Imagine being born into such vast wealth and privilege that you end up with six homes (three castles, two palaces, and the Sandringham Estate), a private train, and so much money that you can find £12,000,000 down the back of the sofa to pay off a woman who has made very realistic sounding claims to have been sexually abused as a minor by your second eldest son.
Some would say that's pure luck. Good luck. Not many would say that living to a ripe old age of 96 is bad luck. Last night's Skeptics In The Pub - Online was somewhat overshadowed by some rather big news earlier in the day because on Thursday 8th September 2022 Queen Elizabeth II passed away and her son, Prince Charles - now King Charles III - a man who once fantasised about being a Tampax, has taken over. It could well be argued that luck has been on his side too.
I wasn't even sure if the Skeptics event would happen but I tuned into Twitch anyway and sure enough it did. With only a few comments about HRH (though plenty of banter on the chat bar). Zooming in from 'over the pond' was Aaron Rabinowitz, a secular moral philosophy educator (woo!) currently working at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and he was with us to talk about luck. Good luck. Bad luck. Whatever kind of luck you want.
The talk, "Was that just luck? The inconsistent world of superstition, privilege, and the illusion of control", began with Rabinowitz setting us a question. Or several questions all lumped in under the header of "Luck or not luck?". Do we believe these things to be examples of luck (good or bad) or not?
(1) The sun rises in the morning.
To me, there's no luck whatsoever involved in that.
(2) A person survives being struck by lightning.
I'd consider that person to be extremely lucky.
(3) A person finishes work five minutes early and arrives home just in time to prevent their child being run down by a car.
Yes, that would also be very fortunate.
(4) A person is born with an illness that gives them such chronic fatigue that they find it impossible to carry out any strenuous work.
To me, that would be an example of very bad luck.
So far, so straightforward. Luck seems to be things we can't control that affect our daily lives. But luck also seems to be something that is quite personal. The sun rising every morning affects our lives and we can't control it but it's the same for everyone and, therefore, doesn't appear to be linked to luck.
It's more confusing than it first seems so Rabinowitz took us into the next part of his talk:- 'What is luck?'. Luck is a universal concept that is shared by all cultures and nearly all individuals. There are objects (four leaf clovers, black cats, horseshoes, ladders, mirrors etc;), actions (crossing one's fingers, knocking on wood, throwing salt over your left shoulder etc;) and phrases ("break a leg", "the Scottish play") associated with luck and obviously they're different around the world but they all have the same, or very similar, resonance.
Luck is tied in with related concepts such as chance, fate, destiny, fortune, and blessing and we have a concept of it from a very early age. Children, across all cultures, have been observed to have a perception of certain individuals as being lucky and will want to become friends with those individuals.
I found that last bit hard to swallow but Aaron Rabinowitz is the expert so let's go with him for now. The next question he asked is "why does luck matter?" and does it matter if we can't change our luck? Luck plays a significant role in the narratives we construct about ourselves and others ("I can't catch a break", "that guy has no luck with women") and this can mean that we end up giving ourselves a free pass we often won't extend to others. Or, indeed, vice versa.
When we do a bad thing we can justify it by creating a narrative in which our circumstances, our recent bad luck, has made us act that way. When others do a bad thing, especially people we don't like anyway, is not because they're unlucky. It's because they're bad people. It's because they're arseholes. Luck doesn't come in to it.
Belief in luck, or ascribing too much to luck, has a negative impact on our belief in free will, in the power of hard work and moral improvement. Why should we work hard, try to improve ourselves, and attempt to take control of our own destinies when luck will, seemingly at whim, override all of that?
Attribution Theory is the study of how people attribute causes to events and it is generally broken down on two axes. Internal versus external (what happens inside of us to what happens outside of us) and stable versus unstable. A stable interpretation of luck would be someone believing that they are born unlucky and that can never change. An unstable interpretation, which seems a more positive one, is someone believing they've had a bad day but that tomorrow could be better. Believing you can be unlucky but that you can also be lucky. In its most positive interpretations you'd probably think that luck, throughout the course of a lifetime, will balance itself out.
This took us on to a section about the philosophical definition of luck and this is when Rabinowitz became much bolder than befpre. He claimed there were three philosophical definitions of luck and that they could roughly be summarised as (1) chance, (2) modal fragility, and (3) lack of control.
The chance interpretation of luck is that it is random, unpredictable, and unlikely and the modal fragility one was quite similar if a little more confusing. It basically posited that luck is when something happens that is unlikely to occur in nearby possible worlds. An example was given relating to the 1992 Disney film The Mighty Ducks in which Emilio Estevez's character believes his life has been cursed since missing an important goal in an ice hockey match some years ago.
I've not seen The Mighty Ducks (and it's not topping my list of must see films anytime soon either) so I'm not sure about that but I'd say winning the lottery would be lucky and that is not unlikely, at all, to occur in any nearby possible worlds. It's almost certain to occur. Just not to me personally. I don't even do the lottery.
Which left us with the concept of 'lack of control' and that's the one Rabinowitz went with. We are unable to control the generation of random numbers (or we'd all win the lottery every week and it would soon cease to exist). We're unable to control some people being born into privilege and we're also unable to prevent some people being born with serious, life threatening, diseases.
It's not just you and me that can't control these things. Nobody can. We may be able to control some aspects of our lives but nobody can control everything that happens in their life. It's impossible and it is Rabinowitz's contention that this means that luck absolutely dominates everything that happens in our lives.
He would go as far as saying that people who have bad, or seemingly amoral, ideas (voting Tory, joining QAnon, denying climate change) aren't bad people. They're just unlucky people. Unlucky because they were born stupid or, to be kinder, unable to understand logical arguments. Because of this, Rabinowitz makes the argument that we should be more compassionate towards such people. In the same way that we would show compassion towards someone born with, and living with, a serious medical condition.
I'm not sure I'm quite as absolutist about this as Aaron Rabinowitz. Whereas I certainly don't buy into the right wing trope, usually espoused by people who have been incredibly lucky but don't want to admit that, that we can all pull ourselves up from our bootstraps and make our own luck I do believe there's some give and take here.
I believe luck plays a huge element in our lives but I don't believe luck runs everything. Perhaps that's because I don't want to. It's very hard to admit we are not in control of our lives and that we don't have the power to make necessary changes to improve them. It's very hard to admit that luck is as powerful as it is but to exist as humans we need to believe we have at least some control over what happens to us.
We can't control if we're born into enormous privilege and get to live in palaces and castles or if we're born into horrific poverty and die before we even learn to walk so luck begins from the very moment of birth and stays with us until the moment we die. Be that as a 96 year old monarch in a huge castle in Scotland or as an innocent nine year old girl shot by a masked gunman at her own home in Liverpool.
A Q&A, steered by the evening's host - the rather wonderful editor of the Skeptic magazine Michael Marshall, took in nihilism, determinism, Blaise Pascal, retribution and justice, how Knock On Wood is a better song than it is a concept, and the fallacy of the notion of the American dream and how that relates to meritocratic toxicity.
When it all finished, I switched back to BBC1. Nicholas Witchell was still wittering on about the Queen and he'd even been joined by Gyles Brandreth (a sure sign of barrel scraping). I'm no royalist but I have to say Elizabeth II did as good a job as anyone could have done in the role of monarch and obviously it's a very sad day for her family, friends, and some of her subjects. Having said that I didn't feel in the mood for watching what now has been eighteen hours of non-stop coverage about her death. But, as luck would have it, Skeptics in the Pub - Online came to my rescue.
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