Washing away your (good or bad) luck: physical cleansing affects risk-taking behavior

Many superstitious practices entail the belief that good or bad luck can be "washed away." Consistent with this belief, participants who recalled (Experiment 1) or experienced (Experiment 2) an episode of bad luck were more willing to take risk after having as opposed to not having washed their hands, whereas participants who recalled or experienced an episode of good luck were less willing to take risk after having as opposed to not having washed their hands. Thus, the psychological effects of physical cleansings extend beyond the domain of moral judgment and are independent of people's motivation: incidental washing not only removes undesirable traces of the past (such as bad luck) but also desirable ones (such as good luck), which people would rather preserve.     

On luck and chance: Need for control as a mediator of the attribution of events to luck

Chance and luck are regarded as two distinct causal agents that effect different results. Whereas chance is deemed utterly uncontrollable, luck elicits, at the very least, an illusion of control. Hence, need for control might be a decisive factor in determining whether an event is attributed to chance or to luck. More specifically, the greater is a person's need for control, the stronger would be that person's tendency to attribute events to luck. This proposition, along with its implications concerning effects of luck attributions on decision making, were tested in three experiments. The results showed that situational circumstances and personality dispositions that heighten individuals' need for control strengthen their tendency to attribute events and outcomes to luck. The results showed, further, that such attributions can affect the process of decision making.     

Beliefs around luck: Confirming the empirical conceptualization of beliefs around luck and the development of the Darke and Freedman beliefs around luck scale

The current study developed a multi-dimensional measure of beliefs around luck. Two studies introduced the Darke and Freedman beliefs around luck scale where the scale showed a consistent 4 component model (beliefs in luck, rejection of luck, being lucky, and being unlucky) across two samples (n = 250; n = 145). The scales also show adequate reliability statistics and validity by ways of comparison with other measures of beliefs around luck, peer and family ratings and expected associations with measures of personality, individual difference and well-being variables.     

Salvific luck

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Manipulation and constitutive luck

Philosophical Studies - I argue that considerations pertaining to constitutive luck undermine historicism—the view that an agent’s history can determine whether or not she is morally...     

Safety and epistemic luck

There is some consensus that for S to know that p, it cannot be merely a matter of luck that S’s belief that p is true. This consideration has led Duncan Pritchard and others to propose a safety condition on knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the safety condition is not a proper formulation of the intuition that knowledge excludes luck. We suggest an alternative proposal in the same spirit as safety, and find it lacking as well.     

Religious diversity and epistemic luck

A familiar criticism of religious belief starts from the claim that a typical religious believer holds the particular religious beliefs she does just because she happened to be raised in a certain cultural setting rather than some other. This claim is commonly thought to have damaging epistemological consequences for religious beliefs, and one can find statements of an argument in this vicinity in the writings of John Stuart Mill and more recently Philip Kitcher, although the argument is seldom spelled out very precisely. This paper begins by offering a reconstruction of an argument against religious beliefs from cultural contingency, which proceeds by way of an initial argument to the unreliability of the processes by which religious beliefs are formed, whose conclusion is then used to derive two further conclusions, one which targets knowledge and the other, rationality. Drawing upon recent work in analytic epistemology, I explore a number of possible ways of spelling out the closely related notions of accidental truth, epistemic luck, and reliability upon which the argument turns. I try to show that the renderings of the argument that succeed in securing the sceptical conclusion against religious beliefs also threaten scepticism about various sorts of beliefs besides religious beliefs.     

Extended cognition and epistemic luck

When extended cognition is extended into mainstream epistemology, an awkward tension arises when considering cases of environmental epistemic luck. Surprisingly, it is not at all clear how the mainstream verdict that agents lack knowledge in cases of environmental luck can be reconciled with principles central to extended cognition.     

Epistemic justification and epistemic luck

Among epistemologists, it is not uncommon to relate various forms of epistemic luck to the vexed debate between internalists and externalists. But there are many internalism/externalism debates in epistemology, and it is not always clear how these debates relate to each other. In the present paper I investigate the relation between epistemic luck and prominent internalist and externalist accounts of epistemic justification. I argue that the dichotomy between internalist and externalist concepts of justification can be characterized in terms of epistemic luck. Whereas externalist theories of justification are incompatible with veritic luck but not with reflective luck, the converse is true for internalist theories of justification. These results are found to explain and cohere with some recent findings from elsewhere in epistemology, and support a surprising picture of justification, on which internalism and externalism are complementary rather than contradictory positions.     

Becker on epistemic luck

Kelly Becker has argued that in an externalist anti-luck epistemology, we must hold that knowledge requires the satisfaction of both a modalized tracking condition and a process reliability condition. We raise various problems for the examples that are supposed to establish this claim.     

The psychology and philosophy of luck

There has been a great deal of interest in the concept of luck in the recent psychological and philosophical literature. In philosophy, this interest has tended to focus not upon luck simpliciter but rather upon the role that luck plays in ethical and epistemological debates concerning (respectively) moral and epistemic luck. In psychology, in contrast, a number of studies have explicitly examined our everyday conceptions of luck and the manner in which these conceptions influence our lives. This article surveys both the recent psychological and philosophical literature on this topic and argues that (to different degrees) the work of both disciplines in this area has been hampered by a failure to be clearer about what luck involves. Accordingly, this article offers a specification of what is core to the notion of luck and highlights how this analysis can aid further research in this area by both psychologists and philosophers.     

Epistemic luck and the generality problem

Epistemic luck has been the focus of much discussion recently. Perhaps the most general knowledge-precluding type is veritic luck, where a belief is true but might easily have been false. Veritic luck has two sources, and so eliminating it requires two distinct conditions for a theory of knowledge. I argue that, when one sets out those conditions properly, a solution to the generality problem for reliabilism emerges.

On having bad persons as friends

Intuitively, one who counts a morally bad person as a friend has gone wrong somewhere. But it is far from obvious where exactly they have gone astray. Perhaps in cultivating a friendship with a bad person, one extends to them certain goods that they do not deserve. Or perhaps the failure lies elsewhere; one may be an abettor to moral transgressions. Yet another option is to identify the mistake as a species of imprudence—one may take on great personal risk in counting a bad person as a friend. In this paper, I argue that none of these intuitive explanations are entirely convincing; for many such proposals run contrary to widely accepted features of friendship. However, they do point us in the direction of a more satisfying explanation—one which concerns a person’s moral priorities. An individual who counts a morally bad person as a friend is, I propose, one who betrays a distinct kind of defect in her values.     

Liability,culpability, and luck

Philosophical Studies - This paper focuses on the role of culpability in determining the degree of liability to defensive harm, and asks whether there are any restrictions on when culpability is...