Machiavelli says the virtuous prince, that is the one that has ability, that person prepares for bad luck.
Speaker: They acknowledge the role that Fortuna plays in life, and they are prepared to overcome her.
Speaker: Okay, yeah.
Speaker: So it's like a strategizing kind of thing.
Speaker: Like if I'm aware of how many contingencies there are in some battle or something, the more aware of them I am and the more intelligent and disciplined and virtuous I am, the more I can be ready no matter what fortuna tries to throw at me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I think this helps us make sense then of a seemingly paradoxical thing that people say that you can make your own luck.
Speaker: On its surface, that seems paradoxical, right?
Speaker: Because we're contrasting luck with ability, like luck and control.
Speaker: But it does seem intuitive once we understand what Machiavelli is saying here, that you can make your own luck.
Speaker: How do you make your own luck?
Speaker: Well, maybe you bring it about that you're put into circumstances where good luck might befall you.
Speaker: So if you just hang out in your bedroom all day, no lucky good things are going to happen to you.
Speaker: So too, if you can prepare for bad luck or prepare for good luck even, then in some sense you can make your own luck.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And I guess what falls in this category of making your own luck is also things sort of that I brought up earlier, like the, you know, possessing lucky charms or doing particular.
Speaker: Yeah, those things work, then that helps you make your own luck, too.
Speaker: Manifesting is helping you make your own luck.
Speaker: Manifesting is helping you make your own luck.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Going to see a relic might give you some.
Speaker: I mean, I guess they wouldn't call it good luck, but like blessings or whatever, that kind of thing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So those are all ways of maybe indirectly controlling to some extent your fortunes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, so although I think we don't really see too many discussions of luck in philosophy, like as I said at the outset, there are accounts of luck where we see it here and there.
Speaker: There is one thing that contemporary moral philosophers like to stress, and that is that morality or moral responsibilities or moral notions are in some sense immune to luck.
Speaker: Like morality and luck, they are contrary.
Speaker: They don't go hand in hand.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, to some extent, at least.
Speaker: There are some contemporary theories that have some element of luck.
Speaker: Utilitarianism will have some element of luck or at least unpredictability in the sense that you can't always predict all the results of your actions.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: what you're responsible for is like the effects you're trying to bring about.
Speaker: And that's, yeah, that's always going to be immune to luck, or at least it's never discussed otherwise.
Speaker: Of course, for deontological theories like Kant's theory, all that matters are your intentions, not what results from what you're doing.
Speaker: So, right.
Speaker: So most of our contemporary intuitions about morality is that whatever it is, whatever it makes it is that makes actions right or wrong,
Speaker: That's something that I control.
Speaker: If I don't control it, then it can't be something that affects the moral quality of my actions.
Speaker: We even have like a principle that kind of sums this up, which is ought implies can.
Speaker: I ought to do something only in the sense that I can do it.
Speaker: There's never a sense where I'm failing an obligation if that is something, if that obligation is something that I'm unable to do.
Speaker: But people have not always thought this.
Speaker: And in fact, let's back up again to the ancient world, because in ancient, in the ancient world, in ancient Greece, especially, we see a really, really great example of literature that seems to demonstrate the presence of moral luck, which is Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King.
Speaker: this really famous tragic play by the playwright Sophocles, which follows a king who has an extremely long, terrible string of bad luck.
Speaker: And it does not turn around for him in the end.
Speaker: I don't want to spoil it for anyone who doesn't know this story, but basically how it goes is that Oedipus, the king of the land, he is told by someone who can see the future that the cause of the famine is that someone...
Speaker: has killed his father, committed patricide, and had sexual intercourse with his mother.
Speaker: So two really, really taboo things.
Speaker: Someone in the land has done this, and until they weed him out and punish him, the land will continue experiencing famine.
Speaker: And so Oedipus goes on this search trying to figure out who he could be.
Speaker: Long story short, as in
Speaker: you know, everyone sees coming basically from the first page of the play.
Speaker: That person is Oedipus himself, although Oedipus does not realize either of these things are true.
Speaker: He has long ago killed his father, not knowing this person was his father.
Speaker: He someone was his father that he didn't realize was his father.
Speaker: And inadvertently married his mother.
Speaker: So his father and his mother had given him up as an infant.
Speaker: They had exposed him to be killed as an infant and someone had taken him and saved him.
Speaker: But now he the results that he didn't know who his parents were.
