175,283 research outputs found
Free will and luck
No full textThe problem of free will is a problem about control and luck. If causal determinism is true, then everything we do is ultimately a matter of luck, as it is if causal determinism is false. Either way we seem to lack free will of the kind needed for moral responsibility. In this thesis a case is built for a certain type of modest incompatibilist view on free will. It is argued that it makes no difference in terms of control whether determinism or indeterminism obtains. What matters is that we have a certain kind of ownership over what we do. Causal determinism rules this out, but indeterminism does not. This has the upshot that not only does free will turn out to be compatible with luck, exposure to a certain kind of luck is actually required, for unless we are exposed to this kind of luck our actions will not be truly ours. By providing luck with a positive role this thesis invites a re-evaluation of the reasons causal determinism destroys free will, and a re-evaluation of our attitudes towards luck. In short this thesis challenges the anti-luckism that lies behind the problem of free will
The problem of moral luck: An argument against its epistemic reduction
No full textWhom I call 'epistemic reductionists' in this article are critics of the notion of 'moral luck' that maintain that all supposed cases of moral luck are illusory; they are in fact cases of what I describe as a special form of epistemic luck, the only difference lying in what we get to know about someone, rather than in what (s)he deserves in terms of praise or blame. I argue that epistemic reductionists are mistaken. They implausibly separate judgements of character from judgements concerning acts, and they assume a conception of character that is untenable both from a common sense perspective and with a view to findings from social psychology. I use especially the example of Scobie, the protagonist of Graham Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter, to show that moral luck is real-that there are cases of moral luck that cannot be reduced to epistemic luck. The reality of moral luck, in this example at least, lies in its impact on character and personal and moral identity. © 2009 Springer Science Media B.V
Metaphysics of luck
No full textClare, the titular character of The Time Traveller's Wife, reflects that "Everything seems simple
until you think about it." (Niffenegger, 2003, 1) This might well be a mantra for the whole of
philosophy, but a fair few terms tend to stick out. "Knowledge", "goodness" and "happiness" for
example, are all pervasive everyday terms that undergo significant philosophical analysis. "Luck",
I think, is another one of these terms. Wishing someone good luck in their projects, and cursing
our bad luck when success seems so close to our reach or failure could have so easily been
otherwise, happens so often that we rarely stop to reflect on what we really mean.
Philosophical reflection on the nature of luck has a rich tradition, that is by no stretch confined
to the Western philosophical canon. However, it has only very recently become one of the goals
of philosophy to provide a clear account of what luck actually amounts to. This, in part, is the
goal of this thesis.
The thesis has two primary motivations. The first is to offer and defend a general account of
luck that overcomes the problems faced by the current accounts of luck that are available in the
current philosophical literature. The second is to apply this general account of luck to the areas
of metaethics and epistemology where luck has been a pervasive and problematic concept, and
demonstrate how this account of luck may resolve or further illuminate some of the problems
that the notion has generated.
The thesis is roughly split into two parts. The first half of the thesis focuses on the former
objective of offering an account of luck. Chapter 1 offers a selected history of the philosophy of
luck that spans from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, so that we might properly situate the
current work on luck as part of the broader historical importance of the concept.
Chapter 2 will set out the major rival to the theory of luck that I will offer - the lack of control
account of luck (LCAL). LCAL has various iterations across the literature, but is most clearly
articulated by Wayne Riggs (2009) and E.J. Coffman (2006, 2009). Both Coffman and Riggs add
and adapt their own conditions to LCAL specifically so that the account may overcome several
problems that have been levied against it. These further conditions are not incompatible so, to
provide the strongest lack of control account possible, I have combined them to form a lack of
control account I have called Combined LCAL - (c)LCAL. The latter part of the chapter pits
(c)LCAL against some of the problems that have been raised against LCAL. However, despite
the efforts of both Riggs and Coffman, even (c)LCAL fails to counter some of these objections.
For these reasons I have rejected LCAL has a viable candidate for an account of luck.
Chapter 3 sets out a modal account of luck (MAL), as argued for by Pritchard (2004, 2005,
2014), where an event is lucky only if it occurs in the actual world, but not in a relevant set of
nearby possible worlds. Here I further elaborate on how we should understand the modal
distances using Lewisian possible world semantics, and what worlds should be taken into
consideration when fixing the relevant set of nearby possible worlds. I argue that these relevant
sets of worlds should be fixed according to the domain of inquiry of which the luck is being
applied - this I call the type of luck. Examples of this is the current literature are resultant luck -
the type of luck concerned with the results of our actions, and veritic luck - the type of luck
concerned with the modal safety of our belief formation. Due to the multitude of types of luck
across disciplinary areas, a general modal account of luck requires flexibility in what factors
should fix the relevant sets of possible worlds. I achieve this by providing a [TYPE] function for
the general modal account of luck, which is used as a mean of inserting the relevant fixing
conditions for any domain of inquiry.
