Subject-Involving Luck.

In recent years, philosophers have tended to think of luck as being a relation between an event (taken in the broadest sense of the term) and a subject; to give an account of luck is to fill in the right-hand side of the following biconditional: an event e is lucky for a subject S if and only if ___...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Metaphilosophy Vol. 45; no. 4/5; pp. 578 - 594
Main Author: Milburn, Joe
Format: Article
Published: Wiley-Blackwell Oct2014
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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Summary:In recent years, philosophers have tended to think of luck as being a relation between an event (taken in the broadest sense of the term) and a subject; to give an account of luck is to fill in the right-hand side of the following biconditional: an event e is lucky for a subject S if and only if ____. We can call such accounts of luck subject-relative accounts of luck, since they attempt to spell out what it is for an event to be lucky relative to a subject. This essay argues that we should understand subject-relative luck as a secondary phenomenon. What is of philosophical interest is giving an account of subject-involving luck, i.e., filling in the right-hand side of this biconditional: it is a matter of luck that S ϕs iff ____. The essay argues that one of the upshots of focusing on subject-involving luck is that lack of control accounts of luck ( LCALs) become more attractive. In particular, a range of counterexamples to LCALs of subject-relative luck do not apply to LCALs of subject-involving luck.