Speaker: So he ended up killing his father and marrying his mother.
Speaker: A string of bad luck, if ever there was one.
Speaker: If ever there was one, yeah, just really terrible luck.
Speaker: So he's done these things that brought famine to the land because they were just so morally terrible, but he didn't know he did them.
Speaker: So it's a really interesting case of someone being punished by the gods.
Speaker: for engaging in incredibly taboo actions that they didn't know they were doing, but they still did them.
Speaker: So it was enough that they did them to bring this kind of wrath from the gods upon them.
Speaker: They didn't need to be aware of it.
Speaker: So Oedipus, just by sheer misfortune, committed all these terrible things and brought famine on the land and had to exile himself in the end.
Speaker: So anyway, we see themes of moral luck in other ancient literature too, all throughout Homer.
Speaker: There are instances of people experiencing moral luck, moral fortune and misfortune, where they're able to act well or they are made to act immorally badly just purely because of some really unlucky situation they find themselves in, either a situation of ignorance or a situation of there being no
Speaker: right choice or no good choice, kind of like moral paradox.
Speaker: So obviously Socrates is going to differ from this way of looking at the world, but there has been an interest in, I guess, sort of recent literature, I mean mid-20th century literature, in kind of trying to tease out this concept of the place of luck or fortune in the moral realm.
Speaker: Yeah, because Oedipus feels responsible for what he did.
Speaker: He blinds himself, right?
Speaker: So even though there's this bad luck, it was outside his control, he had no idea that he did these bad things, he still feels responsible.
Speaker: And also in the second play of the trilogy, it's not a real trilogy, but the three plays about Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonnus, the chorus says, you sinned, right?
Speaker: You did this bad thing.
Speaker: Like, it doesn't matter.
Speaker: Yeah, he doesn't take his ignorance to be exculpated.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So and so so the idea is like he is responsible for this bad thing.
Speaker: He did something wrong.
Speaker: He's blameworthy, even though he he was a victim of bad luck.
Speaker: And this is like an instance of what contemporary philosophers call moral luck.
Speaker: And even in the third play in that trilogy, Antigone, there's some themes of moral luck, too, in the sense that Antigone is caught in the situation where she has to choose to break one of the guiding moral laws or taboos of her culture.
Speaker: Like, she can't act without breaking one of them.
Speaker: Yeah, either she obeys Creon, her uncle, the new king, and doesn't bury her...
Speaker: traitorous brother polynices or she does and obeys the gods are you supposed to you're supposed to bury your your kin exactly so she has this conflict of duties duty to the god duty to her family and duty to the state so right bad luck moral duties can conflict in in uh in in ancient thought moral duties can conflict in this really deep way
Speaker: Yeah, so moral luck has not been a popular theme, as Frank was saying, in a lot of ethics literature, but it has gotten some attention, and I think that it's really interesting personally as a topic.
Speaker: Yeah, so can you tell us more about moral luck, Megan?
Speaker: So what's like an instance?
Speaker: I guess we just gave an instance with Oedipus.
Speaker: So there's one standard example that people like to talk about when talking about moral luck.
Speaker: So why don't you tell our listeners that?
Speaker: Yeah, well, I hope I'm thinking of the same one as you.
Speaker: But right.
Speaker: So a lot of people will say, well, yeah, you're you're not a Nazi now.
Speaker: But if you were born back in, you know, Germany during the Third Reich, you probably would have been.
Speaker: It's morally lucky for you that you weren't born into a culture that had assumed all these norms that made the rise of the Third Reich make sense.
Speaker: to most people at the time that made the actions carried out by the Third Reich not seem as like unbelievably horrific as they seem to us now.
Speaker: And that all these things add up to just like you being born luckily out of that.
Speaker: And the people who were born in that time and place, they were, you know, maybe they weren't just unlucky, but they were certainly unlucky.
Speaker: And it made it much more difficult for them to discern or understand the right thing to do.
Speaker: Yeah, so that wasn't the example I was thinking of, but that is one of the common examples.
Speaker: So I think that's Thomas Nagel's example.
Speaker: That's his example.
Speaker: He's like, imagine a German immigrant from 1930.
Speaker: He immigrated to Argentina, and then he didn't join the Nazis.
Speaker: Well, he's really lucky.
Speaker: because he probably would have if he stayed in Germany.
Speaker: I was thinking of the drunk driving example, right?
Speaker: So this is the case.
Speaker: So two people, they engage in drunk driving.