Chapter 3, in a similar vein to Chapter 2, pits the general modal account of luck against some of
the problems that have been levied against MAL, specifically the Buried Treasure problem raised
by Lackey (2008) and the agent causation problem as raised by Levy (2011). More successfully,
the modal account offered stands up against these criticisms. For these reasons, the modal
condition understood with the [TYPE] function and Lewisian semantics concerning modal
distances, will be adopted to make up one half of the conditions for my account of luck.
Chapter 4 will look at the second condition for an account of luck - the significance condition.
The chapter will set out the reasons for adopting a significance condition at all, and some of the
ways in which the condition has been articulated by Rescher (1995), Pritchard (2005) and
Ballantyne (2011). All of these current views of the significance condition will be found wanting
due to their inability to make sense of certain kinds of luck in specific normative domains. For
example, Ballantyne's account of significance focuses on the interests of an agent, yet for certain
types of moral luck, the interests of the agent are irrelevant. Instead, I propose a relativised
significance condition, where the value of the event is relative to the value of the normative
domain in which the luck is being ascribed. Epistemic luck requires a focus on the epistemic
significance of the event for the agent, moral luck requires a focus on the moral or ethical
significance of the event for the agent, and so on. This I call the kind of luck. Similar to the
[TYPE] function for the modal condition for luck, the significance condition requires a
[NORMATIVE DOMAIN] function where the relevant normative domain can be inserted
depending on the kind of luck.
This version of the significance condition will be conjoined with the modal condition as set out
in Chapter 3 to form the correct general account of luck.
Chapter 5 is the first chapter of the second half of the thesis that concerns applying the account
of luck set out in part 1 to more specific domains of inquiry. Chapter 5 concerns moral luck,
more specifically, resultant moral luck. Moral luck has traditionally been understood in terms of
lack of control. This chapter looks at how Pritchard (2005) and Driver (2014) have attempted to
understand moral luck using modal conditions. However, it is argued that these attempts would
be more successful if we adopted the account of luck that I have offered in previous chapters.
The chapter will go on to look at two possible problems that may be faced by this modal account
of luck, and how it may resolve these problems.
Chapter 6, the final chapter, looks at epistemic luck, specifically how the adoption of the modal
account I have offered resolves a particular problem targeted at anti-luck epistemology by
Ballantyne (2013). The problem, Ballantyne argues, is that given that luck requires a significance
condition, the degree of significance affects the degree of luck and that the degree of luck
involved in our belief formation affects whether we are in a position to know the target
proposition, that the result is that degree of significance affects our ability to know. For at least
some instances of this - such as the aesthetic significance that we assign to the target proposition
- the result will be that non-epistemic factors that have no relevance at all whether an agent is in
a position to know will (absurdly, in Ballantyne's view) affect that agent's position to know. The
resolution to this problem can be found in a two part solution. The first part is to demonstrate
that any degree of veritic epistemic luck results in the agent failing to know. The second is that
through the relativisation of the significance condition, any type of value will not affect an
agent's position to know, only the epistemic value. With these two considerations in mind, the
latter of which that can only be held through the adoption of the modal account of luck I have
offered, the problem may be resolved
Progress in Multi-Agent Systems Research
No full textContinuing the series of workshops begun in 1996 (Luck, 1997; Doran et al., 1997; d'Inverno et al., 1997; Fisher et al., 1997) and held in each of the two years since (Luck et al., 1998; Aylett et al., 1998; Binmore et al., 1998; Decker et al., 1999; Beer et al., 1999), the 1999 workshop of the UK Special Interest Group on Multi-Agent Systems (UKMAS'99) took place in Bristol in December. Chaired and organised by Chris Preist of Hewlett Packard Laboratories, with support from both HP and BT Laboratories, the workshop brought together a diverse range of participants, from the agent community in both the UK and abroad, to discuss and present work spanning all areas of agent research. Although dominated by computer scientists, also present at the meeting were electronic engineers, computational biologists, philosophers, sociologists, statisticians, game-theorists, economists and behavioural scientists, with both academia and industry well represented. Indeed, numbers attending these workshops continue to grow, reflecting the continued and rising interest in agent-based systems. The meeting truly demonstrated the wider view of what the term “agency” implied to research in other disciplines and the questions raised at the end of presentations were a pertinent reminder of the diversity of the audience
Equality of opportunity and luck: Denitions and testable conditions, with an application to income in France
No full textWe oer a model of equality of opportunity that encompasses dierent conceptions expressed in the public and philosophical debates. In addition to circumstances whose eect on outcome should be compensated and eort which represents a legitimate source of inequality, we introduce a third factor, luck, that captures the random factors whose impact on outcome should be even-handed for equality of opportunity to be satised. Then, we analyse how the various denitions of equality of opportunity can be empirically identied, given data limitations and provide testable conditions. Denitions and conditions resort to standard stochastic dominance tools. Lastly, we develop an empirical analysis of equality of opportunity for income acquisition in France over the period 1979-2000 which reveals that the degree of inequality of opportunity tends to decrease and that the degree of risk of income distributions, conditional on social origin, appears very similar across all groups of social origins.Equality of opportunity, Luck, Stochastic dominance, Income distribution.
