Oscar A. Piedrahita

About
I’m a PhD candidate and Fulbright scholar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. Before that, I did my MA in Philosophy at Univerdad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and before that I received a BA in Philosophy from the Universidad de Antioquia (Medellín, Colombia). 

I work mostly on epistemology and issues at the intersection of epistemology and moral responsibility. Here’s my CV

Dissertation

Committee: Duncan Pritchard (chair), Sven Bernecker, Aaron James, Dana Nelkin (UCSD)

As Luck Would Have It: Luck, Ignorance, and Moral Responsibility

Does luck lead to ignorance? According to mainstream views, either ignorance is lack of knowledge and epistemic luck always leads to ignorance, or ignorance is lack of true belief, and never does. As this dissertation shows, however, the views above are vulnerable to compelling counterexamples which show that luck only sometimes leads to ignorance. This opens the door to develop a more nuanced view of ignorance in terms of epistemic access to the world, irreducible to either knowledge or true belief. Is luck incompatible with moral responsibility? Philosophers who see a tension between the fairness of morality and luck have assumed that luck is lack of control. But by understanding luck modally (as what happens and yet could have easily not happened), we can not only dissolve the tension between luck and the fairness of morality, but also develop a new solution to the moral luck problem: the effects of luck on our actions don’t undermine our ascriptions of moral responsibility.

Publications

In Progress (available upon request)

Selected presentations

Peer Reviewed

Invited

Contact
Email: piedraho@uci.edu
Office: HIB 72

University of California, Irvine
Department of Philosophy
85 Humanities Instructional Building
Irvine, CA 92697–4555