Speaker: They both do the exact same thing.
Speaker: One of those people hits a person and kills them.
Speaker: Intuitively, like we blame the one person more.
Speaker: We punish the one person more, the person that killed someone.
Speaker: more than the person that didn't.
Speaker: But that seems kind of weird, right?
Speaker: They both engaged in the same behavior.
Speaker: They both had the same intentions.
Speaker: They were both equally reckless.
Speaker: One of those people was unlucky.
Speaker: One of those people was lucky.
Speaker: But it seems like our moral ascriptions differ markedly.
Speaker: One of those gets blamed.
Speaker: One of those does not.
Speaker: Yeah, one of them is getting charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Speaker: And the other is nothing's happening.
Speaker: Sometimes nothing happens.
Speaker: You get a DUI.
Speaker: A lot of times nothing happens.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: That's that's a probably even better example.
Speaker: Right there.
Speaker: I was lucky that there was no one in the road that night versus, you know, this other drunk driver who was unlucky that there was a person in the road that night that they couldn't stop in time not to hit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So those are some those are some good cases to reflect on, because it does seem like especially the drunk driving case, that's a case where it's certainly true that our our punitive system is not tracking control conditions or responsibility conditions.
Speaker: It's tracking the combination of whatever we chose to do with totally contingent circumstances.
Speaker: Yeah, that might be purely pragmatic.
Speaker: But I think the more interesting thing is I think intuitively we do morally blame the one person, the person that killed someone more.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Do you agree?
Speaker: I don't think we hold people equally morally blameworthy.
Speaker: You know, I'm thinking of like if I have a friend who tells me, you know, gosh, I got to confess something to you.
Speaker: 10 years ago, you know, I drove home drunk.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, luckily I was fine.
Speaker: No one got hurt, but I did it versus a friend who was like, I have to tell you something.
Speaker: 10 years ago, I ran over something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So so that's like the puzzle.
Speaker: So you can you can you can explain away the legal stuff with pragmatic arguments or but like it seems like we have we don't adhere to this standard that is you're only responsible for those morally responsible for that stuff that's in your control.
Speaker: So like, what are we supposed to say about this?
Speaker: Like, are we supposed to just accept this?
Speaker: Like moral luck exists and let's carry on with our lives.
Speaker: Like, what do we do here?
Speaker: Like, what's the, is there a solution to this?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it certainly brings out what the thing that stands out to me is that it seems like it brings out different dimensions of what we mean by like morality.
Speaker: In some cases, it does clearly seem like we're talking just about the things we have control over.
Speaker: But it also seems like the stuff that, you know, the drunk driving case brings to light.
Speaker: There's some dimension of like tragedy and and I don't know, the opposite of tragedy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That is that seems like it's related to morality, but not to what we what we have control over.
Speaker: You you read that Nagel paper, didn't you recently?
Speaker: I read parts of it.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And he has he distinguishes between some different kinds of morals.
Speaker: Yeah, so the kind of moral luck we've been talking about, the case of the drunk driver, that would be what he calls resultant luck.
Speaker: Like two people engaged in the same behavior, they're in the same circumstances, and they're equally morally virtuous or vicious, and for some reasons unbeknownst to us and only to God or the universe, a bad thing happened to one person and not the other.
Speaker: So there's that.
Speaker: He also talks about constitutive luck, where two people do different things.
Speaker: One person might have a good upbringing, for instance.
Speaker: The other person has a bad upbringing.
Speaker: And that leads them to engage in radically different moral behavior.
Speaker: But one person is not—but neither of those people is morally responsible for their upbringing.
Speaker: Like, I have a bad character because my parents were bad.
Speaker: You have a good character because your parents were good.
Speaker: We didn't choose our parents.
Speaker: And then there's also what he calls circumstantial luck, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Speaker: So that fortunate German immigrant who went to Argentina to start a life there, he got some good circumstantial luck because he wasn't even in the circumstances where people were knocking on his door and asking him to betray his neighbors.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that this is a good distinction to make.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So in fact, we can imagine the drunk driver cases having some constitutive luck to maybe there's like a genetic component to alcoholism.
Speaker: Yeah, that like he has, but the the other guy didn't.
Speaker: And I don't know, maybe that made him, you know, maybe that makes him less lucky because it was more outside of his control to not drink or something.
Speaker: So something that I think is interesting about, I don't actually remember if Nagel mentions it, but I know that Williams, Bernard Williams, who also writes about moral luck, famously writes about moral luck.
