Nothing can kill a promising research program in ethics more quickly than a plausible argument to the effect that it is committed to a morally repellent consequence. It is especially troubling when a theory one favors is jeopardized in this way. I have this worry about Harry Frankfurt's theory of free will, autonomous agency and moral responsibility, for there is a very plausible argument to the effect that aspects of his view commit him to a version of the late Stoic (...) thesis that acting freely is a matter of ‘making do,’ that is, of bringing oneself to be motivated to act in accordance with the feasible, so that personal liberation can be achieved by resigning and adapting oneself to necessity. In this paper I try to determine whether the theory does in fact commit Frankfurt (and adherents like me) to this result and, if so, what can be done to prevent it. (shrink)

Two principles regarding agents' specific ability are proposed. The first claims that ordinary agents always lack the ability to do otherwise in the past, while the second principle observes that it is at least possible for some agent to have the ability to perform some action in the past. These two principles further give rise to three desiderata for a true account of ability. Two accounts of ability in the literature—the conditional analysis and the dispositional account—are then examined but they (...) both fail to meet the desiderata simultaneously. A modal principle of ability is motivated at the end. (shrink)

John Fischer has attacked the Ockhamistic solution to the freedom–foreknowledge dilemma by arguing that: (1) God's prior beliefs about the future, though being soft facts about the past, are soft facts of a special sort, what he calls ‘hard-type soft facts’, i.e. soft facts, the constitutive properties of which are ‘hard’, or ‘temporally non-relational properties’; (2) in this respect, such facts are like regular past facts which are subject to the fixity of the past. In this paper, I take issue (...) with this argument by Fischer, claiming that it does not succeed for two reasons: (i) Fischer's account of the notion of a hard property is unsatisfactory; (ii) his notion of a hard-type soft fact is incoherent. Despite this criticism, I agree with Fischer that there is a fundamental difference between God's beliefs about the future and regular soft facts with regard to their fixity-status, but I argue that the reason for this difference is that God's forebeliefs are plain hard facts about the past. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore an alternative to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities for Moral Responsibility—the Ceteris Paribus Principle of Alternative Possibilities for Moral Responsibility. I consider motivations for this principle and answer some objections to it.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I shall explore the relationship between the control required for action and the control required for moral responsibility. I shall argue that there is an incongruity between Frankfurt’s account of guidance control presented in his theory of action and his commitment to the claim that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility. This inconsistency centres around the role of abilities to do otherwise in our analyses of action and moral responsibility. After outlining the problem for (...) Frankfurt, I shall then motivate one way of resolving this tension. This solution provides a unified role for abilities to do otherwise in our analyses of control. (shrink)

This is a paper about time travel and what it teaches us about freedom. I argue that cases of time travel bring out an important difference between two ways of thinking about “the past”—either in terms of time itself, or in terms of causation. This ambiguity naturally transfers over to our talk about things like fixity, determinism, and incompatibilism. Moreover, certain cases of time travel suggest that our freedom is not constrained by the temporal past _per se_, but by our (...) own causal histories. This, in turn, raises a number of interesting questions about the formulation of incompatibilism and the broader debate over freedom. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 66-77, January 2022.

The idea that some of God's past beliefs depend on our future actions has a long history, going back to Origen in the third century CE. However, it is not always clear what this idea amounts to, since it is not always clear what kind of dependence is at issue. This paper surveys five different interpretations of dependence and, in each case, considers the implications for the debate over theological fatalism. Along the way, we discuss a number of related issues, (...) including the nature of explanation, the scope of metaphysical grounding, and the possibility of backward causation. (shrink)

The traditional debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists was based on the assumption that if determinism deprives us of free will and moral responsibility, it does so by making it true that we can never do other than what we actually do. All parties to the debate took for granted the truth of a claim now widely known as "the principle of alternate possibilities": someone is morally responsible only if he could have done otherwise. In a famous paper, Harry Frankfurt argued (...) that the principle of alternate possibilities is false. I argue that Frankfurt's argument rests on a modal fallacy. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with acting freely and being morally responsible. Incompatibilism is the opposite view. It is often claimed that compatibilism or incompatibilism is a natural part of ordinary social cognition. That is, it is often claimed that patterns in our everyday social judgments reveal an implicit commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibilism. This paper reports five experiments designed to identify such patterns. The results support a nuanced hybrid account: The central tendencies in ordinary social (...) cognition are compatibilism about moral responsibility, compatibilism about positive moral accountability, neither compatibilism nor incompatibilism about negative moral accountability, compatibilism about choice for actions with positive outcomes, and incompatibilism about choice for actions with negative or neutral outcomes. (shrink)

