Getting Luck Properly Under Control

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2013 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

METAPHILOSOPHY
Vol. 44, No. 4, July 2013
0026-1068
GETTING LUCK PROPERLY UNDER CONTROL

RACHEL MCKINNON
Abstract: This article proposes a new account of luck and how luck impacts
attributions of credit for agents actions. It proposes an analogy with the expected
value of a series of wagers and argues that luck is the difference between actual
outcomes and expected value. The upshot of the argument is that when considering the interplay of intention, chance, outcomes, skill, and actions, we ought to be
more parsimonious in our attributions of credit when exercising a skill and obtaining successful outcomes, and more generous in our attributions of credit when
exercising a skill but obtaining unsuccessful outcomes. Furthermore, the article
argues that when agents skillfully perform an action, they deserve the same
amount of credit whether their action is successful or unsuccessful in achieving
the goal.
Keywords: luck, metaphysics, epistemology, expected value, control, modal,
chance.
1. Introduction
A randomly selected fan, Bill, at a basketball game is selected for a
million-dollar half-time contest requiring a full-court shot (from one side
of the court to the other). Bill has never played basketball, but he makes
the shot nonetheless and is a million dollars richer. At an NFL game, the
quarterback makes a Hail Mary pass in the closing seconds of the game.
The receiver, Terrell, under heavy coverage, bumbles the pass and juggles
it repeatedly while falling but ultimately catches the ball for the winning
touchdown. Jane is watching the televised draw of a large lottery, to
which she holds a ticket, and realizes that she holds the winning ticket.
Vincent, while wanting to plant a rose bush on the island he inhabits,
finds the best location for growing roses and, while digging, finds some
buried treasure.
All of these cases seem to be instances of luck: Bill making the shot,
Terrell making the catch, Jane winning the lottery, and Vincent finding the
treasure. Providing an account of luck that captures each of these cases
has, however, been surprisingly difficult. In this article I offer an account
of luck that captures each case, along with some important intuitions,
which will have some fortunate upshots for topics in both ethics and
epistemology. I propose that we separate important metaphysical questions about the nature of luck from equally important epistemological
497
questions about when we can identify the presence and influence of luck.
The upshot of my argument is that when considering the interplay of
intention, chance, outcomes, skill, and actions, we ought to be more
parsimonious in our attributions of credit when exercising a skill and
obtaining successful outcomes, and more generous in our attributions
of credit when exercising a skill but obtaining unsuccessful outcomes.
Furthermore, I argue that when agents skillfully perform an action, they
deserve the same amount of credit whether their action is successful or
unsuccessful in achieving the goal.
I make the case that we can better understand the nature of luck by
drawing an analogy with the expected value of wagers. A long series of
wagers, each with a determinate expected value, itself has a determinate
expected value. Its unlikely, however, that the outcome of the series will
be the expected value. I argue that the difference between the actual
results and the expected value is what we call luck. When we consider
how actions, especially when exercising a skill or ability, are similarly
probabilistic, we can call the expected results of a series of actions skill.
Then, mutatis mutandis, the difference between the expected outcomes
and the actual outcomes of a series of actions is what we call luck.
Moreover, like a single wager viewed as part of a series of wagers, I
propose that we view the outcome of an individual action as one element
of a larger series of trials. Its status as creditable or lucky depends essentially on its place within that series. I subsequently argue that agents
deserve credit for an outcome proportional only to their skill. Insofar as
an agents obtaining an outcome involves good luck, we should remove
credit proportional to the good luck; similarly, insofar as an agents
obtaining an outcome involves bad luck, we should attribute credit proportional to the bad luck.
2. Luck out of Control
Theres a strong intuition that lucky events are those that are somehow
out of our control. Janes winning the lottery, for example, is lucky
because the outcome is out of her control. As Thomas Nagel notes, Prior
to reflection it is intuitively plausible that people cannot be morally
assessed for what is not their fault, or for what is due to factors beyond
their control (Nagel 1976, 58; cf. Williams 1976). Daniel Statman offers
a definition of luck that captures this intuition. He writes, Good luck
occurs when something good happens to an agent P, its occurrence being
beyond Ps control. Similarly, bad luck occurs when something bad
happens to an agent P, its occurrence being beyond [Ps] control
(Statman 1991, 146). If we supposed that Jane rigged the lottery so that
she would win, then wed cease to have the intuition that her winning was
lucky. The explanation is that the outcome is under her control and that,
therefore, events under our control are not lucky. Theres an important
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RACHEL MCKINNON
terminological point to make at this time. Although its common to use

luck to refer only to good luck, I will use luck or lucky as a neutral
term to describe the concept of luck irrespective of the outcome being
good or bad.