Speaker: I think he coined the term moral luck.
Speaker: Did he?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: When he is discussing these ideas in Nagel and writing on moral luck himself, he tries to tease out what it is that is bad about cases like
Speaker: antigony or cases like maybe not cases like the drunk driver that's pretty obvious but cases where it's more a case of like a tragic choice uh yeah so he's trying to figure out like well what's in these cases where it seems like you can't act well and those are the ones williams is most interested in because williams is interested in the classics he's he's really deep into the ancient greek literature and so he's interested in these tragic scenarios where it seems like
Speaker: Your luck has determined that there's no way for you to act well, just like Oedipus or Antigone.
Speaker: You're unable to act well for whatever reason.
Speaker: And so he's trying to figure out what it is that's going wrong because you're not being malicious.
Speaker: But what he says is really interesting to me.
Speaker: So he considers that maybe what's bad about the situation is that the agent is in a position where she is unable to offer a justification for what she did.
Speaker: There's no justifying principle that she can mention that shows the reasonableness of her action.
Speaker: On the other hand, there's no... Well, right.
Speaker: So it seems like no matter how she acts, there's always going to be a reason to have not done that.
Speaker: And there's no kind of guiding principle there that she can use to explicate her action.
Speaker: She just has to act.
Speaker: She just has to pick one.
Speaker: So I thought that was really interesting because obviously, you know, I'm sort of independently interested in the issue of like moral justification and being able to like give an account for what you did.
Speaker: So, right.
Speaker: So the tragedy that these people might unluckily find themselves in is that they are
Speaker: They can't there's nothing they can say in their own defense.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I kind of it kind of sounds like the gateway to existentialism.
Speaker: I reason gives out and you have to make this kind of heroic choice.
Speaker: And that's all that can be said.
Speaker: And this kind of thing pops up in these these Greek heroes lives.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like they're doing all of these extreme things and battles and and they run into these situations where sometimes they just have to do a thing.
Speaker: And no matter what they do, it's probably going to be bad.
Speaker: I find this really interesting.
Speaker: Yes, you did anticipate the connection to existentialism.
Speaker: Obviously, this is a big theme in Kierkegaard and has really, really well-known work Fear and Trembling.
Speaker: The topic of that book is situations like this where there is...
Speaker: Someone finds themselves in a situation where there is no way to act well, or if there is a way to act well, it's a way that is completely inexplicable.
Speaker: You can't offer a public justification of it.
Speaker: And that leaves the hero or whatever you want to call him in a painful situation, a situation that seems really bad for him.
Speaker: He cannot communicate big parts of his life.
Speaker: He should just maximize utility.
Speaker: He should just maximize utility.
Speaker: Yeah, Williams never considered that.
Speaker: That's funny because Williams famously argued against utilitarianism.
Speaker: Okay, so thus far, we have been talking all about luck, but we haven't really like offered a definition or settled on a definition.
Speaker: We've mentioned notions that are related to it, like chance, lack of control and that sort of thing.
Speaker: But, you know, contemporary analytic philosophy likes to try to give conceptual analyses of important concepts, try to specify the individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the application of some concept.
Speaker: So is it possible to do that for luck?
Speaker: So as it happens, there has been a bit of literature on like analyzing luck somewhat recently in contemporary philosophy.
Speaker: So broadly speaking, there are three accounts of luck that are prominent in this contemporary analytic literature.
Speaker: So the first account of luck connects luck to probability, right?
Speaker: Chance.
Speaker: So I should mention all these accounts of luck include this significance condition.
Speaker: Something's lucky to you, good luck, good or bad, only if it's significant, right?
Speaker: Like that makes sense.
Speaker: If I don't care about it, if it's completely meaningless to me or completely insignificant, it doesn't really make sense to say it's lucky or unlucky.
Speaker: So it has to be significant to you and also has to be like improbable.
Speaker: So if something really, really good for you that's improbable happens, it makes sense to call it lucky, right?
Speaker: So yeah, that sounds pretty good.
Speaker: The second one is called the modal account.
Speaker: So this is similar to the probability count.
Speaker: But it talks about counterfactuals instead of probability.
Speaker: So on this account, an event is lucky for you only if it's significant and only if it's modally fragile.
Speaker: That is, had the world been very slightly different, the lucky thing would not have occurred.
Speaker: And this makes a lot of sense too, right?
