More Lucky Thoughts
As Jencks and Tach note, (hat tip: Reihan) your economic status is robustly correlated with your parent’s economic status. Is it “luck” that members of the middle-class, for example, pass on middle-class virtues of hard work, the importance of investment in human capital, delayed gratification, punctuality, thrift, etc., to their children. No. Not at all.
Am I “lucky” to have been born to a stolidly bourgeouis, civic-minded, church-going police chief and nurse who filled my head with the “protestant ethic”? Simply put: no.
I don’t mean to be thornily metaphysical here, but if I was not the son of James K. and Dorothy A. Wilkinson, then I would not be me. Even more to the point, if the particular germ cells that were party to my conception had been different, that being would not have been “me” with different attributes, it would have been someone else altogether. In this sense we are all “lucky” to exist at all (if existence is a perfection.) But I am not “lucky” to have the genotype that I have. I have it necessarily. That is, my genotype is not a contingent attribute of me. That a being with my genotype exists is contingent. That I exist with this genotype is necessary. The statement “I could have had a different constellation of genes” is ill-formed, not entirely different from “Gold could have had a different atomic weight.” So, insofar as any of us have “good genes,” it is not a matter of “good luck.”
Now, my manifest attributes are not simply a matter of my genes. My developmental environment will have determined how my genetic potential is expressed. So, what Dorothy Wilkinson ate, drank, and so forth while she was carrying me shaped the way I am. Am I “lucky” that mom didn’t smoke? Well, Mom considered it against her religion. Am I “lucky” that Mom was a quasi-Mormon? Um. I don’t know quite what to say here. But the point I’m trying to get at is that Mom did a lot of things vis a vis little me with the EXPRESS INTENTION that it have a particular effect on my welfare and character. That I have a tendency to feel guilty when I’m late for something is in part a INTENDED consequence of my mother’s actions. So, from her perspective, it’s not a matter of luck that I usually show up on time. It’s the way she trained me.
If I meet a guy in a restaurant, and he likes the way I look, and gives me a million a year salary to work for his firm, that’s luck. If I’m damn good speller, that’s because I’ve got a good mind for words, and good training that was intended to make me a good speller, neither of which is is “luck” in any clear sense. (Please enjoy the irony of spelling mistakes herein.) We don’t think it’s good luck that the bridge didn’t fall down when it was designed to stand up. Right?
May 23rd, 2005 17:17
> In this sense we are all “lucky” to exist at all
Think about it. What are the chances your parents would meet, have sex, and conceive you at a time when just the right egg was ready with just the right sperm? And each of your parents had to experience the same luck with their parents, and those parents the same luck with each of their parents, and so on…
If you look at the odds that any one person would exist, they’re infinitesimal. So small, in fact, that they’re essentially negligible.
May 23rd, 2005 19:11
I suspect that Miller is using a definition of luck that is similar to Nagel’s in his work on moral luck. Under that definition, any factors that influence an outcome, but which are not under your direct control, are luck. And there’s something to be said for that definition. While it is certainly true that you are where you are now do to the quite deliberate actions of many people (you, your parents, your teachers, friends, etc.), the fact that you are where you are instead of dead and buried, or in rehab, is also influenced by semi-random factors that are beyond your control, or the control of anyone who’s purposefuly stearing you in a certain direction.
To run with your analogy, consider a bridge built in an area that is highly flood-prone. The bridge was built to stand (and perhaps even to withstand large amounts of fast-moving water), but it is luck that there so far has not been a flood of sufficient strength to knock it over (or that in the last flood, some of the debris that could have knocked it over missed it or was snagged up river). The fact that the bridge is still standing, or that you are where you are today, is contingent on a lot of things, many of which are related to the effort to arrive at that place, but many of which are not.
A thorough account of why certain people are in certain positions would include luck and effort/design. Is it luck that you were born into the family that you were? In a certain sense yes, because it was an extremely improbably event, but in another sense no, because you couldn’t have been born to any other family. Is it luck that your parents, teachers, etc. worked hard to get you where you are? To a certain extent yes, in that events beyond their control could have conceivably made it difficult or impossible for them to do so, but also no, because they were designed to do exactly that.
Perhaps if the word “luck” is so bothersome, you might just call it “contingency,” and recognize that some contingencies are out of the control of you and those who want to build you in a certain way.
May 24th, 2005 04:10
Will,
I’m pretty much with you on the first part of your post. But I do think that it we might be able to say that you were lucky to get *exactly* the genes that you did. I mean, is there not a possible world in which you got the gene for diabetes (assuming that you didn’t)? And, all things equal, aren’t you lucky that the actual world is one in which you didn’t get that gene?
Also, I think I agree with Chris in that you *were* lucky that your mom raised you the way she did. And I don’t think that the fact that she purposefully did so alters that fact.
May 24th, 2005 09:49
You have used so many words to rail against
the mobility thing that I am having trouble
seeing the forest for the trees because of
how tightly your panties are bunched.
