These are questions impossible to answer without acknowledging what human hubris it is to call one thing accident and another luck in a universe insentient to any of our hopes and fears, to our categories of good and bad. The human mind seems unwilling to wrap itself and its prosthetic of language around the notion of pure impartial probability. We imbue even the word chance with a constellation of subjective meanings—chance as serendipity’s accomplice, chance as free will’s counterpoint, chance as love’s other name or a dog’s only.
