UC Irvine

Does luck lead to ignorance? According to mainstream views, either ignorance is lack of knowledge and epistemic luck always leads to ignorance, or ignorance is lack of true belief, and never does. As this dissertation shows, however, these views are vulnerable to compelling counterexamples which show that luck only sometimes leads to ignorance. This opens the door to develop a more nuanced view of ignorance in terms of epistemic access to the world, irreducible to either knowledge or true belief. Is luck incompatible with moral responsibility? Philosophers who see a tension between the fairness of morality and luck have assumed that luck is lack of control. But by understanding luck modally (as what happens and yet could have easily not happened), we can not only dissolve the tension between luck and morality’s fairness, but also develop a new solution to the moral luck problem: the effects of luck on our actions don’t undermine our ascriptions of moral responsibility.