Given the amount of breath you’ve used,
I’d expect more there there. I 100% agree
that things like ‘luck’ are just a way of
saying ‘the unexplained variance’ in income
survey data, owing to the fact that economic
data is usually too overaggregated for us to
make any properly informed generalizations
about what happens to each individual in the
stew. This seems like such positively old
news to an ant like me, that I have to wonder
why the ado and fuss. The pundit class is
basically just talking to itself here.
There need not be so much self-congratulation
for reinforcing these ethical memes about
self-reliance, which lie at the heart of the
matter. Yippy skippy. Let’s move on.
May 24th, 2005 09:57
Instead of luck, we’re really talking “meta-luck” - the fortune that creates the opportunity for luck to exist.
May 24th, 2005 10:46
Nah, I think the point from the outset cross applies. Had someone with exactly Will’s genome (otherwise) grown up with diabetes, or very different parents, I don’t know how much sense it would make to call that person “Will.” (Any more than we’d call Will’s twin, raised separately, “Will.” Unless that’s what the folks who raised him decided to call him, which would get confusing.)
May 24th, 2005 13:38
I can accept the idea that it doesn’t make sense to think that Will “got lucky” for having been born with his particular set of endowments. But does that really negate the truth of the statement that “Will is lucky” in the sense that who he is includes this set of endowments that are more advantageous than average? That is, there can’t be an unlucky Will Wilkinson, so it may be a mistake to refer to his endowments as a lucky break he *received*, but doesn’t that way of conceptualizing things just shift the luckiness to being an essential part of him?
None of which necessarily matters in terms of moral consequences. I’m just sayin’.
(Speaking of which, I finally got around to reading Schmidtz’ ‘How To Deserve’ the other day. Neat stuff.)
May 24th, 2005 14:06
Hang on, Julian. I feel like I must be missing something subtle about your comment. Because it seems to me that you’re saying that the property of not having diabetes is an essential property of Will’s. And so, there is no possible world in which Will has diabetes.
That’s not what you’re saying, right?
May 24th, 2005 14:29
Luka, This all depends on one’s modal metaphysics. According to Lewis, there is a possible world in which I am a pile of slime. I’m sticking to a Kripkean rigid-designation view that entails the essentiality of origins. Not having diabetes is probably not an essential property of mine, since given my family history, it is very likely that I would have it if I gained a lot of weight. There is a possible world in which (a rigidly designated) Will Wilkinson is fat. But not having a particular gene that I do not have is likely essential. There is no possible world in which (a rigidly designated) Will Wilkinson has different genes.
May 24th, 2005 15:41
What about the somewhat pedestrian “law of unintended consequences”, and the secondary, tertiary, ad infinitum effects it figures? Because society is so drenched in interconnections, even the smallest act performed with the goal of producing some intentional effect will, through the effect it actually has, prime and alter the reflexivities and instincts of the person effected. In this way, my mother’s rearing of me produced certain habits of thought, but the manner in which these habits of thought impact the lives of others via my actions was wholly unpredictable to her. She may have expected them to be “good” and “noble”, but their particular character was unknown. Thus her rearing reverberates throughout the social web whenever I answer a telephone or check out of the grocery store or make a friend, in turn impacting others in unpredictable and unmeasured ways. These fluxes are huge and active all around us, and where we find ourselves within their intersecting paths is, insofar as we have no control or even means of control over them, “luck”. What if these are the predominant forces which shape our lives, and those whose lives shape our own, in infinite regress to Adam and Eve? (joke)
May 24th, 2005 15:54
Will,
Yeah, I’m sticking to the Kripkean rigid-designation view as well. I don’t think there’s a possible world in which either of us is a pile of slime.
But it definitely seems as though there is a possible world in which my genetic makeup is slightly different. Taking away or adding on the gene for diabetes seems to me to be very much like taking away or adding on a left arm. There are definitely possible worlds in which you, Will, have no left arm. Why aren’t there any non-actual possible worlds in which you do (or don’t) have the gene for diabetes?
Maybe I should just read more Kripke…
May 24th, 2005 16:43
Ann Richards once said of the first President Bush “He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”
Most people understand the concept of the “lucky sperm” without the benefits of a Philosophy degree.
A+ in navel-gazing to all the above posters!
May 24th, 2005 16:55
The concept of “essentiality of origins” seems a bit arbitrary. Where do you draw the delimiting line around the “origin” of anything? The “moment” of conception, which is more an interval than a moment? The embryo is under a constant molecular assault (from its environment) that shapes its development, requiring certain nutrient inputs and such, just as the birthed child experiences a continuous stream of external stimuli which results in constant incremental metamorphoses.
So let’s say the universe splits at the moment you lose your left arm. The following day, are the two one-armed Will Wilkinsons substantially the same person? Sure (despite a reasonable allowance for moodiness on the part of the one-armed Will). Your instincts and habits of thought and self-image are largely the same. Given a piece of scholarly literature, the two Wills will probably analyze it similarly. Get a call from a telemarketer, and the two Wills will probably dismiss her with the same off-color rankledness. Twenty years later? I would venture a ‘no’, simply because the accumulated drift of the two acceleratingly different lifestyles would mold your personality down two distinctly different paths, even though both Wills would possess the same name.
