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If all our actions are shaped by luck, are we still agents?

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https://aeon.co/ideas/if-all-our-actions...ill-agents

EXCERPT (Jake Wojtowicz): . . . The problem with luck isn’t just that it can affect what we do in minor or unimportant ways (though it does this, too); the problem is that it can also affect our actions in life-altering ways. [...] But should we be unsettled? An alternative position could hold that what we do – or what matters in what we do – just is what we control, and the rest is simply stuff that happens in the world. We could regret these things as bad events in the world, but we couldn’t feel agent-regret about the factors beyond our control because they are not part of our agency at all.

The trouble with this position is that so much of what we do seems to depend upon things that we do not control. To raise your arm, you need your body to cooperate; to throw a stone a few metres, you need to avoid a gust of wind. Such an approach inevitably restricts our agency to a sparse domain. Perhaps all that matters when it comes to agency is what we will. [...] If agency is restricted to what we sincerely try to do, then the vicissitudes of luck lose their edge. For the unlucky driver who runs down a child, the fact that his conduct was unimpeachable can be a relief and it can set him apart from those who were malicious or reckless. No doubt sometimes we need to take solace here, and we should recognise that a good tree can bear bad fruits.

But this solace comes at a cost. Benard Williams thought that, were we to insulate agency from luck altogether, agency would be a ‘superficial’ concept. [...] If we think that our impact on the world is an important part of agency, it seems that we must accept that we can act on the world even though the impact we make is partly out of our control. We must accept that what we do depends on luck. As Williams put it: ‘One’s history as an agent is a web in which anything that is the product of the will is surrounded and held up and partly formed by things that are not …’

[...] We can make a mark on the world and sometimes that mark can be a spectacular one. From a work of art to a strike on the football pitch, from the things we write to the meals we make, these things don’t just happen: we have to seek them out and use our skills to bring them about. And they are our actions – marks we make on the world as agents.

Without accepting that we might fail, that we might end up regretting what we have done, we wouldn’t be able to achieve any of these things. There is something richer and more uplifting in recognising this, rather than living our lives in the secure but impotent realm where trying is all that matters. (MORE - details)
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