Background: Multiple studies have shown that people who have experienced a serious health problem such as an injury tend to overrate the quality of health they had before that event. The main objective of this study was to test whether the phenomenon of respondents overrating their past health can also be observed in people from the general population. A second aim was to test whether habitual optimism is indeed focused on events in the future.Method: A representatively selected community sample from (...) Leipzig, Germany was examined. Respondents were asked to assess their current health, their past health, and their expected future health on a 0–100 scale. In addition, the study participants completed several questionnaires on specific aspects of physical and mental health.Results: Respondents of all age groups assessed their health as having been better in the past than it was at present. Moreover, they also assessed their earlier state of health more positively than people 5 years younger did their current state. Habitual optimism was associated with respondents having more positive expectations of how healthy they will be in 5 years time, but the correlation with their assessments of their current health was nearly as high.Conclusion: Highly positive scores of retrospectively assessed health among people who have experienced a health problem cannot totally be accounted for by a response to that health problem. (shrink)

Norms provide a valuable mechanism for establishing coherent cooperative behaviour in decentralised systems in which there is no central authority. One of the most influential formulations of norm emergence was proposed by Axelrod :1095–1111, 1986). This paper provides an empirical analysis of aspects of Axelrod’s approach, by exploring some of the key assumptions made in previous evaluations of the model. We explore the dynamics of norm emergence and the occurrence of norm collapse when applying the model over extended durations. It (...) is this phenomenon of norm collapse that can motivate the emergence of a central authority to enforce laws and so preserve the norms, rather than relying on individuals to punish defection. Our findings identify characteristics that significantly influence norm establishment using Axelrod’s formulation, but are likely to be of importance for norm establishment more generally. Moreover, Axelrod’s model suffers from significant limitations in assuming that private strategies of individuals are available to others, and that agents are omniscient in being aware of all norm violations and punishments. Because this is an unreasonable expectation, the approach does not lend itself to modelling real-world systems such as online networks or electronic markets. In response, the paper proposes alternatives to Axelrod’s model, by replacing the evolutionary approach, enabling agents to learn, and by restricting the metapunishment of agents to cases where the original defection is observed, in order to be able to apply the model to real-world domains. This work can also help explain the formation of a “social contract” to legitimate enforcement by a central authority. (shrink)

The behaviour of autonomous agents may deviate from that deemed to be for the good of the societal systems of which they are a part. Norms have therefore been proposed as a means to regulate agent behaviours in open and dynamic systems, where these norms specify the obliged, permitted and prohibited behaviours of agents. Regulation can effectively be achieved through use of enforcement mechanisms that result in a net loss of utility for an agent in cases where the agent’s behaviour (...) fails to comply with the norms. Recognition of compliance is thus crucial for achieving regulation. In this paper, we propose a general framework for observation of agents’ behaviour, and recognition of this behaviour as constituting, or counting as, compliance or violation. The framework deploys monitors that receive inputs from trusted observers, and processes these inputs together with transition network representations of individual norms. In this way, monitors determine the fulfillment or violation status of norms. The paper also describes a proof of concept implementation of the framework, and its deployment in electronic contracting environments. (shrink)

The following argument is addressed: (1) a person is morally responsible for an event's occurring only if that event's occurring was not a matter of luck; (2) no event is such that its occurring is not a matter of luck; therefore, (3) no event is such that someone is morally responsible for its occurring. Two notions of control are distinguished: restricted and complete. (2) is shown false on the first interpretation, (1) on the second. The discussion involves a (...) distinction between resultant and situational luck, And it is argued that, Even when luck's role in life, And the unfairness that stems from it, Is acknowledged, Moral responsibility remains possible. (shrink)

University of North Carolina at Greensboro Greensboro, NC 27402-6170, USA.

University of North Carolina at Greensboro Greensboro, NC 27402-6170, USA.

This superbly crafted account of the notion of moral responsibility and of its relations to freedom, control, ignorance, negligence, attempts, omissions, compulsion, mental disorders, virtues and vices, desert, and punishment fills that gap. The treatment of character and luck is particularly sophisticated and well-argued.

