archives@tulane.edu / 1 / Jesse Hill

My dissertation explores the promise of kindness as a response to the problem of luck which confronts both ancient and modern visions of the moral life. A rich articulation of kindness in the light of historical moral theory reveals that, far from being a trifling, merely and purely sentimental phenomenon, kindness involves many of the key ethical commitments that distinguish both Aristotelian ethics and Kantian morality. More importantly, at the level of individuals kindness has the power to mitigate the toll of bad luck on agents and to yield the types of judgments that dissolve the problem of moral luck. Where it finds expression at the institutional level kindness has tremendous ameliorative potential. I therefore contend that kindness is to be esteemed above all other modes of comportment; in a world that is not up to us, our greatest hope for flourishing lies in being kind and in remaining graciously open to the kindness of others.

In this paper I raise a puzzle that I call 'the puzzle of victim-anger' that is parallel to Bernard William's puzzle of agent-regret. Suppose a truck driver is driving down the street when a child happens to walk in front of them. Through no fault of their own, the driver hits and kills the child. It is well understood that the driver will, and probably should, have some sort of guilt-like response, called agent-regret. However, it would also be unsurprising to find out that the child's parents were angry at the driver for killing their child, and this observation has been largely overlooked in the literature on agent-regret. This anger is totally intelligible—we might even feel deeply alienated by a parent who didn't feel it in the wake of their child's avoidable death. Nevertheless, it's hard to see how this anger could be rationally defensible: aren't the parents just lashing out at an innocent party? In this paper, I show how the traditional philosophical account of anger fails to yield a satisfactory solution to this puzzle. As a result, I reject the traditional account and offer my own positive account of anger in its place. According to my positive account, anger functions to shift the conversational dynamic in order to call attention to the target's obligations to repair the harm they caused. / Master of Arts / In this paper I raise a puzzle that I call 'the puzzle of victim-anger' that is parallel to Bernard William's puzzle of agent-regret. William's puzzle starts like this: suppose a truck driver is driving down the street when a child happens to walk in front of them. Through no fault of their own, the driver hits and kills the child. It is well understood that the driver will, and probably should, have some sort of guilt-like response, called agent-regret even though the accident wasn't their fault. However, it would also be unsurprising to find out that the child's parents were angry at the driver for killing their child, and this observation has been largely overlooked in the literature on agent-regret. This anger is totally intelligible—we might even feel deeply alienated by a parent who didn't feel it in the wake of their child's avoidable death. Nevertheless, it's hard to see how this anger could be rationally defensible: aren't the parents just lashing out at an innocent party? In this paper, I show how the traditional philosophical account of anger fails to yield a satisfactory solution to this puzzle. As a result, I reject the traditional account and offer my own positive account of anger in its place. According to my positive account, anger functions to shift the conversational dynamic in order to call attention to the target's obligations to repair the harm they caused.

