© 2019 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd © 2019 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 50, Nos. 1–2, January 2019 0026-1068 LUCK AND RISK HOW TO TELL THEM APART JESÚS NAVARRO Abstract: This paper advances new theses about the relationship between luck and risk, using recent work by Duncan Pritchard (2014, 2015, 2016) as its foil. Once Pritchard’s views are introduced in section 1, the rest of the paper com- pletes two different tasks, one critical and one constructive. By focussing on some epistemological cases that Pritchard’s model would fail to identify, section 2 shows that it relies on a difference that is in fact inessential: the one between the occurrence and the non-occurrence of an event. Section 3 sketches and defends an alternative account of the luck/risk distinction, based on the consid- eration of situations (instead of events) from different temporal perspectives: luck assessments track a situation’s past, considering it the actual outcome of some previous event, whereas risk assessments look at the situation’s future, regarding it as the initial condition of some unsettled event. Keywords: luck, risk, modality, epistemology, temporal perspectives. The Modal Account The concepts of luck and risk have gained prominent places in contem- porary philosophical discussions in disciplines like ethics, epistemology, and action theory, but they have done so quite independently of one other, which explains why there is still much light to be shed on the many aspects that connect them, as well as on the precise features that distin- guish them. My focus in this paper is Duncan Pritchard’s related ac- count of both concepts (2014, 2015, 2016). In contrast to other theories available in the field that are formulated in terms of probability or agent’s control, Pritchard’s account of luck and risk is in terms of modality. 1 What matters in a modal approach is the relative easiness of certain pos- sibilities—that is: how close to the actual world would be a possible 1 Risk studies are predominantly based on probabilities, but the situation is less clear with respect to philosophical approaches to luck. For a general classification of current accounts of luck and an excellent introduction to the topic see Broncano-Berrocal 2016.