A style of argument that calls into question our freedom (in the sense that involves freedom to do otherwise) has been around for millennia; it can be traced back to Origen. The argument-form makes use of the crucial idea that the past is over-and-done-with and thus fixed; we cannot now do anything about the distant past (or, for that matter, the recent past)—it is now too late. Peter van Inwagen has presented this argument (what he calls the Consequence Argument) in (...) perhaps its clearest and most forceful way, but debate over the argument has arguably reached a stalemate. -/- Recently, however, Wes Holliday has attempted to break this seeming stalemate by presenting a new argument for the Principle of the Fixity of the Past. Holliday’s argument is subtle and ingenious, and worthy of serious consideration, especially given the promise it holds for genuinely advancing this old debate. In what follows, however, we argue that despite its considerable ingenuity, Holliday’s argument fails to convince, and the stalemate appears to remain. (shrink)

At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...) that, looking backwards, it was the case that there would be a sea battle? This tension forms, in large part, what might be called the problem of future contingents. A dominant trend in temporal logic and semantic theorizing about future contingents seeks to validate both intuitions. Theorists in this tradition--including some interpretations of Aristotle, but paradigmatically, Thomason (1970), as well as more recent developments in Belnap, et. al (2001) and MacFarlane (2003, 2014)--have argued that the apparent tension between the intuitions is in fact merely apparent. In short, such theorists seek to maintain both of the following two theses: (i) the open future: Future contingents are not true, and (ii) retro-closure: From the fact that something is true, it follows that it was the case that it would be true. It is well-known that reflection on the problem of future contingents has in many ways been inspired by importantly parallel issues regarding divine foreknowledge and indeterminism. In this paper, we take up this perspective, and ask what accepting both the open future and retro-closure predicts about omniscience. When we theorize about a perfect knower, we are theorizing about what an ideal agent ought to believe. Our contention is that there isn’t an acceptable view of ideally rational belief given the assumptions of the open future and retro-closure, and thus this casts doubt on the conjunction of those assumptions. (shrink)

Most libertarians think that some version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) is true. A number of libertarians, which I call ‘Frankfurt-libertarians,’ think that they need not embrace any version of PAP. In this paper, I examine the writings of one such Frankfurt-libertarian, Eleonore Stump, for her evaluation of the impact of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP. I show how, contrary to her own claims, Stump does need a PAP-like principle for her account of free action. I briefly argue (...) that this discussion also goes some distance to showing that any Frankfurt-libertarian is in a similar position regarding the need for some PAP-like principle. If I am correct, then Frankfurt-libertarians must either renounce their incompatibilism or concede that FSCs fail to show all PAP-like principles to be false. (shrink)

In response to the increasingly popular manipulation argument against compatibilism, some have argued that libertarian accounts of free will are vulnerable to parallel manipulation arguments, and thus manipulation is not uniquely problematic for compatibilists. The main aim of this article is to give this point a more detailed development than it has previously received. Prior attempts to make this point have targeted particular libertarian accounts but cannot be generalized. By contrast, I provide an appropriately modified manipulation that targets all libertarian (...) accounts of freedom and responsibility—an especially tricky task given that libertarian accounts are a motley set. I conclude that if manipulation arguments reveal any theoretical cost then it is one borne by all accounts according to which we are free and responsible, not by compatibilism in particular. (shrink)