There are, however, a number of problems with this sort of nave
control view of luck. First, the concept of control is fraught. What
exactly does it mean to be in control of a situation? One might think that
to be in control means that an agent performing some action guarantees
an outcome. Janes rigging the lottery so that she wins, for example,
seems to guarantee that she will win. We have to grant, however, that
even when we intuitively consider agents in control of their outcomes,
their actions dont guarantee an outcome. Were all subject to unforeseen
events that influence outcomes, after all. For example, an asteroid may
strike Earth just before the drawing of the lottery such that Janes plans
come to naught. Its difficult to conceive of outcomes of which anyone is
truly in control.
There are, however, more philosophically troubling issues with the
nave control view of luck. A number of philosophers have objected that
control is neither a necessary nor a (jointly) sufficient condition for luck.1
As Andrew Latus notes, An event such as the rising of the sun this
morning was entirely out of my control, yet it is not at all clear that I am
lucky the sun rose this morning (although it is surely a good thing that it
did) (Latus 2000, 167). In such cases, the mere lack of control, even for
events significant to agents, is not sufficient for the presence of luck.
There seem to be other cases that count against control being a necessary condition for the presence of luck. Jennifer Lackey presents a case of
a demolition worker, Ramona, attempting to detonate explosives (Lackey
2008, 25859). The requisite wiring is in place, but, unbeknownst to
Ramona, a mouse has chewed through the relevant wires such that Ramonas pressing the detonation button wont be effective. But luckily, also
unbeknownst to Ramona, her co-worker has hung his jacket on a metal
hanger right at the point where the mouse chewed through the wires such
that the electrical circuit is closed and Ramonas pressing the detonator
button will be effective. Ramona presses the button, and the building is
successfully demolished. The purpose of this case is twofold. First, the case
is riddled with luck. Second, Ramonas action (pressing the button) is
causally efficacious in bringing out the (desired) outcome and the outcome
is in Ramonas control. However, her being in control seems to be a matter
of luck. This case thus seems to be an instance of luck where control is
present, so lack of control is not a necessary condition for the presence of
luck. In section 4, I return to the question of whether a more sophisticated
control view of luck can be advanced.
1
For example, see Latus (2000), Pritchard (2005 and elsewhere), and Lackey (2008).
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3. That Normally Wouldnt Have Happened

Along with the control intuition theres a strong intuition that lucky
events are unlikely. Bills full-court basketball shot is exceptionally
unlikely, even for the best professional player, let alone an amateur such
as Bill. Likewise, we consider Janes winning the lottery lucky not so much
due to it being out of her control as due largely to her winning being so
unlikely. Nicholas Rescher advances a view of luck as a property of
events that varies inversely with the likelihood of the event and proportionally to the value of the event (Latus 2003, 465, discussing Rescher
1995). Naturally, someone who wins a lottery holding ten thousand tickets
is proportionally luckier than a person who wins a lottery (with the same
prize structure) holding a hundred tickets. And moreover, someone who
wins a lottery holding a thousand tickets with a prize of a million dollars
is luckier than someone who wins a lottery holding a thousand tickets with
a prize of ten dollars.
There have been criticisms of this sort of chance view of luck, though.
For example, as Latus writes, Suppose I have the ability to bring about
some rare event of great value and I make use of this ability. An unlikely,
valuable event therefore takes place, but it does not seem correct to
describe me as lucky that the event occurred (Latus 2003, 467). We can
imagine Albert Pujols, who is a prodigious home-run hitter, hitting a
home run in a situation where the probability of success is only 15
percent. His hitting the home run is a result of his ability to hit home
runs, his skill. Moreover, some events can seem highly unlikely to an
agent while being predetermined by initial conditions and the relevant
physical laws. Or, additionally, perhaps something that seems unlikely
(such as sixty golfers all getting a hole in one on a hole) is actually the
result of a rigged system.2
I think that there is a more serious problem with the chance view,
though. It might be tempting to think that an advocate of the chance
view of luck could respond to the foregoing concerns by noting that the
unlikely but determined counterexample seems to hinge on cases where
outcomes are somehow determined, and hence arent lucky, even though
they seem lucky from the agents perspective. Moreover, the other counterexample also seems to hinge on an outcome being importantly
determinedthis time by the agents ability to bring about the outcome
and hence isnt lucky. I think, however, that there are a large number of
cases where an outcome is not determined (that is, its the result of a
stochastic process), is unlikely, and yet doesnt seem lucky.