Speaker: Something really, really lucky is something that very easily could not have happened.
Speaker: You might think of a lottery as illustrating both of these things.
Speaker: Suppose you win the lottery.
Speaker: There's like a billion tickets.
Speaker: Very improbable that you win.
Speaker: So we say it's lucky.
Speaker: But also it's very modally fragile, right?
Speaker: You very easily could not have won, I guess, or you might say.
Speaker: So that's the second view.
Speaker: And the third view employs this control condition that we've been talking a lot about, right?
Speaker: Something's lucky for you if it's significant and it was outside of your control, right?
Speaker: So those are the three accounts.
Speaker: So I read this paper by the philosopher Stephen Hales at Bloomsburg University.
Speaker: So that's kind of near where I grew up in the Poconos.
Speaker: And it's called Why Every Theory of Luck is Wrong.
Speaker: So it's in the journal Noose.
Speaker: This is one of the best journals in contemporary analytic philosophy.
Speaker: So it's a really cool paper.
Speaker: He discusses the three accounts.
Speaker: He summarizes them.
Speaker: He talks about who endorses them, what sort of accounts are appealing to which sorts of people.
Speaker: And then he just gives counterexamples to all of them.
Speaker: So there's three classes of counterexamples that are problematic for all three accounts of luck.
Speaker: So should I go through these one by one or should we do all three at once?
Speaker: What do you think?
Speaker: Well, let's talk about the accounts of luck first and then maybe talk about the counterexamples.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Frank and I were talking about this before.
Speaker: So he already knows this, but I am really drawn to the modal account of luck.
Speaker: And I was trying to think of why it is that I just find the modal account so interesting.
Speaker: It's the idea that, you know, there's all these nearby possible worlds where this good thing didn't happen to you.
Speaker: You know, maybe all of them except the one you're in.
Speaker: This good thing didn't happen to you.
Speaker: But it does seem like we...
Speaker: think this way like so naturally so i was thinking of so frank your sister courtney a very devoted listener hi courtney yeah uh she has she gets like anxiety about issues of modal luck when she thinks about how easily she could not have met her husband right uh you know if i just hadn't done this on this day i i never would have met you know the man that she ended up marrying
Speaker: Ryan, the most handsome man in the world.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Famously, the most handsome man, which, you know, might as well be a matter of luck.
Speaker: So so so she feels anxiety about that.
Speaker: We might feel anxiety about if we have a near miss and a traffic incident.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If that car had been half an inch to the to the left or if that bullet had been, you know, a quarter inch to the right, that person would have died.
Speaker: It would have nicked an artery.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So to me, that's like, at least for at least in my case, those instances are really driving my intuitions toward the modal account.
Speaker: Yes, I think some of these instances can be explained with the probability account too.
Speaker: So Hales gives a nice case to try to distinguish the two.
Speaker: So he thinks that they don't collapse into each other.
Speaker: So here's his case.
Speaker: It's a Russian roulette case.
Speaker: So imagine you're playing Russian roulette.
Speaker: You shouldn't be playing Russian roulette.
Speaker: Let's say someone's forcing you to play it, a bad person.
Speaker: And suppose it's like a really, really big revolver.
Speaker: There's like a thousand bullets in a thousand chambers.
Speaker: Or is it like old-fashioned?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, so like, and suppose you, you know, suppose you don't lose Russian roulette, so you survive.
Speaker: Well, let's suppose that the bullet was in like the next chamber, right?
Speaker: So had you just spun it a little bit differently, you would have lost, right?
Speaker: So here he wants to say that the only the modal count can explain this, that had things been slightly different, you would have lost the Russian roulette, right?
Speaker: even though the probability of you losing was still really, really low.
Speaker: So, yeah, I find th at a pretty good case.
Speaker: That seems like it distinguishes the two.
Speaker: We think about luck counterfactually sometimes.
Speaker: Sometimes we think about luck purely in terms of probability and chance.
Speaker: And these two things come apart.
Speaker: In the bullet that almost hits the artery, that seems like a really similar to the Russian roulette case.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, so we have our three accounts, right?
Speaker: Pretty clear, right?
Speaker: All of them require that the event be significant.
Speaker: So I'll just leave that in the background.
Speaker: And so we have a probability count, our modal count, our control count.
Speaker: So he thinks there's counterexamples to all of them.
Speaker: So his first class of counterexamples is the case of lucky necessities.
Speaker: So lucky necessities.