Many philosophers take mental causation to be required for free will. But it has also been argued that the most popular view of the nature of mental states, i.e. non-reductive physicalism, excludes the existence of mental causation, due to what is known as the ‘exclusion argument’. In this paper, I discuss the difference-making account of mental causation proposed by [List, C., and Menzies, P. 2017. “My Brain Made Me Do It: The Exclusion Argument Against Free Will, and What’s Wrong with (...) It.” In H. Beebee, C. Hitchcock, & H. Price (eds.), Making a Difference: Essays on the Philosophy of Causation. Oxford Scholarship Online: Oxford University Press], who argue that their account not only solves the problem of causal exclusion but also saves free will. More precisely, they argue that it rebuts what they call ‘the Neurosceptical Argument’, the argument that if actions are caused by neural states and processes unavailable to us, there is no free will. I argue that their argument fails for two independent reasons. The first reason is that they fail to show that difference-makers are independent causes. The second reason is that physical realizers of mental states can be individuated in a way that makes both mental states and their realizers difference-makers. (shrink)

Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) have famously served as counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). The fine-grained version of the flicker defense has become one of the most popular responses to FSCs. Proponents of this defense argue that there is an alternative available to all agents in FSCs such that the cases do not show that PAP is false. Specifically, the agents could have done otherwise than decide on their own, and this available alternative is robust enough to ground moral (...) responsibility. In this paper, I argue that, when relying on definitions of ‘on one’s own’ within the literature on FSCs, a case can be constructed in which the agent could not have done otherwise than make a decision on his own. Insofar as this new case is successful, it will be able to avoid arguments about robustness while showing that moral responsibility does not require alternative possibilities of the type argued for by proponents of the fine-grained version of the flicker defense. (shrink)

This paper considers the analogies and disanalogies between a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about free will and a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about the external world. In the case of free will, I offer the ancient Lazy Argument and an argument of my own, which I call the Agency Argument, as examples of the relevant genre; and in the case of the external world, I consider Moore’s alleged proof of an external world. (...) I draw attention to analogies and disanalogies between the arguments offered in each case in order to suggest that although the Agency Argument shares with its Moorean relative the unfortunate property of being dialectically ineffective against some of those it is mainly hoping to convince, it will not be dialectically ineffective against all of them. It is also argued that the Agency Argument is less vulnerable than Moore’s proof to worries about its justificatory structure. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that having ‘leeway’ is part and parcel of what it is to be the agential source of an action, so that embracing source incompatibilism does not, by itself, absolve the incompatibilist of the need to find Frankfurtian agents to be possessors of alternate possibilities. I offer a response to Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, based on the idea that Frankfurt's Jones exercises the two-way power of agency when he acts – a (...) power whose exercise intrinsically implies the possibility of having done otherwise. I then show how to respond to the objection that the alternative possibility noted is not sufficiently ‘robust’ to ground his moral responsibility. I also distinguish my own argument for the claim that source incompatibilism is not truly independent of leeway incompatibilism from an argument for the same conclusion which has been offered previously by Kevin Timpe, and suggest that my own version has the dialectical advantage that it does not automatically assume from the outset that sourcehood requires indeterminism, and hence is in line with the traditional idea that the alternate possibilities requirement on moral responsibility is the common property of compatibilists and incompatibilists alike. (shrink)

This paper argues for the replacement of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by an alternative principle, the Principle of Possible Non-Performance, which it is argued represents an important improvement on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities in the context of Frankfurt-style examples. The suggestion that the principle offers only the possibility of something insufficiently 'robust' to supply a decent replacement to PAP is countered.

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this introductory study I discuss the notion of alternative possibilities and its relation to contemporary debates on free will and moral responsibility. I focus on two issues: whether Frankfurt-style cases refute the principle of alternative possibilities, and whether alternative possibilities are relevant to grounding free will and moral responsibility. With respect to the first issue, I consider three objections to Frankfurt-syle cases: the flicker strategy, the dilemma defense, and the objection from new dispositionalism. With respect to the second issue, (...) I consider the debate between Alternative Possibilities views and Actual Sequence views, as framed by Carolina Sartorio in her Causation and Free Will. I then explain how these two issues are relevant to the papers included in this volume. (shrink)

Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will and responsibility. Across three studies (N = 1,516) we found that (...) people with a greater sense of personal control were more surprised at the results of experiments showing effects of unconscious priming on moral behavior. Surprise differentially mediated the relationship between personal control and attributions of free will and responsibility: people attributed less free will and more responsibility as they were more surprised. This suggests that people exhibit defensive thinking with respect to responsibility, but not free will. (shrink)

