In 1969 Harry Frankfurt published his hugely influential paper 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility' in which he claimed to present a counterexample to the so-called 'Principle of Alternate Possibilities' ('a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise'). The success of Frankfurt-style cases as counterexamples to the Principle has been much debated since. I present an objection to these cases that, in questioning their conceptual cogency, undercuts many of those debates. Such cases (...) all require a counterfactual mechanism that could cause an agent to perform an action that he cannot avoid performing. I argue that, given our concept of what it is for someone to act, this requirement is inconsistent. Frankfurt-style alleged counterexamples are cases where an agent is morally responsible for an action he performs even though, the claim goes, he could not have avoided performing that action. However, it has recently been argued, e.g. by John Fischer, that a counterexample to the Principle could be a 'Fischer-style case', i.e. a case where the agent can either perform the action or do nothing else. I argue that, although Fischer-style cases do not share the conceptual flaw common to all Frankfurt-style cases, they also fail as counterexamples to the Principle. The paper finishes with a brief discussion of the significance of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. (shrink)

Some defenders of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) have responded to the challenge of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP by arguing that there remains a flicker of freedom -- that is, an alternative possibility for action -- left to the agent in FSCs. I argue that the flicker of freedom strategy is unsuccessful. The strategy requires the supposition that doing an act-on-one''s-own is itself an action of sorts. I argue that either this supposition is confused and leads to counter-intuitive (...) results; or, if the supposition is acceptable, then it is possible to use it to construct a FSC in which there is no flicker of freedom at all. Either way, the flicker of freedom strategy is ineffective against FSCs. Since the flicker of freedom strategy is arguably the best defense of PAP, I conclude that FSCs are successful in showing that PAP is false. An agent can act with moral responsibility without having alternative possibilities available to her. (shrink)

It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person's will. Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call "first-order desires" or "desires of the (...) first order," which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. (shrink)

In this essay I shall begin by sketching a "Frankfurt-type example." I shall then lay out a disturbing challenge to the claim I have made above that these examples help us to make significant progress in the debates about the relationship between moral responsibility and causal determinism. I then will provide a reply to this challenge, and the reply will point toward a more refined formulation of the important contribution I believe Frankfurt has made to defending a certain sort of (...) compatibilism. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, an agent is morally responsible for an action of hers only if she could have done otherwise. The notion of a robust alternative plays a prominent role in recent attacks on PAP based on so-called Frankfurt cases. In this paper I defend the truth of PAP for blameworthy actions against Frankfurt cases recently proposed by Derk Pereboom and David Widerker. My defence rests on some intuitively plausible principles that yield a new understanding of (...) the concept of a robust alternative. I will leave aside whether PAP also holds for praiseworthy actions -/- Según el Principio de Posibilidades Alternativas, un agente es moralmente responsable de una acción sólo si hubiera podido actuar de otro modo. La noción de alternativa robusta desempeña un papel prominente en ataques recientes al PPA basados en los llamados casos Frankfurt. En este artículo defiendo el PPA para la culpabilidad moral frente a casos Frankfurt propuestos recientemente por Derk Pereboom y David Widerker. Mi defensa descansa en algunos principios intuitivamente plausibles que dan lugar a una comprensión nueva del concepto de alternativa robusta. No trataré la cuestión de la verdad del PPA para acciones moralmente laudables. (shrink)

This paper is a critical comment on an article of David Widerker which also appeared in the Journal of Philosophy. In this article, Wideker held, against positions previously defended by him, that in was possible to design effective counterexamples, in the line initiated by Harry Frankfurt in 1969, to the so-called “Principle of Alternative Possibilities”. The core of my criticism of Widerker is to deny that agents, in his putative counterexamples, are morally responsible for their decisions, owing to the fact (...) they are not able to respond appropriately to moral reasons. (shrink)

This essay challenges the widely accepted principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. The author considers situations in which there are sufficient conditions for a certain choice or action to be performed by someone, So that it is impossible for the person to choose or to do otherwise, But in which these conditions do not in any way bring it about that the person chooses or acts as he (...) does. In such situations the person may well be morally responsible for what he chooses or does despite his inability to choose or to do otherwise. Finally the author considers certain suggestions for revising the principle he rejects or for replacing it with a principle of an altogether different kind. (shrink)

Most people assume that, even though some degenerative or criminal behavior may be caused by influences beyond our control, ordinary human actions are not similarly generated, but rather are freely chosen, and we can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for them. A less popular and more radical claim is that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform. It is this hard determinist stance that Derk Pereboom articulates in Living Without Free Will. Pereboom argues that our best scientific (...) theories have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform, and that because of this, we are not morally responsible for any of them. He seeks to defend the view that morality, meaning and value remain intact even if we are not morally responsible, and furthermore, that adopting this perspective would provide significant benefit for our lives. (shrink)

Robert Kane provides a critical overview of debates about free will of the past half century, relating this recent inquiry to the broader history of the free will issue and to vital currents of twentieth century thought. Kane also defends a traditional libertarian or incompatibilist view of free will, employing arguments that are both new to philosophy and that respond to contemporary developments in physics and biology, neuro science, and the cognitive and behavioral sciences.

