The Modal Account of Luck

Abstract

This essay offers a rearticulation and defence of the modal account of luck that the author developed in earlier work (e.g., Pritchard 2005). In particular, the proposal is situated within a certain methodology, a component of which is paying due attention to the cognitive science literature on luck (and risk) ascriptions. It is shown that with the modal account of luck properly articulated it can adequately deal with some of the problems that have recently been offered against it, and that the view has a number of attractions over competing proposals, such as the lack of control account.

A problem for moral luck

“…Just a tiny change in the world and the prize would have been yours. Pritchard (2014) argues that it may be irrational to place a wager on astronomically long odds that are nevertheless modally close (like the lottery), but it is even more irrational to bet on equally long odds that are also modally distant (like betting that a randomly picked philosopher will win gold in the 100 m sprint at the next Olympics).…”

“…It is too much to demand that true control entail success-that's setting the bar way too high for control (as noted by Sosa 2011, p. 53). If control simply demands reliable counterfactual performance, as Pritchard (2014) holds, then control is robust enough to ensure success across close worlds. This would mean that a lack of control is at least a necessary condition for luck.…”

“…According to this view, an event is lucky only if it could very easily have not occurred. The most prominent defender of the modality theory is Duncan Pritchard, who writes, ''if an event is lucky, then it is an event that occurs in the actual world but which does not occur in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant initial conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world'' (Pritchard 2005 p. 128, see also Pritchard 2014). Epistemologists like the modality approach because then epistemic luck involves ''a true belief that could very easily have been false'' (Pritchard 2012 p. 272) and due to epistemic luck, ''the fact that you could very easily have been deceived is a ground to deny you knowledge, even if in fact you were not deceived'' (Pritchard 2012, p. 275).…”

Does luck exclude knowledge or certainty?

“…Prominent proposals for this additional condition include modal fragility (e.g. Pritchard 2005Pritchard , 2014Levy 2011), low objective probability (e.g. Rescher 1995;Baumann 2012;McKinnon 2013), and lack of control over the lucky event (e.g.…”

Epistemic justification and epistemic luck

“…2 Primarily for this reason, the analysis of luck received a fair bit of attention in recent epistemological literature (e.g. Coffman 2007;Goldberg 2015;Lackey 2008;Pritchard 2005Pritchard , 2014Zagzebski 1994).…”