According to the most popular versions of the flicker defense, Frankfurt-style cases fail to undermine the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) because agents in these cases are (directly) morally responsible not for making the decisions they make but for making these decisions on their own, which is something they could have avoided doing. Frankfurt defenders have primarily focused on trying to show that the alternative possibility of refraining from making the relevant decisions on their own is not a robust alternative, (...) while generally granting that this alternative cannot easily be eliminated from successful cases of this sort. In a recent issue of this journal, Stockdale (2022) attempts to sidestep the debate concerning robustness and develops a novel kind of Frankfurt-style case in which agents are unable to avoid making the relevant decisions on their own. The fundamental problem with Stockdale’s argument is that it hinges on an implausible conception of acting on one’s own. I help clarify the pertinent sense of what it means to do a thing on one’s own in this context and show that these new cases are unable to overcome the targeted versions of the flicker defense of PAP. (shrink)

One way to defend the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) against Frankfurt‐style cases is to challenge the claim that agents in these scenarios are genuinely morally responsible for what they do. Alternatively, one can grant that agents are morally responsible for what they do in these cases but resist the idea that they could not have done otherwise. This latter strategy is known as the flicker defense of PAP. In an argument he calls the W‐Defense, David Widerker adopts the former (...) approach. I argue that, while Widerker's argument does a poor job showing that these agents are not morally responsible for what they do, it does a very good job highlighting the alternative possibilities that remain open to agents in these cases and illustrating their moral significance (or robustness). In doing so, my aim is to co‐opt Widerker's argument to bolster the most promising versions of the flicker defense. (shrink)

Uma forte objeção a uma estratégia compatibilista da responsabilidade moral — isto é, à tese de que responsabilidade é compatível com uma explicação causal determinista do mundo — diz que, ao defender a possibilidade de agentes responsáveis determinados causalmente por fatos prévios às suas ações, uma estratégia compatibilista não dispõe dos recursos conceituais necessários para refutar a tese intuitiva de que agentes manipulados tacitamente não são responsáveis por suas ações. Neste artigo, fornecemos uma resposta a esta objeção, sugerindo como uma (...) estratégia semicompatibilista, que apela para a relevância da história causal da formação de estados mentais componentes de deliberações, pode acomodar várias de nossas intuições acerca de casos de manipulação em que estamos dispostos a negar que os agentes em questão sejam responsáveis. Por outro lado, tentaremos também mostrar que, segundo tal estratégia semicompatibilista, certos processos de manipulação tácita revelam casos em que podemos genuinamente atribuir responsabilidade a agentes, a despeito de haver um componente “manipulador” na explicação das suas ações. Por fim, consideraremos a aplicabilidade da estratégia semicompatibilista a um caso específico, discutido na literatura bioética, sobre manipulação genética de traços componentes do perfil de um agente.A strong objection to a compatibilist strategy on moral responsibility — i.e., to the thesis according to whichresponsibility is compatible with a causal deterministic explanation of the world — says that, insofar as acompatibilist strategy claims that agents could be made responsible in spite of the fact that they are causallydetermined by previous facts to their actions, it lacks conceptual resources to reject the intuitive view that covertlymanipulated agents are not responsible for their actions. We provide here a response to this objection by suggestingthat a semicompatibilist strategy, which resorts to the relevance of the causal history in the formation of the mentalstates which deliberations are composed of, can accommodate many of our intuitions about cases of manipulationand about which we are tempted to deny that the agents in question are responsible. On the other hand, we shall try toshow that, as a consequence of the semicompatibilist strategy, there might be some manipulation processesin respect of which we could genuinely ascribe responsibility to agents, regardless of there being a manipulatingcomponent in the explanation of their actions. Lastly, we shall consider the applicability in practice of thesemicompatibilist strategy, and discuss a case mentioned in the literature on bioethics about genetic manipulation ofhuman traits which are constitutive of an agent’s profile. (shrink)

Humeans about laws maintain that laws of nature are nothing over and above the complete distribution of non-modal, categorical properties in spacetime. ‘Humean compatibilists’ argue that if Humeanism about laws is true, then agents in a deterministic world can do otherwise than they are lawfully determined to do because of the distinctive nature of Humean laws. More specifically, they reject a central premise of the Consequence argument by maintaining that deterministic laws of nature are ‘up to us’. In this paper, (...) we present a new argument for Humean compatibilism. We argue that Humeans about laws indeed have resources for defending compatibilism that non-Humeans lack. Moreover, we show that utilizing these resources does not lead to objectionable consequences. Humeans about laws should thus embrace Humean compatibilism. (shrink)