For the sake of argument, suppose that the outcome of flipping a fair
coin is random (that is, inherently stochastic). In infinitely repeated trials
of flipping a coin we statistically expect an outcome of a ratio of 50H(eads)
2
This is a reference to the Heartbreaker case of Vogel 1990, discussed at length in
Hawthorne 2004.
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RACHEL MCKINNON
to 50T(ails), or 50H:50T. In a trial with a given number of flips, say a

thousand, we still statistically expect a mean of 50 percent heads, 500H
(and, therefore, 500T), but we can calculate the probability of obtaining
this as the outcome of a given trial. The probabilities are calculated
according to a binomial distribution, and the probability of a trial resulting with exactly 500H is 2.52 percent. We can refer to the mean as the
expected value of the trial. The key point is that although the expected
value of a trial is statistically unlikely, we wouldnt consider obtaining that
result as lucky. To see why, if one had to place a bet on a single outcome
of the trial, the only rational (even money) bet would be to bet on the
mean, since its the most likely outcome compared to any other individual
alternative outcome (that is, the trial is more likely to result in 500H than
498H or 502H, for example). The upshot is that in all sorts of probabilistic
situations an unlikely event that isnt predetermined may occur and yet
not seem lucky in the salient sense.
So I think that we can jettison the chance view of luck and look
elsewhere. Responding to these sorts of worries, some have more recently
offered a modal view of luck, most prominently represented by Duncan
Pritchard. Pritchard argues for the following two necessary (but not
jointly sufficient) conditions for luck:
L1: If an event is lucky, then it is an event that occurs in the actual
world but which does not occur in a wide class of the nearest
possible worlds where the relevant initial conditions for that
event are the same as in the actual world.
L2: If an event is lucky, then it is an event that is significant to the
agent concerned (or would be significant, were the agent to be
availed of the relevant facts). (Pritchard 2005, 125, 132)3
This view captures the intuition supporting the chance view: events that
lack counterfactual robustness (those that fail L1) tend to be unlikely.
Moreover, Pritchard suggests, his modal view of luck captures the control
intuition: outcomes in our control tend to exhibit counterfactual robustness (and so arent usually lucky), and outcomes out of our control tend to
lack counterfactual robustness (and so are often lucky).
There have been some criticisms of Pritchards view, though. Jennifer
Lackey is a prominent critic of modal accounts of luck. She offers a case
that purports to show that L1 is not a necessary condition for luck
(Lackey 2006, 285, and Lackey 2008, 26162). Consider Vincent, who
wants to plant a rose bush on the island he inhabits. Hes adept at finding
the best growing area and, while digging, finds some buried treasure.
3
Although Pritchard seems to offer them as jointly sufficient, Riggs notes that Pritchard
has communicated that L1 and L2 are not offered as jointly sufficient. See Riggs 2009, 207
n. 3.
501
Unbeknownst to Vincent, the treasure was left there a month ago by his
neighbor Sophie. Sophie wanted to bury some treasure shortly before her
death in a sentimental spot on the island that she knew would be a good
area for growing rose bushes. Because shes also adept at spotting locations good for growing roses, and because theres only one spot on the
island suitable for this purpose, she finds the same spot that Vincent
later finds.
The key point of this case is that Vincents finding the treasure is clearly
lucky, but in most nearby possible worlds Sophie will bury the treasure
in that spot and Vincent will find it. So this seems to be a case of luck
that involves counterfactual robustness, thereby violating condition L1
of Pritchards view. Lackeys diagnosis of the case is that although the
case exhibits counterfactual robustness, the fact that its counterfactually
robust seems to be a matter of luck. She writes, The fundamental problem with such modal accounts [of luck] is that counterfactual robustness
can be ensured through a combination of features that is entirely fortuitous. For instance, an event that appears in both the actual world and all
of the relevant nearby worlds can none the less be lucky because the
relevant counterfactual robustness is achieved purely through a lucky
combination of external factors (Lackey 2006, 289).4
This appears to be a decisive criticism, as far as it goes. I think,
however, that the coin-flipping comments above also militate against a
modal view, and particularly against L1 and L2 providing jointly sufficient conditions for luck. The single most likely outcome of flipping a
fair coin a thousand times is five hundred heads. But the probability of
actually obtaining this result is merely 2.52 percent. Suppose that this is
the outcome: it doesnt seem lucky, but in most nearby possible worlds
we wouldnt have obtained a result of five hundred heads. The coinflipping case seems to satisfy both L1 and L2 (if we assume that the
outcome is significant for an agent, such as in a wager) without thereby
being a case of luck. So Pritchards modal view, at least as presented, is
inadequate as an account of luck. Below, I return to discuss the possible
merits of a modal view, even if we ultimately reject a strictly modal view
of luck.