Speaker: This is a counterexample to which?
Speaker: All of them, really.
Speaker: All of them.
Speaker: Yeah, so a necessary truth is a truth that's true and was always true, had to be true, is true in all possible worlds.
Speaker: Couldn't have been false.
Speaker: You can think of examples like mathematical truths or logical truths.
Speaker: So it seems like on its surface, it can't ever be a matter of luck that a necessary truth is true.
Speaker: But it does seem like intuitively there are cases where we ascribe luck to,
Speaker: to the truth of necessary truths.
Speaker: So here's one of these kinds of examples.
Speaker: So he calls this the logical bandit example.
Speaker: So a bandit appears and threatens you with a gun.
Speaker: He will take your wallet unless you answer a logic puzzle correctly.
Speaker: The bandit gives the details of the puzzle.
Speaker: You have no idea what the answer is.
Speaker: You're bad at logic puzzles.
Speaker: So you just guess two thirds.
Speaker: By luck, you guessed correctly.
Speaker: The bandit goes away.
Speaker: So this seems like a problem because it seems intuitive that you were lucky.
Speaker: It's lucky that the answer was two thirds.
Speaker: But since it's a logic puzzle, the truth, the answer is necessarily true.
Speaker: That's how logic puzzles are set up.
Speaker: Whatever the answer is, it can be derived by pure logical reasoning.
Speaker: And so it had to be true.
Speaker: It's necessarily true.
Speaker: The objective probability of it being two thirds is one.
Speaker: It had to be true.
Speaker: So it's true in all possible worlds.
Speaker: And of course, you had no control over it's being true because it's a necessary truth.
Speaker: So that seems like a problem.
Speaker: That's the first class of counterexamples.
Speaker: The second class of counterexamples is cases of what he calls skillful luck.
Speaker: So I like this sort of case.
Speaker: So he uses an example from baseball.
Speaker: So in baseball, even the best batter only gets on base about like one third of the time.
Speaker: So if you're hitting 0.333, you're doing really well.
Speaker: But of course, like getting on base one third of the time is not that
Speaker: It's not that much, right?
Speaker: Like hitting the ball, getting a hit one, one third of the time is not that much.
Speaker: So we want to say at any given time that it's improbable you're going to get on base.
Speaker: Of course, it's modally fragile.
Speaker: Like had things been slightly different, had the pitcher thrown a slightly different pitch, had there been a glare in your eye from the sun, you wouldn't have hit the ball.
Speaker: And also it seems like then there is a lot of factors are outside your control.
Speaker: But of course, we don't want to say that every time the best batter in baseball gets on base, he is getting on base as a matter of luck.
Speaker: That's the second kind of example, skillful luck, counterexample to all three.
Speaker: The third kind of example is an example that illustrates that our descriptions of luck...
Speaker: depend on whether we're thinking about the event individually, that is synchronically, or we're thinking about it as an element of a sequence.
Speaker: So here's another sports example.
Speaker: So suppose a basketball player gets 97 free throws in a row in.
Speaker: So, you know, he's at the line, he shoots it in 97 in a row.
Speaker: So that's really, really good.
Speaker: That's like the record in NBA.
Speaker: But his percentage of getting any individual free throw in is like 85%.
Speaker: So any single shot is going to be probable that he's going to get it in.
Speaker: It's not improbable.
Speaker: But it still seems like it makes sense to say that that last shot that he gets in, the one that he gets in where he breaks the record, he gets the 97th free throw in a row in, that one was lucky.
Speaker: That was super lucky for him, even though it was no less probable that
Speaker: than any of the other ones that he got in as well.
Speaker: The 97th one had an 85% chance of going in given his career free throw percentage.
Speaker: But it still seems like we want to say it's lucky because when we think about the sequence of free throws that he just did.
Speaker: So it's important to note that that individual one is supposed to be lucky.
Speaker: We're not saying that we're not evaluating the proposition he got 97 in a row.
Speaker: We're just evaluating that last free throw.
Speaker: It is lucky for him to get that one in.
Speaker: But of course, it's no less probable that he's going to get that one in than the first one.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But it still seems lucky.
Speaker: So the point of these kinds of examples seems to be that our ascriptions of luck seem to be in some sense contextual, like the context matters.
Speaker: What scenario we're in?
Speaker: Are we playing baseball?
Speaker: Are we looking at it synchronically or diachronically?
Speaker: I don't like the first case.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So you don't like the lucky necessities case.