Some incompatibilists about free will or moral responsibility and determinism would abandon their incompatibilism were they to learn that determinism is true. But is it reasonable to flip-flop in this way? In this article, we contend that it is and show what follows. The result is both a defense of a particular incompatibilist strategy and a general framework for assessing other cases of flip-flopping.

Newcomb’s problem involves a decision-maker faced with a choice and a predictor forecasting this choice. The agents’ interaction seems to generate a choice dilemma once the decision-maker seeks to apply two basic principles of rational choice theory : maximize expected utility ; adopt the dominant strategy. We review unsuccessful attempts at pacifying the dilemma by excluding Newcomb’s problem as an RCT-application, by restricting MEU and ADS, and by allowing for backward causation. A probability approach shows that Newcomb’s original problem-formulation lacks (...) causal information. This makes it impossible to specify the probability structure of Newcomb’s univocally. Once missing information is added, Newcomb’s problem and RCT re-align, thus explaining Newcomb’s problem as a seeming dilemma. Building on Wolpert and Benford :1637–1646, 2013), we supply additional details and offer a crucial correction to their formal proof. (shrink)

Intuitively, the future is open and the past fixed: there is something we can do about the future but not the past. Some metaphysicians believe that a proper metaphysics of time must vindicate this intuition. Whereas philosophers have focused on the future and the past, the status of the present remains relatively unexplored. Drawing on resources from action theory, I argue that there is something we can do about the present just like there is something we can do about the (...) future. Hence, a proper metaphysics of the open future should allow for an open present as well. I argue that none of the major metaphysics of the open future currently available can accommodate an open present adequately. Finally, I’ll show that, surprisingly, the shrinking block metaphysics can. (shrink)

In some vicarious cases of compensation, an agent seems obligated to compensate for a harm they did not inflict. This raises the problem that obligations for compensation may arise out of circumstantial luck. That is, an agent may owe compensation for a harm that was outside their control. Addressing this issue, I identify five conditions for compensation from the literature: causal engagement, proxy, ill-gotten gains, constitution, and affiliation. I argue that only two of them specify genuine and irreducible grounds for (...) compensation, and that factors determining the agent’s obligations may be beyond their control. However, I suggest that this is unproblematic. There is thus no problem of circumstantial moral luck for compensation. (shrink)

When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motivate a related (...) but importantly different answer: What is required for fitting guilt and indignation is that the agent is relevantly implicated in that outcome: that the agent’s morally substandard responsiveness to reasons, or substandard caring, is relevantly involved in a normal explanation of it. This answer, it is further argued, makes sense because when an agent’s substandard caring is so involved, the outcome provides a lesson against such caring, a lesson central to the function of guilt and indignation. (shrink)

Recently, several authors have utilized the notion of dependence to respond to the traditional argument for the incompatibility of freedom and divine foreknowledge. However, proponents of this response have not always been so clear in specifying where the incompatibility argument goes wrong, which has led to some unfounded objections to the response. We remedy this dialectical confusion by clarifying both the dependence response itself and its interaction with the standard incompatibility argument. Once these clarifications are made, it becomes clear both (...) (1.) that the dependence response does not beg the question against the proponent of the incompatibility argument and (2.) that the dependence response advances the dialectic whether it is developed as a version of Ockhamism or as a version of multiple-pasts compatibilism. (shrink)

In response to the increasingly popular manipulation argument against compatibilism, some have argued that libertarian accounts of free will are vulnerable to parallel manipulation arguments, and thus manipulation is not uniquely problematic for compatibilists. The main aim of this article is to give this point a more detailed development than it has previously received. Prior attempts to make this point have targeted particular libertarian accounts but cannot be generalized. By contrast, I provide an appropriately modified manipulation that targets all libertarian (...) accounts of freedom and responsibility—an especially tricky task given that libertarian accounts are a motley set. I conclude that if manipulation arguments reveal any theoretical cost then it is one borne by all accounts according to which we are free and responsible, not by compatibilism in particular. (shrink)

