I discuss what I call ‘reactive luck’: luck that befalls us as bearers of reactive attitudes (such as shame, resentment, pride, or gratitude). Our reactive attitudes play significant roles for our constitution, relationships, and lives overall. Likewise, their weight on us can be significant. Yet we are often lucky with respect to bearing them, in that the objects and circumstances warranting them, and with these our reactive attitudes themselves, are often outside our control. I here discuss the nature and philosophical significance of reactive luck, its relationship to moral luck, and consider ways of addressing problematic forms of reactive luck. 

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This talk synthesizes recent historical research demonstrating the close relationship between developments in statistical methods and debates over racial categories and racial admixture in human genetics. I focus on three temporal snapshots, beginning with the early 20th century peak in the collection of quantitative data by physical anthropologists for the purpose of classifying racial groups and detecting histories of human migrations and admixture. In this period, Indian statistician P. C. Mahalanobis formulated his famous distance function—still in use today for applications ranging from finance to machine learning—in order to answer questions about racial admixture in colonial India. By the postwar period, human geneticists collected different kinds of data and developed new statistical approaches, but still largely aimed to address similar questions about “populations” or “ethnic groups” shaped by concepts of racial difference. For example, major scientific disputes emerged between the 1950s and 1970s about the validity of statistical methods used to estimate racial admixture in communities of African Americans and Ashkenazi Jews. I conclude with a reflection on recent computational methods used to analyze “biogeographical ancestry” and the enduring problem of categorizing populations in human genetics.