Abstracts

Keynotes

Understanding, Luck and Achievement

Duncan Pritchard (University of California, Irvine)

An account is offered of the nature and value of understanding. In particular, an explanation of the special value of understanding is presented which flows from the account given of its nature. In terms of the nature of understanding, it is argued that it essentially involves a strong kind of cognitive achievement. This explains the distinctive relationship that understanding bears to epistemic luck and thus how it diverges from propositional knowledge, such that it is usually a more demanding epistemic standing but not always (as in cases of environmental epistemic luck). It is then shown how treating understanding as a strong cognitive achievement can account for its special value, both in broad terms and in terms of epistemic value specifically.  

The Anti-luck Condition on Joint Achievements

John Greco (Georgetown University)

Virtue theory promises to give a unified account of the anti-luck conditions on moral responsibility and knowledge.  A promising idea is this: moral responsibility and knowledge both require that success (or failure) be grounded in relevant character, and grounding in character entails a modally robust relation between character and success (or failure).  That relation, it is argued, illuminates and explains the “no accident” conditions on both moral responsibility and knowledge.  More recently, both action theory and epistemology have used the notion of joint (or shared) agency to explain various kinds of action and knowledge.  But how should we understand the anti-luck condition on joint successes (and failures)?  This paper proposes a way to extend the virtue-theoretic account to joint agency, including joint achievements, and argues for its explanatory power.

Talks

The Explanatory Structure of Moral Worth

Harjit Singh Bhogal (University of Maryland)

It's a platitude that if an action is merely accidentally, or coincidentally, right then it does not have moral worth. This thought drives the central dispute about moral worth -- whether morally worthy actions are motivated by the fact that the action is right or whether they are motivated by right-making features of an action.

Many find it intuitive that we should be motivated by the right-making features of an action -- claiming that there is something cold and strange about a person who is motivated by the abstract facts about rightness rather than concrete morally important things -- like the welfare of others. But a variety of authors, from Kant onwards, have argued that we must be motivated by rightness itself since we could be motivated by the features that make an action right but still do the right thing merely coincidentally or accidentally.

This paper investigates the broader concepts of accidentality and coincidence as it applies in various domains across philosophy. Particularly relevant are considerations originating in the philosophy of science about what it is for two events to be explanatorily connected. As a result of this I formulate, and defend, a novel account of moral worth based on the idea that there should be a unified explanation of why the agent did the right thing. Such a view is a powerful argument against views that say worthy actions must be motivated by the rightness of the action itself.

The Hero’s Fortune: Moral Achievement and Luck 

Kyle Fruh (Duke Kunshan University)

I argue that we should view moral heroism as an achievement consisting in certain kinds of high-stakes sacrifices. This view creates considerable room for luck in achieving. For even beyond being in the right place at the right time, in making a sacrifice, the moral hero may or may not see the risks they run materialize in the harms threatened, and they may or may not secure the benefit they seek to procure for someone else. Rescue cases are paradigmatic instances: in running into the burning building, the hero might emerge relatively unscathed, but they might also perish. By the same token, the hero might successfully extract those in need of rescue, or not.  

I divide possible combinations of good and bad luck into four: the Paradigmatic Hero, the Tragic Hero, the Fortunate Hero, and the Unactualized Hero. In the first three, I argue that luck generally does not undercut the achievement in any of the first three cases. The last case is more challenging because the sense in which the hero does indeed make a sacrifice is attenuated. But even here, I argue that the achievement of moral heroism has a high tolerance for the role of luck.  

Conceptual Luck

Giovanni Gonella (University of Genoa) 

Our beliefs about objects often originate from information-gathering trans-actions involving causal interactions with particulars. Intuitively, these objects act as sources of information that causally lead agents to form beliefs and play a special role in the belief formation process. Cognitive agents are typically competent in forming their singular thoughts <α is Φ> from information channels whose source is some specific individual. However, agents sometimes succeed in this operation merely by luck. In modal terms, we may say that an agent’s belief <α is Φ> formed via an information channel fo whose source is object o in the actual world is conceptually lucky if there are some nearby worlds where the agent forms the same belief <α is Φ> via some other channel f*o* whose source is o* distinct from o.

In this talk, after introducing conceptual luck, I will compare it with other varieties of luck, like doxastic and veritic luck. I will demonstrate that conceptual luck is a novel variant of luck that centres on the agent’s thought-formation activity. I will also show that conceptual luck is knowledge-undermining, thereby advancing an argument supporting my claim and offering reasons to revise the safety principle.

Lucky Doxastic Justification 

Kellan Head  (Syracuse University) 

Doxastic justification (DJ) is the kind of well-formedness that a belief possesses when it’s formed on the basis of the epistemic reasons that provide it propositional justification. DJ is required for knowledge.  It’s commonly thought that DJ cannot obtain luckily or accidentally. I argue that it can. I provide an example in which an agent forms a belief on the basis of her evidence (which propositionally justifies it). In nearby possible worlds where she also forms the belief, it fails to be propositionally justified.  The doxastic justification is unsafe, and yet her belief seems to be apt, well-formed, and rational. It’s an epistemic achievement.  To deny her belief the status of being doxastically justified would be to deny many commonly accepted internalist and evidentialist principles.  I examine and rule out some objections. I conclude by suggesting that if unsafe, lucky truth precludes knowledge, then unsafe, lucky DJ seems to as well. 

Basing without Deviant Causal Chains: A Normativist Approach 

Chris Blake-Turner (Oklahoma State University)

An agent’s φ-ing on the basis of a reason is a kind of rational achievement. Causal accounts of basing are influential, but must face the notoriously tricky problem of deviant causal chains. A causal chain from a reason to an agent’s φ-ing is deviant when the connection between the reason and the agent’s φ-ing involves the kind of luck that precludes achievement. This paper proposes a causal account of basing that rules out deviant causal chains. It does so by taking a normativist approach to basing, which takes inspiration from normativist approaches to the metaphysics of belief. Normativism about belief abandons trying to distinguish belief from other mental states solely in non-normative terms. Normativism argues instead that an agent’s having a certain normative status partly constitutes what it is for a mental state to be a belief. Similarly, I recommend abandoning the attempt to distinguish deviant from nondeviant causal chains solely in non-normative terms. I instead defend the claim that a causal chain between S’s φ-ing and her basis, r, is nondeviant if and only if, and because, the causal chain constitutes S’s becoming rationally committed to r’s favoring φ-ing. 

Knowledge-How and Gettier Cases 

Jonathan Dixon (Wake Forest University)

There is a debate amongst epistemologists about whether knowledge-how (aka ability knowledge) is subject to Gettier-cases (e.g. Stanley and Williamson (2001), Poston (2009), Stanley (2011a,b), Cath (2011, 2015), Carter and Prichard (2015a,b), and others). The first aim of this paper is to show that both sides of this debate have largely been talking past one another. Because neither side has been explicitly clear about the requirements for Gettiered knowledge-how, each side has been making unrecognized assumptions about the nature of knowledge-how, and it is these assumptions which explain why proponents accept, and opponents deny, that knowledge-how can be Gettiered. With these assumptions laid bare I can accomplish the second aim of this paper: to provide a new argument for why knowledge-how cannot be Gettiered.