Succeeding competently: towards an anti-luck condition for achievement

Abstract

Achievements are among the things that make a life good. Assessing the plausibility of this intuitive claim requires an account of the nature of achievements. One necessary condition for achievement appears to be that the achieving agent acted competently, i.e. was not just lucky. I begin by critically assessing existing accounts of anti-luck conditions for achievements in both the ethics and epistemology literature. My own proposal is that a goal is reached competently (and thus an achievement), only if the actions of the would-be-achiever make success likely, and that this is the reason why she acts that way.

Achievement and Enhancement

“…To defend the claim that enhancement undermines achievement, then, the AEA proponent will need to rely on another version of their argument. Although there is no consensus that effort and difficulty are essential to achievement, there is agreement that among achievement's essential features is competent causation (Bradford 2015;Hirji 2019, 527, 528, 543;Hurka 2011;von Kriegstein 2019a;2019b). The proponent of the AEA might consequently be on stronger ground arguing that the reason that enhancement threatens achievement is that it undermines competent causation.…”

Moral Luck and Control

“…Hasko von Kriegstein (Von Kriegstein ) pushes for a probabilistic reading of control, insisting that one can distinguish achievement from lucky success only if the actions one takes make one's success likely. The antithesis of a lucky result is one that is made likely by intentional action; the greater control an agent has over some result, the more probable that result becomes, and the less it is due to chance.…”

“…Jon Williamson writes, “Causal relationships are typically accompanied by probabilistic dependencies—normally when A causes B the former raises or lowers the probability of the latter” (Williamson , 185). Von Kriegstein confirms, “Causing an event is either constituted or closely accompanied by making that event likely” (Von Kriegstein ). Michael Tooley agrees that causation is “related to increase in probability” (Tooley , 417), and Wesley Salmon observes that “probabilistic causal concepts are used in innumerable contexts of everyday life and science” (Salmon ).…”