Abstract
The most serious challenge to Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) comes in the form of a dilemma: either the counterexample presupposes determinism, in which case it begs the question; or it does not presuppose determinism, in which case it fails to deliver on its promise to eliminate all alternatives that might plausibly be thought to satisfy PAP. I respond to this challenge with a counterexample in whichconsidering an alternative course of action is anecessary condition fordeciding to act otherwise, and the agent does not in fact consider the alternative. I call this a “buffer case,” because the morally relevant alternative is “buffered” by the requirement that the agent first consider the alternative. Suppose further that the agent’s considering an alternative action—entering the buffer zone—is what would trigger the counterfactual intervener. Then it would appear that PAP-relevant alternatives are out of reach.
I defend this counterexample to PAP against three objections: that considering an alternative isitself a morally relevant alternative; that buffer cases can be shown to containother alternatives that arguably satisfy PAP; and that even if the agent’spresent access to PAP-relevant alternatives were eliminated, PAP could still be satisfied in virtue ofearlier alternatives. I conclude that alternative possibilities are a normal symptom, but not an essential constituent, of moral agency.
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Notes
Harry G. Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,”Journal of Philosophy 66 (December 4, 1969), pp. 829–39.
Ibid., p. 835.
Ibid., pp. 836–7.
Locke’s locked room example, from which blockage is extrapolated, may be found inAn Essay Concerning Human Understanding Bk. II, ch. XXI, section 10.
I present the theological counterexample in “On Augustine’s Way Out,”Faith and Philosophy 16 (January 1999), pp. 3–26. The blockage strategy, together with further discussion of the divine foreknowledge scenario (understood as a species of blockage), may be found in my “Moral Responsibility and Unavoidable Action,”Philosophical Studies 97 (January (II) 2000), pp. 195–227, and “Freedom, Foreknowledge and Frankfurt,”Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, eds. David Widerker and Michael McKenna (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Pub. Ltd., 2003), pp. 159–83.
It might be objected that Jones could have done something about beingthe kind of person to whom such a thought would come unbidden in the specified circumstances; it’s therefore not true that he could not have avoided having this thought, for hewould have avoided it if he had taken advantage of alternatives that were available to him in earlier character-forming episodes in his life. This objection can be circumvented with a slight modification toRevenge. Suppose the thought of killing Smith is planted in Jones’s mind by an external source—perhaps even by Black’s mechanism. So its coming to be there has nothing to do with Jones being one kind of person rather than another. But given that it’s there, Jones’s duty is now to accept or reject this idea, and nothing constrains him one way or the other. (A related objection appeals to earlier choices that formed Jones into the kind of person who wouldaccept the idea of killing Jones, once the idea occurred to him. This objection cannot be handled by a simple revision in the terms ofRevenge. I take up this objection later in the paper: see The Third Objection and Reply.)
I first presented a case like this one in “Moral Responsibility and Unavoidable Action,” where it took a backseat to my development of the blockage strategy. Derk Pereboom independently developed a similar case: hisTax Evasion, likeRevenge, employs necessary rather than sufficient conditions as the mechanism’s trigger. See Pereboom’sLiving without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 18–37.
What follows is largely taken from a section (“Three Objections Claiming the Presence of Alternatives”) of my “Moral Responsibility and Buffered Alternatives,”Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 29: Free Will and Moral Responsibility, eds. Peter A. French & Howard K. Wettstein, guest editor John Martin Fischer (Boston & Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2005), pp. 126–145. Readers interested in the first kind of objection, which I ignore in the present paper, will find it treated in another section of theMidwest Studies paper (“Three Objections Claiming the Absence of Moral Responsibility”).
I should make clear that I am not here proposing any necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the sort of moral relevance that would qualify an alternative to satisfy clause (ii) of PAP. John Davenport (“The Deliberative Relevance of Refraining from Deciding: A Response to McKenna and Pereboom”,Acta Analytica 21:4 (2006), 62–88) presents two cases—“One Lie Leads to Another” and “Pool Party”—which seem to me to raise interesting questions about whether any very simple account of the moral relevance in question can succeed. What Iam claiming is thatJones’s merely considering whether to murder Smith, in the context of Revenge (as specified), need not constitute an alternative satisfying PAP. Of courseRevenge could bemodified by introducing some of the psychological complexity to which Davenport draws our attention, and the result might well be more favorable to PAP—e.g., if Jones refrains fromconsidering not killing Smith because he subconsciously fears that this might pave the way for hisdeciding not to kill Smith, we might agree that the availability of this unactualized alternative could then be relevant to his culpability for deciding to kill Smith. But this is adifferent case than the one I have described, and the existence of cases in which PAP is satisfied does nothing to rescue PAP from the Frankfurtian critique. PAP is in trouble if there is a single counterexample to it, and my claim is thatRevenge (that very case, and not some neighboring case involving Sartrean “bad faith,” etc.) is just such a counterexample.
Daniel von Wachter made this objection when I presented the paper at Oxford in 2003.
Audiences at oral presentations of the paper have been more likely to raise this objection than any of the other five.
The basic objection conveyed in this paragraph was suggested to me (independently) by Robert Merrihew Adams and Gordon Pettit.
The idea that moral responsibility ultimately rests on earlier character-forming episodes which themselves satisfy PAP is most closely associated with Robert Kane; see especially hisThe Significance of Free Will.
I want to thank Gordon Pettit for raising this objection when I presented the first draft of this paper at the University of Notre Dame.
A Thomistic analysis of this strange individual might go like this. He has apowerful intellect, inasmuch as he is able to discern the good in any end as soon as he considers it; but he has aweak will, inasmuch as his appetite for the good is always moved by the first object proposed to it, before his intellect has a chance to consider alternative ends.
Descartes, for example, maintains inMeditation IV that God would have no need todeliberate.
This paragraph makes no mention of moral responsibility, which would apply to God (if it applies at all) in a very different sense than it applies to human beings. But it’s not God’s acting without considering the alternative(s) that makes his status with respect to moral responsibility different than that of human beings.
Living without Free Will, pp. 18–22.
Versions of this paper have been read at the University of Notre Dame, Westmont College, Oxford University, the University of California at Riverside, the University of Minnesota at Morris, and Talbot School of Theology, as well as at the 2000 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association and the 2006 Bled Conference on Free Will. I want to thank the audiences at these venues as well as my commentators (Daniel von Wachter at Oxford, Michael McKenna at the APA).
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Hunt, D.P. Black the libertarian. Acta Anal 22, 3–15 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02866207
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02866207