'Moral luck' refers to the phenomenon whereby one's degree of blameworthiness for what one has done varies on account of factors beyond one's control. Applying concepts of Dworkin's from the domain of distributive justice, I draw a distinction between 'option moral luck,' which is that to which one has exposed oneself as the result of one's voluntary choices, and 'brute moral luck,' which is that which is unchosen and unavoidable. I argue that option moral luck is (...) not ruled out on grounds of unfairness. I also offer a non-fairness-based rejection of brute moral luck and defense of option moral luck. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to refute Ronald Dworkin's claim that the provision of an equal opportunity to insure against risks is sufficient to render differences in people's circumstances that are the result of luck consistent with his theory of equality of resources. Section I addresses bad luck in the circumstances of individuals in the form of mental or physical incapacitation resulting from the vicissitudes of nature. Section II addresses bad luck which is the result of (...) the choices of other individuals to give or bequeath. (shrink)

T.M. Scanlon has recently proposed what I term a ‘double attitude’ account of blame, wherein blame is the revision of one’s attitudes in light of another person’s conduct, conduct that we believe reveals that the individual lacks the normative attitudes we judge essential to our relationship with her. Scanlon proposes that this account justifies differences in blame that in turn reflect differences in outcome luck. Here I argue that although the double attitude account can justify blame’s being sensitive to (...) outcome luck, it cannot justify allocating blame differently when agents with the same attitudes differ only with respect to the luck-based outcomes of their actions. However, Scanlon’s own contractualist theory of morality can be invoked to show that the double attitude account is compatible with blame-based sanctions (e.g., compensation mandated when negligence or reckless result in harm) being sensitive to outcome luck. The resultant view of blame and luck remains desert-based while making sense of the common intuition that differences in outcome luck can matter to how lucky and unlucky individuals are justifiably treated. (shrink)

This is an editorial introduction to a special issue of Acta Analytica on epistemic luck.

The philosophical interest in the nature, value, and varieties of human understanding has swelled in recent years. This article will provide an overview of new research in the epistemology of understanding, with a particular focus on the following questions: What is understanding and why should we care about it? Is understanding reducible to knowledge? Does it require truth, belief, or justification? Can there be lucky understanding? Does it require ‘grasping’ or some kind of ‘know-how’? This cluster of questions has largely (...) set the research agenda for the study of understanding in epistemology. This article will conclude by discussing some varieties of understanding and highlight directions for future research. (shrink)

I assess G. A. Cohen's claim, which is central to his luck egalitarian account of distributive justice, that forcing others to pay for people's expensive indulgence is inegalitarian because it amounts to their exploitation. I argue that the forced subsidy of such indulgence may well be unfair, but any such unfairness fails to ground an egalitarian complaint. I conclude that Cohen's account of distributive justice has a non-egalitarian as well as an egalitarian aspect. Each impulse arises from an underlying (...) commitment to fairness. Cohen's account of distributive justice is therefore one of justice as fairness. (shrink)

This paper critically explores Timothy Williamson’s view of evidence, and it does so in light of the problem of epistemic luck. Williamson’s view of evidence is, of course, a crucially important aspect of his novel and influential “knowledge-first” epistemological project. Notoriously, one crucial thesis of this project is that one’s evidence is equivalent to what one knows. This has come to be known as the E = K thesis. This paper specifically addresses Williamson’s knowledge-first epistemology and the E = (...) K thesis in the context of anti-luck epistemology and the idea that knowledge is factive. Williamson’s views on these matters are worth investigating in some detail because he subscribes to a well-worked out anti-luck view of knowledge that incorporates what is perhaps the most common anti-luck condition. But this paper is also of more general importance because the critique of Williamson’s views on these matters reveals some important things about the nature of evidence and evidence is one of the most fundamental concepts in epistemology. (shrink)

Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control affect her blameworthiness. Several scholars deny the existence of moral luck by distinguishing judging blameworthy from blame-related practices. Luck does not affect an agent’s blameworthiness because morality is conceptually fair, but it can affect the appropriate degree of blame for that agent. While separatism resolves the paradox of moral luck, we aim to show it that it needs amendment, because it is unfair to treat two equally blameworthy (...) people unequally. We argue that separatists should conceive fairness as a pro tanto reason for blame. By locating fairness as a ground for blame within a wider axiology of blame, separatism could resolve the challenge of blaming fairly. In such an axiology, reasonable and fair blame diverge. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe held that acting intentionally entails knowing (in a distinctively practical way) what one is doing. The consensus for many years was that this knowledge thesis faces decisive counterexamples, the most famous being Donald Davidson’s carbon copier case, and so should be rejected or at least significantly weakened. Recently, however, a new defense of the knowledge thesis has emerged: provided one understands the knowledge in question as a form of progressive judgement, cases like Davidson’s pose no threat. In this (...) paper, I argue that this neo-Anscombean maneuver fails because it is founded on an untenable conception of the difference between intentional and merely lucky success. More specifically, the neo-Anscombean view conflates merely lucky success with subjectively surprising success. Unlike the former, subjectively surprising success may well be intentional, for it may well be the result of an exercise of knowledge-how. After sketching an alternative view that better captures the intuitive contrast between lucky and intentional success, I argue that the conflation of surprising and merely lucky success owes to a tacit commitment to the thesis that knowing how entails knowing that one knows how. This thesis is not only false, but distortive of the explanatory role of knowledge-how. This result, in turn, tells us something important about what practical knowledge cannot be. (shrink)

Rawlsian justice as fairness is neither fundamentally luck egalitarian nor relational egalitarian. Rather, the most fundamental idea is that of society as a fair system of cooperation. Collective pensions provide a case study which illustrates the fruitfulness of conceiving justice in these latter terms. Those who have recently reached the age of majority do not now know how long they will live in retirement or how well any investments they try to save up for their retirement would fare. From (...) the perspective of the beginning of their working lives, it is therefore rational for each to enter into an agreement with others, who also do not yet know their fates, that, if one turns out to be among the unfortunate whose private pension pots would not have yielded enough for one’s retirement, one will receive much more in retirement, whereas those whose pension pots would have overflowed their retirements will receive somewhat less. These terms are to each person’s expected advantage, which is made possible by a fair sharing of the fruits of social cooperation which arise through the efficiencies reaped by the pooling of the risk of outliving what one could save for one’s retirement on one’s own. It is rational for each to agree to share one another’s fates by pooling risks across both space and time, on fair terms of social cooperation for mutual advantage. Even when collective pensions arise from, and are proportional to, a baseline of unequal income, they can be defended on grounds of reciprocity involving regard for one another as equals. (shrink)

Just like commonsense morality, commonsense virtue ethics faces complicated issues about luck. However, if luck plays a role in our development of virtuous or vicious traits of character, then we can evaluate such traits in virtue‐ethical terms without blaming or condemning those, e.g., whom we wish, in favored terms, to criticize. This approach is very reminiscent of Spinoza.

In A Metaphysics for Freedom, Helen Steward proposes and defends a novel version of the libertarian account of free action. Amongst several objections that she considers to her view, one that looms particularly large is the Challenge from Chance: ‘the most powerful, widely-promulgated and important line of anti-libertarian reasoning’. This paper begins by arguing that Steward’s response to the Challenge is not fully convincing. It then goes on to explore a further possible libertarian line of defence against the Challenge, arguing (...) that it, too, ultimately fails. The conclusion is that the Challenge remains an important source of dialectical advantage for the compatibilist. (shrink)

It is gratifying to me, though perhaps it will be disappointing to you, to discover that Neil Levy and I agree on much of what to say about the morality of punishment. His summary of the contents of The Immorality of Punishment is both generous and, for the most part, accurate, and the concerns that he raises are certainly reasonable. In what follows, I will address what I take to be the most significant of these concerns.IAs Levy notes, in the (...) book I discuss alleged moral justifications of legal punishment that have been proposed both from a retributivist and from a non-retributivist perspective. What I take to be my two most significant arguments—the Argument from Ignorance and the Argument from Luck—concern the former perspective, but let me say something first about some of the reasons I gave for doubting that legal punishment can be morally justified on non-retributivist grounds. I considered three such grounds: rehabilitation, by either educative or non-educative means, of the pe .. (shrink)

Fodor argued that learning a concept by hypothesis testing would involve an impossible circularity. I show that Fodor's argument implicitly relies on the assumption that actually φ-ing entails an ability to φ. But this assumption is false in cases of φ-ing by luck, and just such luck is involved in testing hypotheses with the kinds of generative random sampling methods that many cognitive scientists take our minds to use. Concepts thus can be learned by hypothesis testing without circularity, (...) and it is plausible that this is how humans in fact acquire at least some of their concepts. (shrink)

