Hard luck How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility

The concept of luck has played an important role in debates concerning free will and moral responsibility, yet participants in these debates have relied upon an intuitive notion of what luck is. Neil Levy develops an account of luck, which is then applied to the free will debate. He argues that the standard luck objection succeeds against common accounts of libertarian free will, but that it is possible to amend libertarian accounts so that they are no more vulnerable to luck than is compatibilism. But compatibilist accounts of luck are themselves vulnerable to a powerful luck objection: historical compatibilisms cannot satisfactorily explain how agents can take responsibility for their constitutive luck

Preface and Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction. 2. An Account of Luck. 3. Luck and Libertarianism. 4. The Luck Problem for Compatibilists. 5. The Epistemic Dimensions of Control. 6. Akratic Freedom?. 7. The Retreat to the Inner Citadel. 8. Quality Of Will Theories And History-Insensitive Compatibilism. Bibliography. Index.

Neil Levy is Head of Neuroethics at the Florey Neuroscience Institutes and Director of Research at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. He is the author of five previous books and many articles, on a wide range of topics including applied ethics, free will and moral responsibility, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of mind. He divides his time between Melbourne, Australia, and Oxford, England.