And assuming you didn’t chop off your own arm (nor blithely walk into a powered chainsaw, for there is a fine line between bad luck and recklessness/stupidity) you would have expereinced “bad luck”, and the consequences of this one moment and the random chaotic reverberations it both generates in your personality and attracts from other people would continue to shape you in ways beyond your control.
May 24th, 2005 23:49
Dorky Science Note:
The same element can have different atomic weights. It’s atomic numbers that differ one element from another. Gold may have different atomic weights but not different atomic numbers.
I have nothing substantive to add to the philosophy here.
- Josh
May 25th, 2005 01:19
“So, from her perspective, it’s not a matter of luck that I usually show up on time. It’s the way she trained me.
If I meet a guy in a restaurant, and he likes the way I look, and gives me a million a year salary to work for his firm, that’s luck. ”
Why? From the guy in the restaurant’s persepctive, it is not a matter of luck: he likes the way you look. (Are you going to tell him you look good only because of your “lucky” genes?) What’s doing the work here? That you accidently meet someone? That the person acts arbitrarily? Is it some notion of desert? Or that somehow your mother is very connected with you in a way a stranger is not?
May 25th, 2005 02:04
But you know full well that Rawls, Dworkin and others who are talking about “luck” and “desert” in justifying redistributionary schemes are using luck in such a way that you certainly are lucky that your mother intentionally caused certain attributes to inhere in you. Because you weren’t self-causing, it is a non-tautological statement to say, “You are lucky to be you,” when using luck in the Rawlsian sense. In principle, the refutation would involve arguing that you deserve to be you.
Which is to say, who are you arguing against here?
May 25th, 2005 17:55
The more I think about this the more I disagree with you Will. It seems to me that there is a clear and intuitive notion of luck that applies in the situations that you think it doesn’t. That is, we are lucky to have whatever natural abilities that we have. We are lucky, in some sense, to have anything good happen to us that we did not explicitly pursue (or something like that).
May 27th, 2005 15:38
Just to pile on a bit, your argument, if it is one, is really for fatalism, not for a classically liberal concept of justice. Was Richard II “lucky” to be born heir to the English throne? If he hadn’t been heir to the English throne, he wouldn’t have been Richard II. He wouldn’t even have been Prince Richard-who-if-he-survives-his-male-relatives-with-a-closer-link-in-accordance-with-the-rules-of-primogeniture-will-be-King. And there is no other kind of Prince Richard he could be.
Similarly, Baldrick-the-toothless-serf wasn’t “unlucky” to be born attached to the land and forced to work for a snotty Norman aristocrat because if he hadn’t been born a serf, he wouldn’t have been Baldrick.
But Kripke isn’t going to justify this situation. You are going to need Karma or Jehovah to help out. Because it still could be unjust that anyone is a king or a serf, even if the people in the kingless, serfless utopia would, in a real sense, be different people from the actual people of feudal England.
May 28th, 2005 00:21
>Am I “lucky” to have been born to a stolidly >bourgeouis, civic-minded, church-going police >chief and nurse who filled my head with the >”protestant ethic”? Simply put: no. I don’t mean >to be thornily metaphysical here, but if I was >not the son of James K. and Dorothy A. Wilkinson, >then I would not be me.
Then, simply put, you are lucky to have been born at all. Assuming you like being alive (and since your goal in life is to be happy, I’ll assume you do), you are lucky to be alive. Your structure of logic seems to depend upon the claim that person W cannot be lucky for having quality Y because without Y, W would not exist as W. I think that makes sense on some level. But can’t the one thing we actually say about X is that it is lucky to have to have the quality of existence of existence? (Perhaps you side with Kant in saying being is not a predicate?)
May 29th, 2005 09:11
On the thornily metaphysical point, I think Will’s right, but
(a) a lot of people (and conservatives in particular) can’t consistently agree; and
(b) in any event, it’s largely irrelevant.
The argument that Will would not be Will were he not the son of James and Dorothy, requires us to reject any dualism between the soul and body: if we accepted this distinction, then we could easily claim that Will’s soul was lucky to have been born as the son of J&D, and with the associated benefits thereof. Now, personally, I do reject the dualistic view, but there are a lot of religious people out there who don’t, and for whom Will’s argument should consequently hold no water.
Moreover, even if one thinks (as I do) that Will is right, I don’t think it much matters. To my mind, the argument from luck operates in much the same way as Rawls’ argument from the original position: it’s intended (or at least it works better) as a thought experiment to draw out our moral intuitions, rather than as a tight analytical argument. Original-position-plus-veil-of-ignorance is basically identical to dualism-plus-the-irrelevance-of-luck. And just as it’s no argument against Rawls that there’s no such thing as the original position, similarly, it’s no argument against those who advocate the irrelevance of luck that we’re not actually dualistic beings. That’s just not (or at least needn’t be) the point.