Abstract
The modal account of luck is the predominant account of luck in epistemology and ethics. In the first half of this paper, I discuss three possible interpretations of the modal account (proportional, distance, and density-based views) and raise objections to each. I then raise an objection to all plausible versions of the modal account, that is, that whether an event is lucky or the extent to which it is a matter of luck will depend on what initial conditions or features of the event one holds constant across nearby possible worlds. However, there is often reasonable disagreement about what the relevant initial conditions of an event are, and the modal account of luck has no means of determining which description of the event is correct. As such, the modal account is subject to a kind of reference class problem, and the view cannot actually tell us the extent to which certain events are a matter of luck.
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Notes
For example, whether the sun rises tomorrow is completely outside of anyone’s control and significant but is either non-lucky or only involves a small degree of luck. This event, however, is modally robust. On the probabilistic side, it is unclear what notion of probability is relevant to luck, and deterministic events (for example, a dice roll or roulette spin), which have a probability of 1, may still be lucky. However, one’s win at such “games of chance” is modally fragile.
P1 could still involve the repositioning of a few balls; they could simply fall in a different order. Thus, Smith still wins by hitting on all five of the white balls.
Note that the odds of guessing the other three white balls correctly after correctly guessing the first two numbers is 1 in 47,905 or (67 × 66 × 65)/(3 × 2 × 1). Again, there is something to be said about the verdict implied by the distance view that the Donald who loses after correctly guessing the first two balls is unluckier than the Donald who incorrectly guesses all of the balls. However, my objection is that the distance view gets the degree of luck involved in such cases wrong. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me emphasize this point.
Coffman (2015, p. 64) and Hawthorne (2004, pp. 4–5) discuss a similar problem with ease of mistake approaches to knowledge that make use of Pritchard’s modal account. Consider that there might be one nearby world where one’s justified belief is false due to a highly improbable physical anomaly—say a quantum particle flashing in and out of existence at a particular time. But the fact that there is one such nearby world, does not entail that one’s justified, true belief in the actual world—say that there is a coffee cup on the desk—has been “Gettiered” or is particularly lucky.
This is would not be questionable regarding Pritchard’s earlier accounts. Pritchard’s (2004, p. 23) view is that there is a subjective component to luck, and he defines significance subjectively: “The type of luck, and its very existence from that agent’s point of view thus depends upon the significance that the agent attaches to the event in question” (2004, p. 19). Pritchard’s (2005, p. 132) view also has a significance condition, but here he defines significance in terms of what an informed agent would find significant.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.
Of course, a modal theorist could claim that chanciness thought of in terms of probability is not the same as the chanciness element in lucky cases, hence we should not be surprised that a distance-based modal account and a probabilistic account will diverge in certain cases—such as in Fair lottery 2. However, the point of this counterexample is that Pritchard’s distance-based modal account sometimes gets the chanciness condition wrong. A small change in a nearby world could cause an event to fail to occur but if that change, itself, is extremely unlikely, the occurrence of the event in the actual world will—contrary to the distance view—not involve a high degree of luck. Thus, the relationship between luck and possible worlds cannot be captured via distance alone.
Church’s (2010) modal account is similar to the proportional view but involves the notion of modal weight. Perhaps a charitable reading of Pritchard also involves something similar to modal weighted likelihood. However, such a reading pushes his view very close to Carter and Peterson’s.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the wording of this point.
I suspect that many will not have this intuition and hold instead that an event may be modally robust and lucky. For example, Steglich-Peterson (2010) discusses eight different variations of Buried treasure cases regarding Vincent’s epistemic position and modal fragility and argues that lucky cases are restricted—not to cases where the Vincent’s discovery is modally fragile—but to cases in which Vincent is not in a position to know that he will discover the treasure.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this objection and Thomas Mulligan for helping me with this response.
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Hill, J. On Luck and Modality. Erkenn 87, 1873–1887 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00279-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00279-4