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Subject‐Involving Luck
Author(s) -
Milburn Joe
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
metaphilosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.475
H-Index - 35
eISSN - 1467-9973
pISSN - 0026-1068
DOI - 10.1111/meta.12108
Subject(s) - luck , subject (documents) , spell , event (particle physics) , epistemology , counterexample , philosophy , psychology , computer science , mathematics , theology , physics , discrete mathematics , quantum mechanics , library science
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.