4. Luck, Control, and Credit
Although there are some prominent objections to a nave control view of
luck, such that one might think that all is lost, theres been a resurgence of
a more sophisticated version of the control view offered by Wayne Riggs
(see, e.g., Riggs 2007 and 2009). Central to an adequate control view is to
focus instead on what outcomes are creditable to agents. Consider Shari,
who is terrible at pool and is faced with a nearly impossible jump shot to
4
This feature is also present in the Ramona case.
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RACHEL MCKINNON
pocket the 8 ball. She doesnt actually know how to hit a jump shot
properly, let alone how to do so with any accuracy. But buoyed by the
taunting of her friends, she attempts a jump shot and makes it. This
outcome seems incandescently lucky. One explanation for this is that the
outcome isnt adequately a result of Sharis (limited) skill at pool, at jump
shots in particular. Were a professional pool player to make this shot we
would be more inclined to credit the player for the outcome manifesting
his or her skill rather than being the result of luck, as is the case with
Sharis shot.
Riggs offers the following as a definition of luck:
[Event] E is lucky for S iff it is not the case that S brought E about (where this
implies that either E was not the result of the application of Ss powers,
abilities, or skills, or E was inadvertent with respect to S). (Riggs 2009, 219)
He goes on to argue that this is incomplete since satisfying these conditions is not sufficient for E being lucky. Although I will not discuss the
details, he offers the following as a more complete specification:
E is lucky for S iff
a) E is (too far) out of Ss control, and
b) S did not successfully exploit E for some purpose, and
c) E is significant to S (or would be significant, were S to be availed of the
relevant facts). (Riggs 2009, 220)
Whats important is that what it means for an agent to be in control of an

event is for the outcome to be sufficiently the result of an agents ability in
order for the agent to deserve credit for the event. The pocketing of the 8
ball isnt sufficiently the result of Sharis ability to make the shot; this
explains why its lucky. In contrast, pocketing the 8 ball would be sufficiently the result of a professionals skill, which is why it wouldnt be lucky
in that case.
Its important to note, however, that it isnt for the lack of counterfactual robustness that Shari doesnt deserve credit for her shots success.
Even though she will miss the shot in nearly every nearby possible world,
we could imagine a case where the game is rigged for her to make the shot
in nearly every nearby possible world. Wed still have the intuition,
however, that her success is due to luck, rather than her ability to exploit
the game being rigged.5 If, on the other hand, Shari knew the game was
5
Its unclear whether Riggs would consider the outcome lucky. According to the tripartite definition, it seems that the outcome is lucky for Shari. This seems, however, to run afoul
of our intuitions of outcomes in rigged situations being lucky for the agent.
503
rigged for her to make the shot, then even exercising her limited ability
would properly bring about the outcome for her to deserve credit (in
that she exploited the game being rigged, thus failing condition b for
being lucky).
Central to what it takes for an agent to be credit-worthy is for an
agents action in bringing about E to be causally efficacious. Recall the
case of Bill and his full-court basketball shot. Of such a shot Riggs writes,
[T]hrowing the basketball the length of the court [is not] an efficacious
way to make a basket (though, once again, its better than not throwing it
at all). Note that merely being in the causal chain that leads to an event,
even being a necessary element of the causal chain leading to the event, is
not sufficient to make an agent causally efficacious in bringing something
about. So one way for an event to be lucky for an agent A is for the agent
to be causally inefficacious in bringing about the event (Riggs 2007, 334).
Although Bill is obviously a necessary part of the causal chain, and he
threw the ball at the hoop rather than, say, the crowd, he doesnt deserve
credit for making the shot, since his success isnt sufficiently the result of
exercising his (limited) basketball skills. Rather, the result is attributable
to luck. I have more to say about this, however, in section 5, where I argue
that Bill deserves some credit for his success.