Speaker: So what's wrong with those?
Speaker: Because I think it calls the wrong thing lucky.
Speaker: It's not lucky that that's the answer.
Speaker: It's lucky that you got the answer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I agree with you.
Speaker: I think that that's right.
Speaker: So like you can we can diffuse that count example by saying, well, we're not saying that the answer to the logic puzzle being two thirds is lucky.
Speaker: It's like that you guessed it is lucky.
Speaker: Yeah, if I like wrote out Gödel's incompleteness theorem just by randomly putting some numbers or letters and symbols on a page, it wouldn't be like lucky that that proves the incompleteness arithmetic and be lucky that like that I did that.
Speaker: Another thing you can do, and this is a common thing people have done in the literature and response to this paper, is you make luck a kind of epistemic notion.
Speaker: So it's lucky because from your point of view, given the evidence you have, you have no reason to believe that it's two thirds, right?
Speaker: Your epistemic probability, right, how probable it is that it's two thirds given your evidence, your battle logic puzzle, that's part of your evidence.
Speaker: That's really low.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So if you if you think of judgments of what's lucky or unlucky as a kind of epistemic judgment rather than objective judgment, that's sort of.
Speaker: how you approach these.
Speaker: So the objective probability is one.
Speaker: It's a necessary truth, so the probability is one.
Speaker: But the epistemic probability, how probable it is given your own evidence, is really low, and that's why it's lucky.
Speaker: So that seems to me like a pretty promising way to respond to this too.
Speaker: You make judgments of what's lucky or unlucky, like relative to the epistemic context, like what you should believe given your evidence.
Speaker: I mean, I think that there is.
Speaker: So the idea of like necessities being immune to luck is interesting because it I guess that means if you're like a hard determinist.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Then you can't believe in luck.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And if you make luck epistemic, though, then you can.
Speaker: Given my evidence, I have no reason to believe this is what's going to happen.
Speaker: And if it happens and it's good for me, then it's lucky, even though determinists are.
Speaker: So the epistemic account of of Locke makes it more widely available.
Speaker: Now, hard determinists can also accept Locke.
Speaker: I like that.
Speaker: I think hard determinists should be able to believe in Locke.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So how about the second case, the case of the baseball player?
Speaker: Ty Cobb, he best the highest career average in baseball, average of 366.
Speaker: He got on base a lot.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But he's still, you know, he was still very improbable that he'd get on base ever.
Speaker: Well, the interesting thing about that case that it seems like it's fine to call any individual instance of getting on bass lucky, but it doesn't seem like his overall record is the result of luck.
Speaker: At least to me, that's like my intuition about it.
Speaker: Well, I don't know.
Speaker: I think I didn't get to say that like every single instance getting on bass is lucky.
Speaker: I'm not saying my intuitions are consistent.
Speaker: That's just what it seems like to me.
Speaker: Because it seems like, you know, the more data you get, like the more times he tries to hit a ball, the less likely it's going to be that someone who's bad at getting on base continues to have this good record.
Speaker: But it still makes sense that for each individual one, there's enough of an element of chance or whatever, stuff outside of his control to make it
Speaker: Right to say that it was lucky.
Speaker: I think the way I want to look to greed.
Speaker: I think maybe that's one thing you could say like, okay, it's like it's a little bit lucky because baseball, but it'd be wrong to say it's luck.
Speaker: It's lucky because you're a mix of luck and skill.
Speaker: And we just, you know, we don't always have like great access to what that mix is.
Speaker: Yeah, and it might be vague, like how lucky something has to be in order to be lucky without qualification.
Speaker: But I like the idea of making luck kind of contextual, right?
Speaker: We're talking about baseball.
Speaker: That's the context, right?
Speaker: So it's already well known.
Speaker: It's very difficult to hit the ball.
Speaker: It's already well known.
Speaker: There's a lot of factors outside of the baseball player's control.
Speaker: So hold all that fixed, right?
Speaker: And then how much skill does the baseball player exercise?
Speaker: Well, he still exercises a lot of skill, so it's not luck that he gets on base.
Speaker: And then that also makes sense of why I have different intuitions about the aggregate, about the record than the individual cases, because the aggregate in some ways helps us cancel out like the noise of luck and lets us just look at the skill.
Speaker: At least the more the more times he tries to hit a ball, the more we're able to filter out the lucky noise.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then so those are some kinds of responses you see in the literature to the first two kinds of counterexamples.
