Abstract
Greg Janzen has recently criticised my defence of Frankfurt’s counterexample to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by arguing that Jones avoids killing Smith in the counterfactual scenario. Janzen’s argument consists in introducing a new thought-experiment which is supposed to be analogous to Frankfurt’s and where the agent is supposed to avoid A-ing. Here I argue that Janzen’s argument fails on two counts, because his new scenario is not analogous to Frankfurt’s and because the agent in his new scenario does not avoid A-ing.
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Notes
Here is a link to the 884 scholarly articles or books citing Frankfurt’s counterexample: http://tinyurl.com/9n87t4l (Google Scholar data, accessed 7.10.12). For an overview of this debate, see Fischer 1999. For a more recent survey, see Levy and McKenna 2009.
Mention of this kind of move against Frankfurt’s counterexample can be found at least in the following places: Fischer (1982), Kane (1985), Widerker (1995), Kane (1996), McKenna (1997), Wyma (1997), Otsuka (1998), Fischer (1999), Woodward (2002), Pettit (2005), Steward (2006), Alvarez (2009), Larvor (2010), Di Nucci 2010a, 2011a, and b.
Page numbers refer to pre-print.
“We can imagine that Jones has often confronted the alternatives—A and B—that he now confronts, and that his face has invariably twitched when he was about to decide to do A and never when he was about to decide to do B. Knowing this, and observing the twitch, Black would have a basis for prediction” (Frankfurt 1969, p. 835).
Here one could try to devise cases of unintentional avoidance, such as one in which Lois Lane spends all day Monday actively trying to avoid running into Clark Kent (rescheduling her lunch break, hiding when she hears him coming down the hall, etc.) and she is successful in doing so. Further suppose that she hopes that she will get to see Superman on Monday. Is this a case in which Lois Lane unintentionally avoids running into Superman? It is certainly a case in which she didn’t intentionally avoid running into Superman. Apart from the peculiarity of “running into” as a passive verb, one could easily claim here that this is a case in which Lois Lane intentionally avoided running into Clark Kent and did not run into Superman (so not A-ing rather avoiding A-ing with regard to ‘running into Superman’). One more thing about this case: one may be alternatively tempted to argue that this case points to the need for a more general difference than the one between ‘intentionally’ avoiding and ‘unintentionally’ avoiding, namely the one between an agential avoidance and a non-agential avoidance: indeed, this is anyway the direction that talk of not A-ing and avoiding A-ing goes towards and also this is what the distinction between what is up to the agent and what is not up to the agent points to. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this scenario.
A case where one may be able to speak of Jones having avoided killing Smith would be one where Jones knew that his changing his mind would trigger Black’s intervention. Even here, though, one will have to distinguish between a scenario where Black’s power of intervention is restricted to the event of Jones’s changing his mind and a scenario where Black can intervene at will: only the former may be a case of avoiding.
This could be resisted by pointing out that what Janzen has in mind is a necessity rather than a sufficiency condition for responsibility (thanks to anonymous reviewers for this point): I think that Janzen’s account is implausible even if conceived just as a necessary condition, but as this whole point about responsibility is not necessary to my argument I will not press it any further.
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Di Nucci, E. Avoiding and Alternate Possibilities. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 1001–1007 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9505-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9505-0