Question Do luck and bad luck exist? Or have they just been imagined in order to create excuses?

Accepted:
November 22, 2005

Comments

One might think that (bad) luck does not exist because the universe is deterministic (running like clockwork according to strict physical laws). I assume this is not your concern. The (bad) luck label might then be attached to things happening to an agent insofar as these things (however causally determined) are better or worse than she could have predicted. In this sense, clearly, luck and bad luck do occur.

To be sure, agents will invoke bad luck as an excuse. But this is no reason to reject the very idea of bad luck. After all, such excuses are sometimes valid -- as when the sole copy of your typescript is destroyed by a fire (something that very nearly happened to John Rawls's ATheory of Justice!). And when such excuses are lousy, this can be shown even when bad luck is accepted in principle: We can point out that the outcome was not really worse than the agent could have predicted or that the agent failed to take sufficient account of the risk. For example, we can tell the notorious drunk driver that it was not unpredictable that he would cause an accident sooner or later. Or we can tell him that, though he encountered a low-probability challenge and was in this regard unlucky, he is nonetheless not excused because he ought not have run the risk of encountering such a challenge while driving drunk.

People sometimes excuse their general failure in life by saying that they are prone to bad luck. Now, it is true enough that, in retrospect, some people have better luck than others. If you roll 6 billion dice ten times each, it is likely that some of them will score a perfect 60 and some an abysmal 10. We should recognize this and excuse people who have had to deal with much more than the average burden of misfortunes. But the causal or explanatory claim suggested by the phrase "prone to bad luck" is false. People have such a proneness no more than coins do. And so we should therefore reject this excuse: "I am an unlucky person, everything I try to achieve goes wrong, so I won't even try any more." We can answer her that whatever bad luck she may have had in the past will not make her any more likely to have bad luck in the future.

Question Do luck and bad luck exist? Or have they just been imagined in order to create excuses? Accepted:November 22, 2005

Question Do luck and bad luck exist? Or have they just been imagined in order to create excuses?

Accepted:
November 22, 2005