Clare, the titular character of The Time Traveller's Wife, reflects that "Everything seems simple until you think about it." (Niffenegger, 2003, 1) This might well be a mantra for the whole of philosophy, but a fair few terms tend to stick out. "Knowledge", "goodness" and "happiness" for example, are all pervasive everyday terms that undergo significant philosophical analysis. "Luck", I think, is another one of these terms. Wishing someone good luck in their projects, and cursing our bad luck when success seems so close to our reach or failure could have so easily been otherwise, happens so often that we rarely stop to reflect on what we really mean. Philosophical reflection on the nature of luck has a rich tradition, that is by no stretch confined to the Western philosophical canon. However, it has only very recently become one of the goals of philosophy to provide a clear account of what luck actually amounts to. This, in part, is the goal of this thesis. The thesis has two primary motivations. The first is to offer and defend a general account of luck that overcomes the problems faced by the current accounts of luck that are available in the current philosophical literature. The second is to apply this general account of luck to the areas of metaethics and epistemology where luck has been a pervasive and problematic concept, and demonstrate how this account of luck may resolve or further illuminate some of the problems that the notion has generated. The thesis is roughly split into two parts. The first half of the thesis focuses on the former objective of offering an account of luck. Chapter 1 offers a selected history of the philosophy of luck that spans from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, so that we might properly situate the current work on luck as part of the broader historical importance of the concept. Chapter 2 will set out the major rival to the theory of luck that I will offer - the lack of control account of luck (LCAL). LCAL has various iterations across the literature, but is most clearly articulated by Wayne Riggs (2009) and E.J. Coffman (2006, 2009). Both Coffman and Riggs add and adapt their own conditions to LCAL specifically so that the account may overcome several problems that have been levied against it. These further conditions are not incompatible so, to provide the strongest lack of control account possible, I have combined them to form a lack of control account I have called Combined LCAL - (c)LCAL. The latter part of the chapter pits (c)LCAL against some of the problems that have been raised against LCAL. However, despite the efforts of both Riggs and Coffman, even (c)LCAL fails to counter some of these objections. For these reasons I have rejected LCAL has a viable candidate for an account of luck. Chapter 3 sets out a modal account of luck (MAL), as argued for by Pritchard (2004, 2005, 2014), where an event is lucky only if it occurs in the actual world, but not in a relevant set of nearby possible worlds. Here I further elaborate on how we should understand the modal distances using Lewisian possible world semantics, and what worlds should be taken into consideration when fixing the relevant set of nearby possible worlds. I argue that these relevant sets of worlds should be fixed according to the domain of inquiry of which the luck is being applied - this I call the type of luck. Examples of this is the current literature are resultant luck - the type of luck concerned with the results of our actions, and veritic luck - the type of luck concerned with the modal safety of our belief formation. Due to the multitude of types of luck across disciplinary areas, a general modal account of luck requires flexibility in what factors should fix the relevant sets of possible worlds. I achieve this by providing a [TYPE] function for the general modal account of luck, which is used as a mean of inserting the relevant fixing conditions for any domain of inquiry. Chapter 3, in a similar vein to Chapter 2, pits the general modal account of luck against some of the problems that have been levied against MAL, specifically the Buried Treasure problem raised by Lackey (2008) and the agent causation problem as raised by Levy (2011). More successfully, the modal account offered stands up against these criticisms. For these reasons, the modal condition understood with the [TYPE] function and Lewisian semantics concerning modal distances, will be adopted to make up one half of the conditions for my account of luck. Chapter 4 will look at the second condition for an account of luck - the significance condition. The chapter will set out the reasons for adopting a significance condition at all, and some of the ways in which the condition has been articulated by Rescher (1995), Pritchard (2005) and Ballantyne (2011). All of these current views of the significance condition will be found wanting due to their inability to make sense of certain kinds of luck in specific normative domains. For example, Ballantyne's account of significance focuses on the interests of an agent, yet for certain types of moral luck, the interests of the agent are irrelevant. Instead, I propose a relativised significance condition, where the value of the event is relative to the value of the normative domain in which the luck is being ascribed. Epistemic luck requires a focus on the epistemic significance of the event for the agent, moral luck requires a focus on the moral or ethical significance of the event for the agent, and so on. This I call the kind of luck. Similar to the [TYPE] function for the modal condition for luck, the significance condition requires a [NORMATIVE DOMAIN] function where the relevant normative domain can be inserted depending on the kind of luck. This version of the significance condition will be conjoined with the modal condition as set out in Chapter 3 to form the correct general account of luck. Chapter 5 is the first chapter of the second half of the thesis that concerns applying the account of luck set out in part 1 to more specific domains of inquiry. Chapter 5 concerns moral luck, more specifically, resultant moral luck. Moral luck has traditionally been understood in terms of lack of control. This chapter looks at how Pritchard (2005) and Driver (2014) have attempted to understand moral luck using modal conditions. However, it is argued that these attempts would be more successful if we adopted the account of luck that I have offered in previous chapters. The chapter will go on to look at two possible problems that may be faced by this modal account of luck, and how it may resolve these problems. Chapter 6, the final chapter, looks at epistemic luck, specifically how the adoption of the modal account I have offered resolves a particular problem targeted at anti-luck epistemology by Ballantyne (2013). The problem, Ballantyne argues, is that given that luck requires a significance condition, the degree of significance affects the degree of luck and that the degree of luck involved in our belief formation affects whether we are in a position to know the target proposition, that the result is that degree of significance affects our ability to know. For at least some instances of this - such as the aesthetic significance that we assign to the target proposition - the result will be that non-epistemic factors that have no relevance at all whether an agent is in a position to know will (absurdly, in Ballantyne's view) affect that agent's position to know. The resolution to this problem can be found in a two part solution. The first part is to demonstrate that any degree of veritic epistemic luck results in the agent failing to know. The second is that through the relativisation of the significance condition, any type of value will not affect an agent's position to know, only the epistemic value. / With these two considerations in mind, the latter of which that can only be held through the adoption of the modal account of luck I have offered, the problem may be resolved.

