Is there such a thing as luck?
From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://iep.utm.edu/luck/ . Winning a lottery, being hit by a stray bullet, or surviving a plane crash, all are instances of a mundane phenomenon: luck. Mundane as it is, the concept of luck nonetheless plays a pivotal role in central areas of philosophy, either because it is the key element of widespread philosophical theses or because it gives rise to challenging puzzles. For example, a common claim in philosophy of action is that acting because of luck prevents free action. A platitude in epistemology is that coming to believe the truth by sheer luck is incompatible with knowing. If two people act in the same way but the consequences of one of their actions are worse due to luck, should we morally assess them in the same way? Is the inequality of a person unjust when it is caused by bad luck? These two complex issues are a matter of controversy in ethics and political philosophy, respectively.
Comments (15)
I want to believe our systems of law are actually designed with many balances and counter balances in order to minimize the possibility of people being victims of bad luck (i.e. I was there, beside the killer, and the victim confused me with the killer, but I was not the killer... Thriller movies are full of good examples).
Quoting Don Wade
I have to recognize I don't catch this one. What do you understand with this sentence?
Oh no, the coin hit the fish tank, cracked the glass, the water shorted the electrics and blundering about in the dark I squished flippy!
:100:
I don’t think I’ve ever heard that sort of view being articulated before. On the top of my head, I think I can come up with many examples of someone coming to believe the truth by sheer luck. For example, I believe that Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system only because I was lucky enough to be taught that in school. If Jupiter really is the biggest planet in our solar system then it seems like I knew that and I knew that by sheer luck. Otherwise, it’s hard for me to see how anyone can know anything at all because there doesn’t seem to be any beliefs that one can acquire through effort.
Quoting Don Wade
I don’t think it’s a good idea to assess 2 actions with different consequences in the exact same way. This is because it’s really hard to discern if a particular consequence only comes about from good or bad luck. For example, suppose you have 2 drunk drivers and one managed to drive home without incident while the other one kills someone. We can never truly know if their acts of drunk driving were actually the same in terms of the risk that they had of killing someone. This is because there is a variety of factors that effect that sort of thing besides the fact that they were drunk like the competence of the driver for example. If the first drunk driver is the better driver and he has a habit of driving slower and more carefully and he has a better alcohol tolerance then the fact that he drove home without incident isn’t merely a matter of luck. I would go as far as to say his drunk driving wasn’t as reckless and irresponsible as that of the less competent and less alcohol tolerant driver. So, it’s just hard to know if it’s really just luck or if one person had more reason to not drink and drive.
Quoting Don Wade
I think that the concepts of justness and unjustness are predicated on our emotions rather than anything that is intellectual in nature. It seems to me like asking a question about whether or not something is just or unjust is about as intellectually trivial as asking a question about whether or not a particular food is tasty or not. It just seems like these sorts of things are as subjective as anything could possibly be and I find a hard time treating this as an intellectual topic that a philosopher could address properly. I suppose you could argue that it’s useful for a society to call some things just and unjust. Regarding that consideration, you could just do a psychological study about whether or not people find something just or unjust and just base legal disputes regarding justness on that(assuming that there aren’t additional consequentialist considerations worth considering in a given legal dispute as well.)
I think that your question is a good one. It raises the underlying question about whether destiny exists. Certainly, some people do believe that in fate and destiny. I am a bit sceptical of the idea of fate, although I do sometimes feel that whatever I do I keep facing certain situations and do wonder if this is part of my path, or my own life quest.
The whole question of luck implies fortune and the how much is random? It is a big question but I do think that we have some ability to have some influence through intention. Perhaps we can create luck through being in the state of mind to be lucky as expressed by writers on the law of attraction.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Gettier Problems
Umm.... Gattier problems do not seem to suggest that coming to believe the truth by sheer luck is incompatible with knowing. For example, I believe that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and I believe this only because I was lucky enough to be taught that in school. If Jupiter really is the biggest planet in our solar system then I had known that by sheer luck. Yet, this really isn’t a Gattier case so you can know something by sheer luck it seems and it wouldn’t create a Gattier problem of any sort.
Well, of course, if you search far and wide you'll find some luck being involved in some way in anything that ever happened in your life, but when people are talking about "epistemic luck" they specifically mean luck as a proximate and significant factor in acquiring a belief that seems to undermine its legitimacy. Like in Gettier cases.
Anyway, I wasn't going to get into the discussion of Gettier - just pointing to what is probably the best known discourse concerning epistemic luck.
To add to what SophistiCat said, it goes back to Plato's Theaetetus. To show that there must be more to knowledge than true belief, Socrates gives the example of a jury convinced of the truth merely by the rhetoric of a lawyer: only through luck did they arrive at the right verdict, and that doesn't look a lot like knowledge.
In your own example, luck didn't replace justification as it did in Socrates's example, but merely put you in a position to justify your belief (by allowing you to be taught). That's not what philosophers are talking about when they talk about luck in epistemology.
https://iep.utm.edu/epi-luck/
Luck is problematic because it puts to the test some firmly held notions, such as "People deserve what they get".
But it's an big topic with many implications.
"Luck is probability taken personally. – Penn Jillette, who attributes this quote to Chip Denman"
It’s called “the Mind argument” (after a philosophy journal called Mind where it frequently appeared). It’s the argument that actions caused by random chances are not freely willed actions, so it’s actually INdeterminism that’s incompatible with free will, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) determinism.
As much as I respect the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and the academic philosophy establishment, I must say that what academic philosophers refer to Epistemic luck isn’t really luck at all. It’s just a lack of justification. This thread is about luck in general so if Epistemic luck isn’t a topic that is actually about luck then it seems like it wouldn’t be relevant to the discussion at hand. It’s worth noting that an unjustified true belief that is achieved though effort is just as incompatible with knowing as an unjustified true belief achieved through sheer luck. For example, suppose that a man wanted to find out if his wife is cheating on him and he decided to search through the trash cans for used condoms every day for a month. Eventually, he found a used condom and this made him believe that his wife was cheating on him. Turns out he was right about his wife cheating but that used condom actually belonged to his teenage son who was sneaking girls over his house. This is a Gattier case and yet I don’t think it’s fair to say that the man was right about his wife cheating by sheer luck. He did put a lot of effort in discovering the truth after all and he would have never discovered the truth without searching through trash cans.