Pereboom has formulated a Frankfurt-style counterexample in which an agent is alleged to be responsible despite the fact that there are only non-robust alternatives present (Pereboom, Moral responsibility and alternative possibilities: essays on the importance of alternative possibilities, 2003; Phil Explor 12(2):109–118, 2009). I support Widerker’s objection to Pereboom’s Tax Evasion 2 example (Widerker, J Phil 103(4):163–187, 2006) (which rests on the worry that the agent in this example is derivatively culpable as opposed to directly responsible) against Pereboom’s recent counterarguments (...) to this objection (Pereboom 2009). Building on work by Moya (J Phil 104:475–486, 2007; Critica 43(128):3–26, 2011) and Widerker (Widerker 2006), I argue that there is good reason to measure the robustness of alternatives in terms of comparative, rather than non-comparative likelihood of exemption, where the important factor for blame is whether the agent is “doing her reasonable best” to avoid blameworthy behaviour. I maintain that an agent only ever appears responsible when alternatives are robust in this sense. In Pereboom’s examples, both Tax Evasion 2, and his more recent version, Tax Evasion 3 (Pereboom 2009), I maintain the robustness of the alternatives, so understood, is unclear. We can clear up any ambiguity by sharpening the examples, and the result is that the agent appears responsible when the alternatives are made clearly robust, and does not appear responsible when alternatives appear clearly non-robust. The comparative nature of our judgements about blame, I maintain helps to explain the continuing appeal of the “leeway-incompatibilist” viewpoint. (shrink)

In this paper Mele and Robb defend their (1998) paper against a variety of objections and further their develop their defense of Frankfurt-style cases.

The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt''s example relies on a counterfactual intervener to preclude alternatives to (...) the person''s action, it is not possible for it to preclude all alternatives (intervention that is contingent upon a trigger cannot bring it about that the trigger never occurred). This makes it possible for the determined PAPist to maintain that some pre-intervention deviation is always available to ground moral responsibility. In reply, the critic of PAP can examine all the candidate deviations and argue their irrelevance to moral responsibility (a daunting prospect); or the critic can dispense with counterfactual intervention altogether. The paper pursues the second of these strategies, developing three examples of noncounterfactual intervention in which (i) the agent has no alternatives (and a fortiori no morally relevant alternatives), yet (ii) there is just as much reason to think that the agent is morally responsible as there was in Frankfurt''s original example. The new counterexamples do suffer from one liability, but this is insufficient in the end to repair PAP''s conceptual connection between moral responsibility and alternate possibilities. (shrink)

Almost thirty years ago, in an attempt to undermine what he termed "the principle of alternate possibilities" (the thesis that people are morally responsible for what they have done only if they could have done otherwise), Harry Frankfurt offered an ingenious thought-experiment that has played a major role in subsequent work on moral responsibility and free will. Several philosophers, including David Widerker and Robert Kane, argued recently that this thought-experiment and others like it are fundamentally flawed. This paper develops a (...) new Frankfurt-style example that is immune to their objections. [Reprinted in Laura Waddell Ekstrom, ed., Agency and Responsibility: Essays on the Metaphysics of Freedom (Westview Press, 2001), pp. 241-54; and in John Martin Fischer, ed., Free Will, Vol. III (Routledge, 2005), pp. 330-42.]. (shrink)

The Frankfurt cases have been thought by some philosophers to show that moral responsibility does not require genuine metaphysical access to alternative possibilities. But various philosophers have rejected this putative "lesson" of the cases, and they have put forward a powerful "Dilemma Defense." In the last decade or so, many philosophers have been persuaded by the Dilemma Defense that the Frankfurt cases do not show what Frankfurt (and others) thought they show. This essay presents a template for a general strategy (...) of response to the Dilemma Defense. It thus seeks to provide further support for the author's view that the Frankfurt cases help to establish that moral responsibility does not require alternative possibilities. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that defenders of Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities do not need to construct a metaphysically possible scenario in which an agent is morally responsible despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. Rather, there is a weaker (but equally legitimate) sense in which Frankfurt-style counterexamples can succeed. All that's needed is the claim that the ability to do otherwise is no part of what grounds moral responsibility, when the agent is indeed morally responsible.

An important and engaging book on a key argument in contemporary debates about free will and moral responsibility.

In current debates about moral responsibility, it is common to differentiate two fundamentally different incompatibilist positions: Leeway Incompatibilism and Source Incompatibilism. The present paper argues that this is a bad dichotomy. Those forms of Leeway Incompatibilism that have no appeal to ‘origination’ or ‘ultimacy’ are problematic, which suggests that incompatibilists should prefer Source Incompatibilism. Two sub-classifications of Source Incompatibilism are then differentiated: Narrow Source Incompatibilism holds that alternative possibilities are outside the scope of what is required for moral responsibility, and (...) Wide Source Incompatibilism holds that while ultimacy is most fundamental to moral responsibility, an agent meeting the ultimacy condition will also have alternative possibilities, thereby also satisfying an alternative possibilities condition. The present paper argues that the most promising incompatibilist positions will be versions of Wide Source Incompatibilism. (shrink)

I defend an incompatibilist 'Principle of Avoidable Blame' according to which one is blameworthy for performing an act of a given type only if one could instead have behaved in a manner for which one would have been blameless. First, I demonstrate that this principle is resistant to Harry Frankfurt-type counterexample. Second, I present a positive argument for this principle that appeals to the relation of blame to the 'reactive attitude' of indignation. Finally, I argue against the possibility of blamelessly (...) stumbling into a 'moral blind alley' where one would be blameworthy for whatever one is capable of doing. (shrink)