The Machinations of Luck

Luck is at issue when it is a matter of pure chance that a result of significant positive of negative value ensues for someone. Luck differs from fate, which pivots on an individual's condition, and from fortune, which pivots on an individual's talent and effort. It is by luck that you are rich when you win the lottery, by fortune if your wealth comes from talent and hard work, and by fate if you inherit those millions. On this basis luck lies beyond anyone's rational control. With risk (R) as the probability of failure in a chancy situation and the stake (S) as the difference between a favorable and an unfavorable outcome, luck (L) can be measured as the product of these quantities: L = R × S. The condition of humankind in an uncertain world being as it is, luck cannot be eliminated as a key factor of our existence, be it in cognitive, practical, or ethical regards.     

Luck as Risk and the Lack of Control Account of Luck

This essay explains the notion of luck in terms of risk. It starts by distinguishing two senses of risk, the risk that an event has of occurring and the risk at which an agent is with respect to an event. It cashes out the former in modal terms (rather than probabilistic) and the latter in terms of lack of control. It then argues that the presence or absence of event‐relative risk marks a distinction between two types of luck or fortune commonly overlooked in ordinary usage of the terms “luck” and “fortune.” After offering a detailed account of the notion of control, the essay advances a new version of the so‐called lack of control account of luck: lucky events are events with respect to which one is at risk and hence events over which one lacks control in the specified way. Finally, it argues that its account steers clear of counterexamples to the lack of control account of luck.     

Strokes of Luck

This essay aims to reorient current theorizing about luck as an aid to our discerning this concept's true philosophical significance. After introducing the literature's leading theories of luck, it presents and defends counterexamples to each of them. It then argues that recent luck theorists’ main target of analysis—the concept of an event's being lucky for a subject—is parasitic on the more fundamental notion of an event's being a stroke of luck for a subject, which thesis serves as at least a partial diagnosis of the leading theories’ failure. Next, it develops an analysis of strokes of luck that utilizes insights from the recent luck literature. Finally, having set out a comprehensive new analysis of luck—the Enriched Strokes Account of lucky events—the essay revisits the initial counterexamples to the literature's leading theories and argues that the Enriched Strokes Account properly handles all of them.     

Good fortune but bad luck? Predictable versus unpredictable gains and losses in risky choice

This study examines the effects of two different types of good and bad experiences on risk‐taking preferences: fortune and luck. We define fortune as a relatively stable positive or negative context within which choices are made and luck as a more unpredictable series of better or worse outcomes. With the use of a lottery‐based paradigm, fortune was operationalized as a preponderance of all‐gain or all‐loss two‐outcome option pairs within a larger set of mixed‐outcome control lotteries. Luck was operationalized as the experienced frequency of better versus worse outcomes when playing the lotteries. We predicted that fortune and luck would lead to opposite risk‐taking tendencies within control lotteries. An assimilation effect of fortune was predicted, with risk‐averse preferences for control lotteries when surrounded by good fortune and risk‐seeking preferences when surrounded by bad fortune. In contrast, we expected that high rates of success with good luck would lead to risk‐seeking preferences, whereas low rates of success with bad luck would yield risk‐averse preferences. Our predictions for fortune were confirmed; however, there was no evidence of any effect on risk taking based on experiencing good versus bad luck. Moreover, we observed a striking disconnect between impressions of the experience and risk‐taking behavior. Both identification and attributions of luck and fortune were highly correlated with the number of gain outcomes that participants experienced but were uncorrelated with risk taking. We review these surprising findings considering several prominent theories of risk‐taking behavior, particularly drawing attention to the differential roles of predecisional and postdecisional information in choice.