Its important to note Riggss contribution to the debate over the
nature of luck. His account clearly captures the control intuition: lucky
events are lucky in part because they are sufficiently out of our control. His
view also captures the chance intuition that lucky events tend to be those
that are unlikely. Although its not a necessary condition that lucky events
are unlikely or that they lack counterfactual robustness, they do tend to be
unlikely and they do tend to lack counterfactual robustness. The upshot of
Lackeys examples, particularly the buried-treasure case, is that a lack
of counterfactual robustness cant be a necessary condition for luck. As
Riggs puts it, such views are simply not looking in the right place for the
appropriate conditions for luck (Riggs 2009, 210). What explains the
lucky nature of the buried-treasure case is, instead, that Vincents finding
the treasure is not a manifestation of his treasure-finding ability; instead,
its an inadvertent result of his skill in locating good areas for growing
roses.
The sort of sophisticated control view that Riggs proposes is not
without problems, however. First, its unclear how the account will treat
cases like Lackeys Ramona and her pressing the detonation button. The
account doesnt adequately address cases where that an agent is in control
seems to be a matter of luck even when the event is sufficiently the result
of an agents actions. Riggs argues that theres some ambiguity in such
cases. On the one hand, one intuition pushes us in favor of crediting
Ramona with the outcome (the demolition of the building); on the other
hand, we dont fully credit her because she wasnt in control of her
co-worker fortuitously (that is, luckily) hanging his coat on a metal hanger
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RACHEL MCKINNON
in just the right spot to close the circuit in order to allow Ramona to
exercise her ability in demolishing the building.
A much more important problem with a sophisticated control view
such as Riggss is that, like its predecessors, it unduly treats outcomes as
the result of an exclusive disjunction between luck and skill (or ability, and
so on). Although parts of the view seem sensitive to many of the successful
outcomes of our actions involving a little of both luck and skill, often one
is strongly privileged over the other. For example, when an archer skillfully hits his or her target, we tend to forget about the possible presence of
luck, and when Bill makes his unlikely basketball shot, we tend to forget
about the role that his skill, albeit limited, plays in his success. Hence, in
the next section I argue that we ought to be more parsimonious in our
attributions of credit when exercising a skill and obtaining successful
outcomes, and more generous in our attributions of credit when exercising
a skill but obtaining unsuccessful outcomes.
5. Just as We Expected
In this section I present a new view of luck that builds on the credit view in
Riggss sophisticated control view while avoiding talk of control. In the
professional online poker-playing world, there are some sophisticated
views on luck. Online poker sites create histories of all the actions taken in
each hand, record them, and offer them to the players. Knowing this,
a number of highly sophisticated software programs (such as Holdem
Manager and Poker Tracker) have been created that take this information
and allow players real-time sophisticated statistical analyses of their play as
well as the play of their opponents. One particular statistic is relevant to our
discussion of luck: all-in expected value (or AIEV). Poker inherently
involves a great many probabilistic judgments made by players about the
profitability of a play (the expected value, or EV). Its rare, however, that
players can know the exact EV of a play, since this requires knowing their
opponents cards, which is often impossible. One situation in which players
can know their EV is when both players are all-in with cards to come (e.g.,
in Texas HoldEm before the river card has been dealt).6 When a player is
all-in pre-flop (before any board cards have been dealt), for example, with
a pair of aces against a single opponent with a pair of twos, we can precisely
calculate the players probability of winning (its roughly 80 percent). When
we know the value of the bets and how much has already been wagered,
calculating the exact EV for each player becomes trivial. We can then
compare the actual results to the EV (what Ill call the expected results).
Due to the software available, players can view the AIEV over their
career (or any period of time) and then compare this with their actual
6
The reason it can be known is that the hand histories indicate an opponents hand only
when that player reaches showdown. This always happens when two players are all-in.
505
results in these situations.7 For example, over a year playing two million
hands a player may be in these sorts of all-in situations twenty thousand
times. Suppose that Shannon has an AIEV of +$20,000 (a positive number
indicates that Shannon makes good decisions about when to go all-in with
cards to come; the higher the number, the better she is at making these
decisions).8 Her actual results from these situations, however, are that she
won $23,500. So her actual results are $3,500 better than expectation. My
proposal is that we can attribute $20,000 of her earnings to skill and
$3,500 to luck.
This is related to the coin-flipping example from section 3. In probabilistic events, we can determine the expected outcome. In flipping a coin
its a ratio of 50 percent heads to 50 percent tails. We recognize, however,
that, in any reasonably sized trial of repeated flips, its unlikely that the
outcome will be the expected ratio. Instead, its more likely that well
obtain an outcome other than the expected one, though one fairly close to
the mean. In a binomial distribution of outcomes of flipping a fair coin a
thousand times, most will be within about 16H of the mean (that is, within
one standard deviation). In probabilistic events, I argue, outcomes of the
mean (the expected outcomes) are what we attribute to skill, and any
deviation from the mean is attributable to luck. Outcomes with more
successes than expected are what we call good luck (positive deviation),
and outcomes with fewer successes than expected are what we call bad
luck (negative deviation).