Speaker: The last one where our judgments about what's lucky or not depends on whether we're looking at the event as part of a sequence or individually, atemporally, synchronically.
Speaker: So the way that some have responded to this is they'll say, well, you got to remember the significance condition, right?
Speaker: So it is true that that 97th free throw has the same probability of going in as the first one, but he's going to break the record if he gets the 97th one in.
Speaker: And so it's super good for him for it to go in.
Speaker: And that's why it's lucky.
Speaker: So you always got to remember the significance condition, right?
Speaker: So something can be really lucky for you, not because it was like super duper improbable, but just because it was super duper good.
Speaker: There's both factors that go into this.
Speaker: So that's what you might say for that one.
Speaker: It was lucky, not owing to its improbability.
Speaker: It was still pretty probable that he'd get it in.
Speaker: It was lucky because he's going to break the record and that's super good for him.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: And that seems pretty plausible to me, too.
Speaker: So I liked looking into this debate because, yeah, I like the proposal that luck might be epistemic rather than an objective feature of the world.
Speaker: Luck is relative to the epistemic agent.
Speaker: And I like this idea of luck being contextual.
Speaker: Maybe our judgments about what's lucky or not depend on the context.
Speaker: Does Hales consider this epistemic account in the paper?
Speaker: No, he doesn't, actually.
Speaker: That seems like the... I didn't read the footnotes or end notes.
Speaker: Maybe he does there, but...
Speaker: But it seemed like the obvious move.
Speaker: And yeah, and his detractors have gone that way.
Speaker: So some people want to make luck relative to your epistemic probability.
Speaker: Some want to make luck relative to the epistemic possibilities of the agent.
Speaker: So we don't look at all the possible worlds metaphysically.
Speaker: We look at the ones that you're aware of and they're accessible to you.
Speaker: So this spawned like a mini literature.
Speaker: Yeah, it's kind of ironic.
Speaker: It's kind of bad luck for him because he says at the end of the paper, we should just stop talking about luck.
Speaker: I don't want to start a literature.
Speaker: And then he did.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: It's like Nietzsche telling people not to follow him.
Speaker: Yeah, this paper got like 50 citations in like five years.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So we are just about out of time.
Speaker: But Frank, do you have any closing thoughts?
Speaker: What what how how have your thoughts developed on this topic of luck since we've been preparing for this episode?
Speaker: Well, I have a grand theory of luck.
Speaker: I think maybe subsumes all the theories we've talked about.
Speaker: Are you ready to hear it?
Speaker: Yeah, I'm ready.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's reason is at war with luck.
Speaker: It's kind of like a pre-Socratic theory.
Speaker: What do you think?
Speaker: I think it's pretty good.
Speaker: Yeah, it's very like elemental.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But I think there's something to it, right?
Speaker: Like, you know, the philosophical temperament like doesn't like luck.
Speaker: Like we're suspicious of luck.
Speaker: We want to eliminate luck.
Speaker: That might be why people are so into the principle of sufficient reason, like the idea that every fact has an explanation or a reason for it.
Speaker: The philosophical temperament just can't abide a world full of luck.
Speaker: Reason is at war with luck.
Speaker: That's my theory.
Speaker: So you're like a luck Manichaean.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Okay, sure.
Speaker: The goal is to eliminate luck as much as possible.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Even good luck because that's out of our... Yeah, you don't deserve that good luck.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well... What's your theory?
Speaker: What's your theory?
Speaker: Um...
Speaker: You know, I don't know that I have a grand theory of luck, but I do think that I've really solidified my idea that I think luck is a huge part of human life and actually like understanding luck and the way that luckiness affects us is like integral to understanding the nature of humanity and like the nature of the human life.
Speaker: I actually think it's like really, really important.
Speaker: So maybe my idea is like contradictory to yours or something like that.
Speaker: Well, I guess so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I want to eliminate luck and you want to come to terms.
Speaker: Well, I didn't say I believe my grand theory.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: It is a grand theory.
Speaker: Well, maybe what's true is we should be trying to eliminate luck, but we're always going to fail.
Speaker: And just understanding that is really important for understanding the human condition.
Speaker: That sounds Kierkegaardian.
Speaker: It does.
Speaker: Maybe that's why I like it.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: All right, so that's all the time we have for this episode.
Speaker: Join us on the next one, which will definitely not be three months from now, when we're going to be talking about myths.