Inequality, avoidability, and healthcare
No full textThis review article of Shlomi Segall's Health, Luck, and Justice (Princeton University Press, 2010) addresses three issues: first, Segall’s claim that luck egalitarianism, properly construed, does not object to brute luck equality; second, Segall’s claim that brute luck is properly construed as the outcome of actions that it would have been unreasonable to expect the agent to avoid; and third, Segall’s account of healthcare and criticism of rival views. On the first two issues, a more conventional form of luck egalitarianism – that is, one which objects to brute luck even if it creates equality, and which construes brute luck as the inverse of agent responsibility – is defended. On the third issue, strengths and weaknesses in Segall’s criticism of Rawlsian, democratic egalitarian, and all-luck egalitarian approaches to healthcare, and in his own luck egalitarian approach, are identified
How to Avoid Compensating CEO for Luck: The Case of Microeconomic Fluctuations
No full textIncentive effects of performance-based compensation schemes for management may be weakened or biased by macroeconomic influences on remuneration. These influences can be seen as reflecting luck from the CEO’s perspective. In this chapter we present a model for how to avoid compensating CEO for luck by filtering out the macroeconomic influences. In the empirical section we analyze the impact of macroeconomic, industry and firm-specific factors on the compensations (salary, bonus, options, and pensions) of CEOs in 127 Swedish corporations during the period 2001-2007. We find macroeconomic influences on Swedish CEOs’ compensation to be substantial. Distinguishing between favorable and unfavorable macroeconomic developments, we find compensation to be more responsive to favorable than to unfavorable developments in macroeconomic variables.Executive compensation; Salary; Bonus; Option; Pension; Macroeconomic uncertainty; Macroeconomic factors; Performance; Luck
Recommended from our members
Gambling, luck and superstition: a brief psychological overview
No full textFor what is generally accepted as almost endemic to many a gamblers' disposition - the ideas, practices and responses that combine gambling, luck and superstition - there has been surprisingly little scientific research in this field. As an indication of what can be undertaken subsequently, an intriguing picture emerges of how this affects players' character and motivations as gamblers according to the type of gambling engaged, including its relationship to chance and skill
Just Luck: An Experimental Study of Risk Taking and Fairness.
No full textChoices involving risk significantly aect the distribution of income and wealth in society, but there is probably no more contentious question of justice than how to allocate the gains and losses that inevitably result from risky choices. This paper reports the results from the first experiment, to our knowledge, to study fairness views about risk-taking, where the main aim is to examine whether people's fairness considerations mainly focus on ex ante opportunities or ex post outcomes. The experiment was a two stage dictator game where the distribution phase was preceded by a risk-taking phase. Our analysis provides four main findings. First, we show that even though many participants focus exclusively on ex ante opportunities, the majority favors some redistribution ex post. Second, we find that, among the participants who redistribute ex post, a substantial share make a distinction between ex post inequalities that reflect differences in luck and ex post inequalities that reflect differences in choices. Third, we show that the appeal of the ex ante view is independent of how costly it is to avoid exposure to risk. Fourth, we find that the choices of stakeholders and impartial spectators reflect the same set of fairness considerations.Risk-taking; fairness; luck; equal opportunities.
Balancing Conflict and Cost in the Selection of Negotiation Opponents
No full textWithin the context of agent-to-agent purchase negotiations, a problem that has received little attention is that of identifying negotiation opponents in situations where the consequences of conflict and the ability to access resources dynamically vary. Such dynamism poses a number of problems that make it difficult to automate the identification of appropriate opponents. To that end, this paper describes a motivation-based opponent selection mechanism used by a buyer-agent to evaluate and select between an already identified set of seller-agents. Sellers are evaluated in terms of the amount of conflict they are expected to bring to a negotiation and the expected amount of cost a negotiation with them will entail. The mechanism allows trade-offs to be made between conflict and cost minimisation, and experimental results show the effectiveness of the approach
- …