Let me explain with a more familiar example. Take Bills unlikely
basketball shot. Admittedly, there is some nonzero probability that hell
make the shot (there must be, since he makes it in the case). Suppose that
hell make the shot 1 percent of the time. If we were to let him have an
infinite number of throws, wed expect an outcome where 1 percent of his
throws were successful. This is the degree to which Bill is skilled at making
long-distance basketball shots. A professional, by contrast, might be able
to make the shot 5 percent of the time.9 And when Bill makes the shot, the
success manifests his ability: he was successful because he has some ability
in making such shots. So Bill deserves at least some credit for making the
shot: it wasnt entirely due to luck. But how much? Since his ability is only
to make the shot 1 percent of the time, we dont attribute all of the credit
to Bills ability. Instead, we should attribute most of it to luck. In fact, we
should attribute 1 percent of the credit to Bills skill, and the rest to luck.
7
In order to generate useful statistical conclusions, large sample sizes are required. Since
these all-in situations may only happen a few times per thousand hands, players often require
a long period of play before analyzing their play with any confidence.
8
There are some confounds, but I ignore them for the sake of simplicity. For example, a
player who is unduly cautious will have a highly positive AIEV but will likely be passing up
other good opportunities.
9
As Bill moves closer to the basket, wed expect his probability to increase to the point
of being nearly 100 percent if he were standing right next to the basket.
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RACHEL MCKINNON
That we should attribute credit in this way is a point about how credit
ought to be attributed. In many cases this is different from our actual
practice in attributing credit to agents for obtaining outcomes. Insofar as
the two come apart, my view is revisionist.
My view of luck importantly differs from Riggss in that I jettison
discussing skill in terms of being causally efficacious in bringing about
certain outcomes. Part of the reason for this is that its unclear what is
meant by something being causally efficacious. On the one hand, in discussing a low-probability action such as Bills shooting a full-court shot, it
makes sense to say that anyoneeven a professionalattempting to do so
isnt a good way of attempting to make a basket. This just seems to be
another way of saying that it isnt a sufficiently likely way of making a
basket. But theres a problem for Riggss view when we consider highly
skilled athletes making highly probable attempts, such as Steve Nash
taking a free-throw shot.
Elite National Basketball Association players can have a probability of
success in making free throws that is around 90 percent. When Steve Nash
steps to the free-throw line, we expect him to make the shot most of the
time. Suppose that Steve is truly a 90 percent shooter: lets suppose that
hes constituted such that his success rate at making free throws in normal
game situations is inherently 90 percent. This requires a number of heavy
metaphysical assumptions about abilities and actions. Many will think
that in a given instance of a shot, given the mechanics of the shooter, the
laws of physics, and the initial conditions, a shot will either surely succeed
or surely fail: its not fundamentally stochastic. I propose, however, that
we view the individual event as one element of a larger series of trials. Its
status as creditable or lucky depends essentially on its place within that
series. Moreover, it is important that we treat agents abilities to perform
actions as fundamentally stochastic, at least epistemically speaking.
Its also important to restrict the specification of a players skill to, in
some important sense, normal conditions of the skills application.10 An
important feature of a skill is that a more skillful agent will be able to
successfully exercise a skill in a wider range of cases with slightly different
circumstances. A professional basketball player, for example, will remain
a 90 percent shooter when a crowd is loud and using distraction devices,
whereas a novice will lose whatever skill she or he has in such conditions.
But even professionals will not be able to shoot well if stones are hitting
them as theyre trying to shoot.
With these background assumptions in place, suppose that Steve sinks
a free throw: do we attribute the success to his skill or to luck? Here I think
we need to separate the metaphysical from the epistemological question.
Metaphysically speaking, I think that the question is ill formed. Since
10
For a good, recent discussion of skills and normative assessments of performances, see
Sosa 2011.
507
Steves ability is only to make the shot 90 percent of the time, we expect
him, even when hes exercising his ability, to miss some of the shots.
Consequently, on my view, even when he succeeds, in exercising his
ability, Steve doesnt deserve all of the credit for the success manifesting
his ability. Hes only entitled to 90 percent of the credit. Returning to the
poker case will help explain why.
Suppose that Shannon and Bonnie are playing a game of Texas
HoldEm poker. They both have $1,000 to wager and, with one card to
come, they both bet all of their money (with nothing already in the pot).
