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What Luck Is Not Jennifer Lackey Abstract What Luck Is Not Jennifer Lackey Abstract: In this paper, I critically examine the two dominant views of the concept of luck in the current literature: lack of control accounts and modal accounts. In particular, I argue that the conditions proposed by such views—that is, a lack of control and the absence of counterfactual robustness—are neither necessary nor sufficient for an event’s being lucky. Hence, I conclude that the two main accounts in the current literature both fail to capture what is distinctive of, and central to, the concept of luck. The concept of luck plays a crucial role in many philosophical discussions. For instance, it is nearly received wisdom in epistemology that the possession of knowledge is incompatible with at least certain kinds of luck. Ethicists have long noted that actions that result purely from luck are neither praiseworthy nor properly creditable to the agents who perform them. And fully making sense of the concept of responsibility is something that metaphysicians simply cannot do without a consideration of luck. Yet despite its philosophical importance, it is rare to find more than a rough characterization of this concept in the literature, and even rarer to find anything resembling a substantive account of luck. Recently, however, this has begun to change, and several detailed proposals of luck have been offered, all of which fall under two general views of this concept: lack of control accounts and modal accounts. In what follows, I shall critically examine these two different approaches to analyzing the concept of luck and show that they are both fundamentally flawed. In particular, I shall argue that the conditions proposed by such views—that is, a lack of control and the absence of counterfactual robustness—are neither necessary nor sufficient for an event’s being lucky and, 2 hence, that the two main accounts in the current literature both fail to capture what is distinctive of, and central to, the concept of luck. 1. Against the LCAL Of the substantive accounts of luck offered in the literature, what we might call the Lack of Control Account of Luck—hereafter, the LCAL—is the most widely embraced. Here are some characterizations of the LCAL, offered by Daniel Statman, John Greco, Michael Zimmerman, and Wayne Riggs, respectively: Let us start by explaining what we usually mean by the term ‘luck’. Good luck occurs when something good happens to an agent P, its occurrence being beyond P’s control. Similarly, bad luck occurs when something bad happens to an agent P, its occurrence being beyond his control [Statman 1991: 146]. [T]o say that something occurs as a matter of luck is just to say that it is not under my control [Greco 1995: 83]. [S]omething which occurs as a matter of luck with respect to someone P is something which occurs beyond P’s control [Zimmerman 1993: 231]. If an event is lucky for S, then S was not sufficiently responsible for bringing about E [Riggs forthcoming-a]. The central idea of this view of luck, then, can be formulated as follows: LCAL: An event is lucky for a given agent, S, if and only the occurrence of such an event is beyond—or at least significantly beyond—S’s control.1 The LCAL has a substantial amount of intuitive appeal. For consider a paradigmatically lucky event, such as winning a fair lottery. It is natural to explain the luck of this event in terms of the winner’s lack of control over the outcome of the lottery. For instance, if we discovered that the lottery in 3 question wasn’t in fact fair—say, because the winner had rigged the process or manipulated the results—we would no longer regard such an event as lucky. Similar considerations apply to countless other events: a shot at basketball ceases to be deemed lucky when it clearly resulted from the player’s skill; providing the correct answer at a spelling bee does not seem lucky when the student mastered every possible word beforehand; and finding one’s complicated destination is not a matter of luck when one is an expert of the area in question. In all of these cases, control, or a lack thereof, seems to lie at the heart of our concept of luck. Nevertheless, despite the intuitive appeal of the LCAL, I shall now argue that a lack of control is neither necessary nor sufficient for an event’s being lucky. Let us begin with the sufficiency component of the LCAL. The first point to notice is that if a lack of control is sufficient for an event’s being lucky, then there will be a counterintuitive proliferation of lucky events. For instance, suppose that I walk into my kitchen, toast a bagel, and eat it with cream cheese. When my husband comes home ten minutes later, my eating a toasted bagel with cream cheese ten minutes earlier is an event that he neither had control over (he wasn’t home) nor was sufficiently responsible for (he had nothing to do with my eating the bagel in question). But is it lucky for him that I ate a toasted bagel with cream cheese? If so, it is clearly not in any interesting sense of luck.2 Countless cases of this sort abound: my neighbor’s playing a computer game right now, my cat’s sleeping this afternoon, a chef’s making eggplant parmesan in Florence today, and numerous other ordinary or mundane events are out of my control at this moment. Yet to regard all of these events as lucky, as proponents of the LCAL must do, is surely to miss something important to the concept of luck. Of course, details may be filled in for each of these scenarios so that the event in question is properly regarded as lucky. For instance, suppose that my husband’s health requires that he be gluten-free, but he is nonetheless occasionally overcome with powerful cravings for bread and related food items. My eating a toasted bagel with cream cheese, then—which happened to be the 4 last item of food in our house that contained gluten—removed a temptation from his environment that he would not have been able to resist, thereby saving him from a debilitating physical reaction. In such a case, it may be true that my eating a toasted bagel with cream cheese was, in fact, lucky for my husband. But however the luck in this revised version of the original scenario is explained, this does not show that a lack of control is sufficient for luck. For in the original case, we can assume that unusual circumstances of this, or any other relevant, kind simply do not hold: my husband is not required to be gluten-free, it is not the last bread-item in the kitchen, terror will not descend upon our house if such a bagel is not eaten, and so on. It is simply a run-of-the-mill bagel, eaten as an ordinary snack, on an average day. Yet my eating this snack is nonetheless an event that lies beyond my husband’s control, thereby rendering it lucky according to the LCAL. This clearly seems like the wrong result. Proponents of the LCAL may respond here by granting that ordinary and mundane events of this kind are in fact lucky—thereby conceding that the proliferation of lucky events in question exists—but then argue that there are practical and/or epistemic reasons to care about the luck of only some of these events. In particular, they may claim that winning a fair lottery can be distinguished on their view from an ordinary toasted bagel being eaten, not in virtue of one being lucky and the other not, but in terms of one having significance or importance for us while the other does not.3 This response will not vindicate the LCAL. For there are events that are both clearly outside of an agent’s control and of significance and importance to her, but which are nonetheless clearly not lucky. For instance, my picking up my 6-year-old daughter, Isabella, from school while my husband is teaching is an event that is not only outside of his control, it is also one that is deeply significant and important to him. But surely it is not a lucky event that Isabella is picked up from school. I pick her up from school every day at the same time; I have never forgotten her, nor have I 5 ever arrived to her school late; I am not the sort of person who would neglect my commitments where my children are concerned; and so on. Similar considerations apply to countless other events: for instance, my younger daughter, Catherine, who is 4 years old, is well-fed, clean, and safe on a daily basis. Given her tender age, however, she is not responsible for many of the events that lead to her being properly cared for, nor is she in control of many of these events, despite the fact that they are very significant and important to her. Consider Catherine’s being well-fed: she does not prepare her own food and, indeed, couldn’t reach or cook most of what she eats even if she wanted to. Nonetheless, that she eats well is something about which she cares a great deal. According to this version of the LCAL, then, it is a matter of luck that Catherine is well-fed every day. But this is clearly the wrong result. If, for instance, she were to say to her father, ‘Wow, what luck that there is a plate of tofu and vegetables in front of me’, he would rightly say, ‘Well, it may seem like a matter of luck that your food is on the table, but Dad knows otherwise because he is the one who prepared your meal’.
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