Thinking about luck

Coffman, E. J.

doi:10.1007/s11229-006-9046-8

Cited by 80 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Theorists have often attempted to analyze the concept of luck in 'modal' terms-i.e., in terms of how events and actions causally covary within contextually specified sets of initial conditions, frequently modeled as possible worlds (e.g., Coffman, 2007;Levy, 2011;Pritchard, 2006). These analyses are all based on the intuitive idea that an event or action is lucky to the degree that it could easily have failed to occur.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations

Cullen

2018

Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A B S T R A C TWhen explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes. What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others? The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor's environment. Study 1 found that high-prejudice participants were much more likely to endorse nonagential explanations of an erotic same-sex encounter, such as that one of the men endured a stressful event earlier that day. Study 2 manipulated participants' beliefs about how the agent's behavior depended on features of his environment, finding that such beliefs played no clear role in modeling participants' explanatory preferences. This result emerged both with low-and high-prejudice, US and Indian participants, suggesting that these findings probably reflect a species-typical feature of human psychology. Study 3 found that moral attitudes also predicted explanations for a woman's decision to abort her pregnancy (3a) and a person's decision to convert to Islam (3b). Study 4 found that luck in an action's etiology tends to undermine perceptions of blame more readily than perceptions of praise. Finally, Study 5 found that when explaining support for a rival ideology, both Liberals and Conservatives downplay agential causes while emphasizing environmental ones. Taken together, these studies indicate that our explanatory preferences often reflect a powerful tendency to represent agents as possessing virtuous true selves. Consequently, situation-focused explanations often appear salient because people resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self. There is a person/situation distinction, but it is normative.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations

Cullen

2018

Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…L2, recall, states (roughly) that an agent is lucky with respect to an event only if it is significant for her. On Coffman's (2007) interpretation of this condition, an event is significant for an agent only if she (a) is presently sentient and (b) is sentient as the event unfolds. 13 This interpretation (specifically, (b)) would undermine the stratified anti-luck theory's attempted accommodation of the intuition*: Fred was not sentient when he was conceived and so his acquiring his disability at this time would not be significant for him on Coffman's account.…”

Section: Coffman's Sentience Condition On Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

But for the Grace of God: Abortion and Cognitive Disability, Luck and Moral Status

Surovell

2016

Ethic Theory Moral Prac

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many theories of moral status that are intended to ground pro-choice views on abortion tie full moral status to advanced cognitive capabilities. Extant accounts of this kind are inconsistent with the intuition that the profoundly cognitively disabled have full moral status. This paper improves upon these extant accounts by combining an anti-luck condition with Steinbock's stratification of moral status into two levels. On the resulting view, a being has full moral status if and only if (1) she has moral status and (2) (a) has had advanced cognitive capacities, (b) has the potential to develop such capacities, or (c) would have had such capacities were it not for luck. I argue that modal accounts of luck provide a non-speciesist basis for attributing the lack of advanced cognitive capacities in humans to luck without doing the same for non-human animals.

show abstract

“…For E.J. Coffman (2007) and Levy (forthcoming) the control condition supplements the improbability condition. 14 For a critical discussion, see Levy (forthcoming).…”

Section: Knowledge and Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…5. 3 For a detailed discussion of these and more conditions, see Coffman (2007) and Lackey (2006Lackey ( , 2008. In Sect.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Luck as an epistemic notion

Steglich‐Petersen

2009

Synthese

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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

show abstract

Thinking about luck

Cited by 80 publications

References 12 publications

When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations

When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations

But for the Grace of God: Abortion and Cognitive Disability, Luck and Moral Status

Luck as an epistemic notion

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About