It is widely thought that Atemporalism—the view that, because God is “outside” of time, he does not foreknow anything —constitutes a unique solution to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge. However, as I argue here, in order for Atemporalism to escape certain worries, the view must appeal to the dependence of God’s timeless knowledge on our actions. I then argue that, because it must appeal to such dependence, Atemporalism is crucially similar to the recent sempiternalist accounts proposed by Trenton Merricks, (...) Philip Swenson, and Jonathan Westphal, and I conclude by briefly sketching some implications of this result. (shrink)

Strawsonians about moral responsibility often claim that our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, rather than the other way round. Many have argued that such ‘reversal’ claims have an unwelcome consequence: If our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, does this not imply, absurdly, that if we held severely mentally ill people responsible, they would be responsible? We provide a new Strawsonian answer to this question, and we explore the relation (...) between reversal claims and (in)compatibilism. (shrink)

The classical problem of free will is one instance of the Integration Challenge. The Integration Challenge in its general form is that of reconciling our metaphysics of any given area with our epistemology for that same area. In the case of free will, the challenge is that of reconciling our seeming first-person knowledge of our exercise of free thought, deliberation, choice and action with a description of what is really going on in the world as characterized in terms of causation, (...) determination, explanation and causal possibility. (shrink)

L’analyse de la conception commune de la liberté produit deux « critères minimaux » : 1) L’autonomie distingue la liberté de la contrainte ; 2) La responsabilité distingue la liberté du hasard. Interpréter la liberté comme « autodétermination » correspond aux deux critères. L’autodétermination se comprend comme une détermination par les « préférences personnelles », constitutives de la personne. La liberté et le déterminisme sont ainsi compatibles. La question essentielle n’est pas de savoir si une action est déterminée ou pas, (...) mais plutôt de savoir si elle est déterminée par les préférences personnelles. Cette explication est juste à l’égard des intuitions les plus importantes concernant la liberté, y compris le pouvoir d’agir autrement. Abandonner la détermination, par contraste, violerait les critères minimaux au lieu de procurer « davantage » de liberté. Dans la conclusion, il est indiqué que l’autodétermination procure tout ce qu’on peut demander si on demande la liberté. (shrink)

Frankfurt-style cases challenge the intuitively plausible “Principle of Alternative Possibilities” (pap), which claims that moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise. Most such cases have familiar responses by defenders of the pap, most notably the “dilemma defense” levied against traditional Frankfurt-style cases. However, one particular style – buffered alternatives cases – are even more challenging. The ingenuity of these cases lies in the introduction of a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for doing otherwise, which acts as a buffer between the agent and (...) potential alternatives. I develop a new dilemma for buffered alternatives Frankfurt-style cases which shows that they too fail to constitute counterexamples to the pap. I argue that the buffer, though it may remove certain alternative possibilities, shifts the locus of responsibility to earlier provisional or character-forming decisions. These prior, responsibility-conferring decisions cannot be said to have been made without the ability to do otherwise. (shrink)

In her recent book Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio develops a distinctive version of an actual-sequence account of free will, according to which, when agents choose and act freely, their freedom is exclusively grounded in, and supervenes on, the actual causal history of such choices or actions. Against this proposal, I argue for an alternative- possibilities account, according to which agents’ freedom is partly grounded in their ability to choose or act otherwise. Actual-sequence accounts of freedom are motivated by (...) a reflection on so-called Frankfurt cases. Instead, other cases, such as two pairs of examples originally designed by van Inwagen, threaten actual-sequence accounts, including Sartorio’s. On the basis of her view of causation, Sartorio contends, however, that the two members of each pair have different causal histories, so that her view is not undermined by those cases after all. I discuss these test cases further and defend my alternative-possibilities account of freedom. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom suggests that the power to do otherwise is necessary for being morally responsible. While much of the literature on alternative possibilities has focused on Frankfurt’s argument against this claim, I instead focus on one of Dennett’s (1984) arguments against it. This argument appeals to cases of volitional necessity rather than cases featuring counterfactual interveners. van Inwagen (1989) and Kane (1996) appeal to the notion of ‘character setting’ to argue that these cases do not show that the power to (...) do otherwise is unnecessary for moral responsibility. In this paper, I argue that their character setting response is unsuccessful. (shrink)

