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    Counterfactuals cannot adequately capture the concept of ... — Carmelics
    Home/Moral Responsibility
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Counterfactuals cannot adequately capture the concept of circumstantial luck

    Moral Responsibility
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Circumstantial luck is constitutively indexed to the agent's actual situation, making any non-actual world comparison semantically misaligned with what luck picks out.
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    • 2.Lewis's possible worlds semantics selects counterfactual worlds by similarity metrics that presuppose a stable agent-type, but circumstantial luck is precisely what destabilizes that type across worlds.
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    • 3.Moral luck theorists like Nagel treat circumstances as partially constitutive of the moral situation itself, not merely as inputs to a pre-fixed deliberative structure that counterfactuals could hold constant.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Circumstantial luck concerns the normative significance of unchosen contexts, but counterfactual analysis dissolves context by abstracting away the very particularity that makes those circumstances morally salient.
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    • 2.Williams's critique of moral theory shows that ethical concepts resist reduction to context-neutral conditionals because moral weight is borne by irreducibly particular facts about what actually happened to a specific person.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Each improvement to the counterfactual schema for circumstantial luck generates a new apparent counterexample
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    • 2.The iterative failure of successive counterfactual refinements suggests a systematic inadequacy rather than a fixable defect
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    Topics

    Moral Responsibility

    Related

    Circumstantial luck concerns the normative significance of unchosen contexts, bu...Circumstantial luck is constitutively indexed to the agent's actual situation, m...Each improvement to the counterfactual schema for circumstantial luck generates ...Lewis's possible worlds semantics selects counterfactual worlds by similarity me...
    +3 moreShow less
    Moral luck theorists like Nagel treat circumstances as partially constitutive of...The iterative failure of successive counterfactual refinements suggests a system...Williams's critique of moral theory shows that ethical concepts resist reduction...

    Similar

    Causal luck is exhausted by constitutive luck and circumstantial luck89%Compatibilists who admit causal moral luck must also accept constituti...79%Each improvement to the counterfactual schema for circumstantial luck ...79%Having the right equipment is at least to some extent a matter of circ...75%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: moral-luck
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    As Hanna recognizes, the defender of circumstantial luck can improve the counterfactual schema in various ways so as to try to avoid such counterexamples. But each improvement seems to simply bring a clever new apparent counterexample. Perhaps counterfactuals simply cannot do the job being asked of them.
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit