Agency, Luck, and Tragedy

Philosophy and Literature 46 (1):68-85 (2022)
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Abstract

Abstract:The term "tragedy" is widely misused in common parlance to designate any disastrous occurrence of great magnitude. If this practice is to be resisted and reformed, an alternative account of real-life tragedy must be sustained. I attempt to offer one that is grounded in the connections between agency and luck. More specifically, I argue that in a universe lacking any supernatural power of fate, real-life tragedy occurs when the exercise of agency results, through a confluence of constitutive and circumstantial bad luck, in the suffering and the destruction of the agent.

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10.1353/phl.2022.0004

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Charles O. Nussbaum
University of Texas at Arlington

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