Frankfurt-Style Cases (FSCs) seem to elicit the intuitive judgment that an agent is morally responsible despite being unable to act otherwise, which is supposed to falsify the Principle of Alternative Possibility (PAP). Recent empirical studies have shown that the inclination toward this intuitive judgment is shared among people, which seems to reinforce the argument against the PAP. However, some scholars have argued for Descriptive Anti-Intuitionism (DAI) — intuitive judgments have never played an evidential role in philosophy — and thus denied (...) the philosophical significance of such empirical findings. I point out that although DAI fails in its literal claim for FSCs, an associated insight remains potent: an intuitive judgment is so fragile that it can be easily defeated by further arguments. Nevertheless, I argue, empirical studies are significant in uncovering the general principles to which we are committed in our practice concerning moral responsibility. I clarify how such findings can play a robust evidential role in philosophical debates concerning moral responsibility by tracing the literature written by Frankfurt and philosophers. (shrink)

Frankfurt-style cases purport to show that an agent can be morally responsible for an action despite not having any alternatives. Some critics have responded by highlighting various alternatives that remain in the cases presented, while Frankfurtians have objected that such alternatives are typically not capable of grounding responsibility. In this essay I address the recent suggestion by Seth Shabo that only alternatives associated with the ‘up to us’ locution ground moral responsibility. I distinguish a number of kinds of ability, suggest (...) which kinds of abilities ground the truth of the ‘up to us’ locution, and outline how these distinctions apply to the indeterministic buffer cases. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen contends that nonresponsibility transfers across deterministic relations. Suppose it does. If the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every truth about what one does, and no one is even in part morally responsible for the past and the laws, then no one is even in part morally responsible for what one does. This argument, the Direct Argument, has drawn various critics, who have attempted to produce counterexamples to its core inference principle. This article (...) considers two notable efforts, one by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza and another by David Widerker. It shows that neither is sufficient to reject the Direct Argument. The article then proceeds to challenge the argument in a novel fashion. Van Inwagen has not given us good reason to think that the principle in question has an adequate anchor in our inferential practices, especially in light of the dialectical context with the compatibilist. Hence, it is not the compatibilists' burden to produce counterexamples to it. Rather, it is van Inwagen's burden to produce relevant confirming instances of it. (shrink)

What does it take for an individual to be personally responsible for behaviors that lead to increased risk of disease? We examine three approaches to responsibility that cover the most important aspects of the discussion of responsibility and spell out what it takes, according to each of them, to be responsible for behaviors leading to increased risk of disease. We show that only what we call the causal approach can adequately accommodate widely shared intuitions to the effect that certain causal (...) influences—such as genetic make-up or certain social circumstances—diminish, or undermine personal responsibility. However, accepting the causal approach most likely makes personal responsibility impossible. We therefore need either to reject these widely shared intuitions about what counts as responsibility-softening or undermining or to accept that personal responsibility for behaviors leading to increased risk of disease rests on premises so shaky that personal responsibility is probably impossible. (shrink)

Much of the recent philosophical discussion about free will has been focused on whether compatibilists can adequately defend how a determined agent could exercise the type of free will that would enable the agent to be morally responsible in what has been called the basic desert sense :5–24, 1994; Fischer in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Philos Stud, 144:45–62, 2009). While we agree with Derk Pereboom (...) and others that the compatibilist’s burden should be properly understood as providing a compelling account of how a determined agent could be morally responsible in the basic desert sense, the exact nature of this burden has been rendered somewhat unclear by the fact that there has been no definitive account given as to what the basic desert sense of moral responsibility amounts to. In Sect. 1 we set out to clarify the compatibilist’s burden by presenting our account of basic desert moral responsibility—which we call retributivist desert moral responsibility for purposes of clarity—and explain why it is of central philosophical and practical importance to the free will debate. In Sect. 2 we employ a thought experiment to illustrate the kind of difficulty that compatibilists of any stripe are likely to encounter in attempting to explain how determined agents can exercise the kind of free will needed for retributivist desert moral responsibility. (shrink)