Do we have the right to defend ourselves against innocent aggressors? If I amattacked in a lift by a knife‐wielding lunatic, may I kill or maim him to protect my own life? On one view the insane man’s plight is his bad luck and I am under no obligation to let it be transferred to me. On the opposing view it is my bad luck to be under attack and I have no right to transfer it to an (...) innocent man by killing him to protect myself. It is perhaps becauseneither of these opposing viewpoints is obviously preferable to the other that there is no consensus about the question. Nevertheless we can find considerations for favouring the first view over the second. (shrink)

I argue that the Lockean 'enough and as good' proviso provides support for egalitarian as opposed to libertarian or sufficientarian claims over worldly resources. These egalitarian claims apply to contemporary advanced industrial societies with money-based economies as well as primitive agrarian barter economies. But the full 'luck egalitarian' complement of equality of opportunity for welfare cannot be derived from a Lockean approach that focuses on our egalitarian claims to unowned bits of the world. For that, we need to reach (...) beyond Locke, and appeal to complaints of unfairness that have nothing in particular to do with our claims to worldly resources. (shrink)

One of the most widely recognised intuitions about knowledge is that knowing precludes believing truly as a matter of luck. On Pritchard’s highly influential modal account of epistemic luck, luckily true beliefs are, roughly, those for which there are many close possible worlds in which the same belief formed in the same way is false. My aim is to introduce a new challenge to this account. Starting from the observation—as documented by a number of recent EEG studies—that our (...) capacity to detect visual stimuli fluctuates with the phase of our neural oscillations, I argue that there can be very close possible worlds in which an actual-world detectable stimulus is undetectable. However, this doesn’t diminish our willingness to attribute knowledge in the case that the stimulus is detectable, even when undetectability would result in the same belief formed in the same way being false. As I will argue at length, the modal account appears unable to accommodate this result. (shrink)

In this article we survey six recent developments in the philosophical literature on free will and moral responsibility: (1) Harry Frankfurt's argument that moral responsibility does not require the freedom to do otherwise; (2) the heightened focus upon the source of free actions; (3) the debate over whether moral responsibility is an essentially historical concept; (4) recent compatibilist attempts to resurrect the thesis that moral responsibility requires the freedom to do otherwise; (5) the role of the control condition in free (...) will and moral responsibility, and finally (6) the debate centering on luck. (shrink)

Three studies were conducted to explore the psychological determinants of COVID-deterrent behaviors. In Study 1, using data collected and analyzed both before and after the release of COVID-19 vaccines, mask-wearing, other preventative behaviors like social distancing, and vaccination intentions were positively related to assessments of the Coronavirus Behavioral Health Mindset ; belief in the credibility of science; progressive political orientation; less use of repressive and more use of sensitization coping; and the attribution of COVID-19 safety to effort rather than ability, (...) powerful forces, fate, or luck. In Study 2, favorable COVID-19 vaccination intentions were related to greater willingness to work, lower emotional distress, and greater customer experience mindset. Study 3 examined the personality and motives of individuals who volunteered to help deliver COVID-19 inoculations to the local community. The vaccine-giving volunteers, especially those with prosocial motives, had high CVBHM scores, belief in the credibility of science, low use of repressive coping, greater attribution of COVID-19 protection to effort, low likelihood of voting conservative, were older, and had more education than others. The majority of public health volunteers expressed prosocial motives to help people or join a cause, but many expressed the personal motives of getting the COVID-19 vaccination for themselves, conveying a public image of compassion, or structuring time. Based on the three research studies, a COVID-19 Mindset Hierarchy model is proposed to integrate the results. (shrink)

