Synthese (2007) 158:299–302 DOI 10.1007/s11229-006-9040-1 ORIGINAL PAPER Worries about Pritchard’s safety John Greco Published online: 10 October 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006 Abstract I take issue with two claims that Duncan Pritchard makes in his recent book, Epistemic Luck. The first concerns his safety-based response to the lottery problem; the second his account of the relationship between safety and intellectual virtue. Keywords Lottery problem · Luck · Pritchard · Safety · Virtue epistemology 1 Introduction Duncan Pritchard’s (2005) Epistemic Luck is full of important insights and makes a number of contributions that advance the state of the literature. There is so much in the book that is valuable, and so much I agree with, that it seems inappropriate to focus only on points of contention. But that is the nature of the business, and so I move straight away to two objections. The first concerns Pritchard’s claim that his safety condition solves the lottery problem. The second concerns a claim that Pritchard makes about the relation between safety and intellectual virtue. 2 Safety and the lottery problem The lottery problem trades on two stable intuitions. On the one hand, we think that inductive evidence can ground knowledge. On the other hand, we think that a ticket holder does not know that she will lose the lottery, even if the odds of her win- ning are very small. But how could both intuitions be right? How can it be both (1) that we can have knowledge on inductive grounds, but (2) that we don’t know J. Greco (B ) Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, Bronx, NY 10458, USA e-mail: greco@fordham.edu