It so happens that Bonnie is 95 percent likely to win (given that we dont
know what the next card will be). In poker, we calculate the EV of the play
according to the following formula:
EV = ( Probability of Winning Amount Won )

(Probability of Losing Amount Lost )
In this case, Bonnies play carries an EV of +$900. EV can be positive,
neutral, or negative. For Shannon its -$900. She stands, on average over
the long run, to lose $900 on her play, whereas Bonnie stands to make
$900.
Poker has a concept of pot equity, where players own a portion of the
pot proportional to their probability of winning. Here Bonnie owns 95
percent of the total pot ($2,000), which comes to $1,900. If we were to play
out this hand an infinite number of times, wed expect Bonnie to end up
with $1,900 on average. However, since she either wins the full $2,000 or
loses, this is an impossible outcome for a single hand.11 So suppose that
Bonnie wins and thus has $2,000. Poker theorists would say that shes only
entitled to $1,900 of that. If she were only to play this hand once, theyd
say that shes lucky to the tune of the extra $100. Critical in this analysis
is that the value of Bonnies play is +$900 regardless of the actual outcome
of the hand. So the normative assessment of her performance is based on
putting herself in a highly positive EV situation (the application of her skill
as a poker player), not the outcome of the hand. Were Shannon to win, we
wouldnt credit her for her masterful play in winding up with $2,000;
rather, wed say that most of her winnings are due to luck ($1,900 of them,
in fact).
I argue that the case is the same for more familiar cases of success
through ability, such as Steve Nash making the free throw. In probabilistic
actions, which I think applies to most of our actions, agents are only
entitled when successful to credit for the expected value of their action; the
rest is attributable to luck. If an agent is 1 percent likely to be successful
when exercising his ability, such as Bills full-court shot, then he only
deserves 1 percent of the credit for being successful; likewise, if an agent is
11
Consider that the average roll of a die is 3.5, even though such a result is impossible
in a single roll.
508
RACHEL MCKINNON
99 percent likely to be successful when exercising her ability, then she only
deserves 99 percent of the credit for being successful.
Theres an interesting consequence of this view, though: when agents
exercise an ability but fail to achieve the desired outcome, they deserve
some credit. Often our practices of applying credit dont do this: when a
skillful player misses a shot, we dont give her any credit. Instead, shes
often rebuked for her failure. This seems mistaken: this would be to forget
that our skills are fallible and probabilistic. That is, even when a skillful
agent is exercising her skill in shooting an arrow, sometimes shell miss,
and the failure will be merely because shes expected to miss at least some
of the time. And, conversely, when shes successful, she doesnt deserve
all of the credit. Returning to the all-in EV example, if Shannons career
AIEV is $20,000 but her actual results in these situations are $19,000, then
she deserves some extra credit for the $1,000 shes missing due to some bad
luck. Likewise, if Steve Nash is truly a 90 percent free-throw shooter and
his results for the year are only 83 percent, we can give him credit for being
a 90 percent shooter and recognize that hes had some bad luck to the tune
of the missing 7 percent.12
All of the preceding discussion is about the metaphysical questions
regarding what luck is. Ive suggested that we should keep these separate
from epistemological questions about when, whether, and to what degree
we can determine that an outcome is due to luck. I argue that in a given
situation we cant know whether this shot was due to mostly luck or mostly
skill. Suppose that Steve Nash makes ninety-eight of a hundred free-throw
shots in a season (98 percent). If hes truly a 90 percent shooter, we can say
that eight of these shots were due to luck, but which ones? We cant know.
We can only determine that some eight shots were due to luck. Determining
the presence of luck (and to what degree) in outcomes thus requires a
big-picture view of a series of trials. We have to zoom out, as it were. When
we focus on a particular performance, whether successful or unsuccessful,
we lose the ability to determine whether the outcome was due largely to skill
or to luck. Instead, were left with the probabilistic attribution of credit
discussed above based on expected value: for a given successful shot, Steve
Nash deserves credit for 90 percent of the shot due to skill.
Its important to recognize that neither luck nor skill is an all-ornothing affair. Its often been the case in the debates on moral or epistemic
luck that the presence of problematic forms of luck removes moral responsibility or impugns ones knowledge of a proposition. How should we
understand the natural idea that luck undermines credit or responsibility? For example, its been argued that, in a sense, the presence of luck
12
Theres an important distinction, however, between exercising an abilityand deserving the attendant credit for an outcomeand exercising an ability welland how exercising
an ability poorly or well will impact the attribution of credit. I avoid that discussion for my
present purposes.
