Rationality, Success, and Luck

Acta Analytica 37 (1):57-71 (2021)
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Abstract

Rationality, whatever exactly it demands of us, promotes success, whatever exactly that is. Some philosophers interpret that slogan as something that can provide them with a way of reductively explaining the demands of rationality by appeal to some independently intelligible notion of success: being rational, they might say, is just having whatever property it is that promotes success. Other philosophers may interpret the same slogan as something that can provide them with a way of reductively explaining the notion of success by appeal to some independently intelligible notion of the demands of rationality: having success, they might say, is just having whatever property it is that is promoted by being rational. In this paper, I argue that neither of these reductive efforts can succeed. I then argue that understanding the way in which rationality promotes success requires us to understand why the promotion relation between rationality and success can be severed by some kinds of luck, but not by others. To explain the kind of luck that can sever promotion, we should conceive of both rationality and success as distinct but related facets of something more fundamental than either of them.

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Ram Neta
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Citations of this work

Epistemic Rationality and the Value of Truth.Sophia Dandelet - 2024 - Philosophical Review 133 (4):329-365.

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References found in this work

Why be rational.Niko Kolodny - 2005 - Mind 114 (455):509-563.
Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions.Selim Berker - 2013 - Philosophical Review 122 (3):337-393.
An Epistemic Non-Consequentialism.Kurt L. Sylvan - 2020 - The Philosophical Review 129 (1):1-51.
Consequentialize This.Campbell Brown - 2011 - Ethics 121 (4):749-771.
Rationally determinable conditions.Ram Neta - 2018 - Philosophical Issues 28 (1):289-299.

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