Niccolo Machiavelli, one of the eminent minds of the Italian Renaissance, spent much of a long and active lifetime trying to determine and understand what exceptional qualities of human character-- and what surrounding elements of fortune, luck, and timing-- made great men great leaders successful in war and peace. In perhaps the liveliest book on Machiavelli in years, Michael A. Ledeen measures contemporary movers and doers against the timeless standards established by the great Renaissance writer. Titans of statecraft (...) (Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton) business and finance (Bill Gates) Wall Street and investing (Warren Buffett) the military (Colin Powell), and sports (Michael Jordan) are judged by Machiavelli's precepts on leadership and the proper use of power. The result is a wide-ranging and scintillating study that illuminates the thoughts of the Renaissance master and the actions of today's truly towering figures as well as the character-challenged pretenders to greatness. Here is an exceptional book on Machiavelli and his ultra-realistic exploration of human nature-- then and now. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that truth is a constitutive norm of belief formation, argue in favour of a virtue-theoretic account of epistemic evaluation and respond to possible objections. In §1, I argue that belief necessarily aims at truth. In §2, I defend a virtue-theoretic approach to epistemic evaluation in response to concerns about epistemic luck and doxastic control. In §3, I distinguish between evaluative and deontic norms in order to avoid the charge that we are subject (...) to impossible epistemic demands. In §4, I study the relationship between epistemic norms, practical interests and ascriptions of knowledge. (shrink)

This paper provides a detailed account of the origins of the Psycho logical Review in 1894, of the policies and practices of its editors (James Mark Baldwin and James McKeen Cattell) during its first decade, and of the public and private disagreements that led them to dissolve their collaboration in 1904. In doing so, it sheds light on the significant roles played by specialized scientific journals in the development of specific scientific specialities, and illustrates the value for historical exploration of (...) (what anthropologists call) a 'thick description' of (what historians call) 'the fine texture of the past'. It argues that personal factors such as luck and character and temperament often have a greater impact on the way in which science actually evolves than do intellectual interests and concerns, and concludes with an analysis of the overwhelming signifi cance of this episode on the later careers of both Baldwin and Cattell. (shrink)

Martin Smith has recently proposed, in this journal, a novel and intriguing approach to puzzles and paradoxes in evidence law arising from the evidential standard of the Preponderance of the Evidence. According to Smith, the relation of normic support provides us with an elegant solution to those puzzles. In this paper I develop a counterexample to Smith’s approach and argue that normic support can neither account for our reluctance to base affirmative verdicts on bare statistical evidence nor resolve the pertinent (...) paradoxes. Normic support is, as a consequence, not a successful epistemic anti-luck condition. (shrink)

Dieser Band soll eine Lücke der Hegelforschung schließen und bietet dazu in zehn Kapiteln kommentierende Interpretationen der neun Hauptabschnitte, in die Hegel seine Wissenschaft der Logik gegliedert hat. Ein zehnter Beitrag widmet sich dem Verhältnis der Wissenschaft der Logik zur Phänomenologie des Geistes, einer weiteren, bis heute nicht abschließend geklärten Frage der Hegelforschung. Alle Kapitel zielen darauf ab, den komplexen Gedankengang Hegels nachvollziehbar und die systematische Bedeutung seiner Argumentation erkennbar zu machen. Der Band ist darum bemüht, dem Leser die Vielzahl (...) möglicher fruchtbarer Zugangsweisen aufzuzeigen. (shrink)

Engineering Ethics literature tends to emphasize wrongdoing, its avoidance, or its prevention. It also tends to focus on identifiable events, especially those that involve unfortunate, sometimes disastrous consequences. This paper shifts attention to the positive in engineering practice; and, as a result, the need for addressing questions of character and imagination becomes apparent.

Libertarians such as Nozick have argued that any redistributive tax scheme intended to achieve and maintain an egalitarian distributive pattern will violate self‐ownership. Furthermore, since self‐ownership is a central component of the idea of freedom, instituting an egalitarian distribution makes a society less rather than more free. All this turns on the claim, accepted by both libertarians and their critics, that a redistributive tax will violate self‐ownership because it must expropriate the fruit of a person’s labour. I show here that (...) there is no reason to accept this claim. The libertarian argument works only if the fruit of one’s labour must be understood to include everything that a person produces through his labour. But there is an alternative reading of the fruit of labour which identifies it with that subset of the total product of one’s labour which is due to his choices rather than luck. I argue that this reading is plausible, that there is nothing in the concept of self‐ownership which disallows it, and that if it is adopted, a redistributive tax need not automatically expropriate the fruit of one’s labour. Consequently there is no necessary inconsistency between redistributive taxation and self‐ownership, and so egalitarians can endorse the latter idea. (shrink)