509
undermines responsibility. Or, in epistemology, the presence of luck undermines ones knowledge. A good way of understanding luck is that its part
of an equation including outcomes, skill (that is, credit), and luck. For any
outcome, it is the result of a combination of luck and skill whereby,
1 = % Credit + % Luck
so that luck undermines credit because:
% Credit = 1 % Luck
As the presence of luck increases, the amount of credit that an agent
deserves for an outcome decreases. Therefore, the extent to which an agent
is lucky deprives him or her, to that same extent, of earning credit. Thus,
its natural to say that luck undermines credit.
Now, one might think that in many cases, the intuition supporting the
attribution of luck to an outcome seems to come from the unlikelihood of
the outcome. For example, Bills making the shot and Janes winning the
lottery both seem lucky partly because the outcomes are unlikely. But we
should be careful. Suppose that were comparing two baseball players:
Albert Pujols is a professional with a track record of hitting home runs,
and Bob is a neophyte. Suppose that we place both in an identical situation facing one of the best Major League Baseball closing pitchers,
Mariano Rivera. Suppose that, on average, Albert will obtain a hit only 25
percent of the time, and a home run only 15 percent of the time. Suppose
further that Bob will obtain a hit only 5 percent of the time, and a home
run 1 percent of the time. Now suppose that both players hit a home run.
Many will have the intuition that Bobs home run was lucky, whereas,
albeit unlikely, Alberts is due to skill. The example is meant to show
that merely because an outcome is statistically unlikely is insufficient to
attribute luck.
We should be equally careful about another source of problems from
such examples. One explanation for why we shouldnt attribute Alberts
home run to luck is that, although the outcome is unlikely, the outcome is
a result of his skill: the success manifests his home-run and hitting ability.
Note, however, that Bobs home run is also a result of his, albeit limited,
skill. Since he successfully hit a home run, we know that Bob has some
ability to hit home runs. And when he succeeds, his success manifests his
(limited) hitting ability no less than Alberts home run manifests his prodigious hitting ability. The difference in the cases is that we expect Albert
to hit home runs much more often than we expect Bob to hit home runs.
This is where the probabilistic analysis offered above is particularly
useful. If we were to place Bob in the hitting situation and give him an
infinite number of attempts, we expect him to hit a given number of home
runs proportional to his ability (that is, 1 percent of the attempts will result
in a home run). If we were to offer him only a single attempt, then being
510
RACHEL MCKINNON
surprised at his success makes some intuitive sense: we expect him to hit
some home runs given many trials, but with only one trial, its very
unlikely that hell succeed. We cant be surprised every time, however, or
well commit a fallacy akin to the lottery paradox: although its unlikely
for a given ticket to win, and we may be justified in believing that ticket n
will lose, we cant make that judgment about every ticket or else well be
justified in believing that all tickets will lose, which is absurd (since one
ticket must win). So I think a better attitude to adopt toward Bobs success
in a given trial is not to attribute it entirely to luck: instead we should
notice that Bob has some (albeit limited) hitting ability and we should give
him credit for his ability. But he doesnt deserve full credit for his home
run. However, Albert deserves more credit than Bob. How much? Again,
we should attribute credit proportional to Alberts ability, which is greater
than Bobs.
6. Conclusion
In this article Ive presented a new theory of luck based on a probabilistic
understanding of abilities and expected value. Skill is what we call the
expected value of an ability, and luck is any deviation, whether positive or
negative, from this value. This answers the metaphysical question of what
luck is. Ive also argued, however, that we should separate this from
the epistemological question regarding when and to what degree we can
attribute an outcome to luck or to skill. Ive argued that we can only
determine that some number of successes (or failures) are attributable to
luck (or to skill) only when we take a big-picture, long-term view of a
number of performances. We are epistemologically blocked from determining whether, and to what degree, a given performance is due to luck
(or to skill). In such cases we are left with a probabilistic judgment where
we attribute credit proportional to the agents skill, and the rest to luck.
The upshot of my argument is that when considering the interplay
of intention, chance, outcomes, skill, and actions, we ought to be more
parsimonious in our attributions of credit when exercising a skill and
obtaining successful outcomes, and more generous in our attributions of
credit when exercising a skill but obtaining unsuccessful outcomes.
Moreover, when agents skillfully perform an action, they deserve the same
amount of credit whether their action is successful or unsuccessful in
achieving the goal.
University of Calgary
Department of Philosophy
Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4
Canada
rachelvmckinnon@gmail.com
511
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Tim Kenyon for feedback at various stages of this
project.
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