Thesis advisor: James F. Keenan / This dissertation argues that both wealth and poverty function as moral luck to impede the pursuit of virtue and that economic inequality worsens the problem. I begin with a chapter describing the state of economic inequality today, asking whether economic inequality is a problem distinct from poverty. I conclude that it is, for three reasons: inequality causes many social ills traditionally associated with poverty; it self-perpetuates; and—the argument I advance throughout the dissertation—inequality functions as moral luck to harm virtue. In the next chapter, I argue for a Christian virtue account of moral luck. Moral luck is a term used by feminist philosophers to describe the impact of life circumstances on persons’ ability to pursue virtue. I examine Scripture, Aquinas, and the work of womanist theologians to propose a Christian virtue account of moral luck that acknowledges both the pervasiveness of sin and Christian hope for God’s promised redemption. In the third chapter, I draw on Aquinas and contemporary virtue theorists to provide rich descriptions of the eight virtues I will consider throughout the dissertation. I describe a new virtue taxonomy: cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, and humility; “daughter” virtues of solidarity, fidelity and self-care; and helper virtues of temperance and fortitude. To understand how inequality functions as moral luck, we must first understand how wealth and poverty affect our pursuit of virtue. I continue with a chapter describing the impact of wealth, which I define as “having more than we need,” on the virtues in my taxonomy. Blending resources from psychology, sociology and theology, I conclude that wealth impacts the pursuit of virtue in two major ways: by endowing the wealthy person with hyperagency, or greater power, freedom and choice than that enjoyed by others; and by becoming an end in itself. This does not mean that wealth has a unilaterally negative impact on the pursuit of virtue; for example, I argue that wealth can help in pursuing the virtue of self-care. In the next chapter, I assess how poverty, which I define as being unable to meet one’s needs or meeting them only through constant and precarious struggle, functions as moral luck. Consulting social science, memoirists and journalists who write about poverty, and liberation theologians, I show that key issues in poverty’s impact on virtue include scarcity, which impacts cognitive processing and can limit access to certain virtuous practices, and diminished self-regard. This does not mean that poverty has a unilaterally negative impact on the pursuit of virtue; for example, a variety of evidence suggests that poverty encourages the virtue of solidarity. My final chapter shows how inequality exacerbates the impact of wealth and poverty on virtue in terms of hyperagency, wealth as an end in itself, scarcity and self-regard. I offer suggestions for future Christian ethical work on moral luck and responses to the impact of economic inequality on virtue. These include practical economic solutions to reduce inequality and theological solutions including encounter, conversion, satisfaction with contentment, and dependence on God. I suggest that the Christian community can respond to the impact of economic inequality on virtue through political action; a renewed approach to tithing and aid; and creating sites for encounter between the rich and the poor. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

abstract: This dissertation puts forth an account of moral responsibility. The central claim defended is that an agent's responsibility supervenes on the agent's mental states at the time of the action. I call the mental states that determine responsibility the agent's quality of will (QOW). QOW is taken to concern the agent's action, understood from an internal perspective, along with the agent's motivations, her actual beliefs about the action, and the beliefs she ought to have had about the action. This approach to responsibility has a number of surprising implications. First, blameworthiness can come apart from wrongness, and praiseworthiness from rightness. This is because responsibility is an internal notion and rightness and wrongness are external notions. Furthermore, agents can only be responsible for their QOW. It follows that agents cannot be responsible for the consequences of their actions. I further argue that one's QOW is determined by what one cares about. And the fact that we react to the QOW of others with morally reactive emotions, such as resentment and gratitude, shows that we care about QOW. The reactive attitudes can therefore be understood as ways in which we care about what others care about. Responsibility can be assessed by comparing one's actual QOW to the QOW one ought to have had. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Philosophy 2011

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Asymmetric moral luck is the position of denying some types of moral luck, typically resultant moral luck, while accepting others. Robert Hartman’s Parallelism argument is meant to reject asymmetric moral luck and show that if circumstantial moral luck exists then we have good analogical evidence for the existence of resultant moral luck. Eduardo Rivera-López and Anna Nyman object against this argument. Rivera-López takes issue with the rejection of asymmetric moral luck in general while Nyman focuses on the parallelism argument in particular. In this paper, i will argue that while Nyman manages to show that the paralellism argument fails to give analogical evidence for resultant moral luck, both asymmetric moral luck and its rejection are still viable options owing to the fact that both positions appeal to fundamental intuitions. As such, substantive progress is hard to make out.

Den här uppsatsen kommer att behandla fenomenet moralisk slump (moral luck). Uppsatsen är till största del av undersökande karaktär och till dels av argumenterande karaktär. Uppsatsen huvudfrågor är vad moralisk slump är för någonting, vad det finns för olika typer av respons kring problemet med moralisk slump och slutligen vad jag anser är den mest trovärdiga lösningen på problemet med moralisk slump. Uppsatsen utgångspunkt ligger I Nagels och Williams berömda artiklar som anses vara startskottet för den moderna debatten angående moralisk slump, även om området i sig har diskuterats sen länge. Utifrån detta undersöks flera olika teorier i detalj som fungerar som svar på framför allt den utmaning som Nagel målade upp i sin artikel. Svaren som redogörs för kan kategoriseras i två breda kategorier, de som förnekar att slumpen kan orsaka en moralisk skillnad och de som accepterar slumpens betydelse för moral.