Abstract
In a recent article, Robert Lockie brings about a critical examination of three Frankfurtstyle cases designed by David Widerker and Derk Pereboom. His conclusion is that these cases do not refute either the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) or some cognate leeway principle for moral responsibility. Though I take the conclusion to be true, I contend that Lockie's arguments do not succeed in showing it. I concentrate on Pereboom's Tax Evasion 2. After presenting Pereboom's example and analyzing its structure, I distinguish two strategies of Lockie's to defend PAP against it, which I call "No True Alternative Decision" (NTAD) and "No Responsibility" (NR), respectively. According to NTAD, Pereboom's example fails because the agent has alternatives to his decision. I hold that this strategy is faulty because the alternatives that Lockie points to are arguably not robust enough to save PAP. According to NR, the example fails because the agent is not blameworthy for his decision. After defending the intuitiveness of the agent's blameworthiness, I present Lockie's arguments against this blameworthiness and suggest that they might beg the question against Frankfurt theorists. I examine Lockie's main response to this question-begging objection and hold that it does not clearly succeed in meeting it. Moreover, I hold that this response faces other important problems. Additional responses appear to be unsatisfactory as well. Hence, Lockie's defense of the agent's blamelessness lacks justification. The general conclusion is that Lockie does not succeed in defusing Pereboom's Tax Evasion 2 as a counterexample to PAP.
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Notes
The notion of robustness of an alternative possibility will be very important in my criticism of Lockie’s defense of PAP. The central characteristic of a robust AP is its ability to (partly) explain the agent’s moral responsibility in the situation at hand. Not any AP available to an agent can do this. More on this notion below, especially in section 2.
There may be an ambiguity as to the object of Joe’s awareness. This point is discussed in Section 5.
Though see the preceding footnote.
“WKG” stands for Widerker, Kane and Ginet, for each of these authors has offered versions of this important objection to Frankfurt-inspired counterexamples to PAP.
Here is Pereboom’s last version of the idea of the robustness of an AP: “Robustness (B): For an agent to have a robust alternative to her immoral action A, that is, an alternative relevant per se to explaining why she is blameworthy for performing A, it must be that (i) she instead could have voluntarily acted or refrained from acting as a result of which she would be blameless, and (ii) for at least one such exempting acting or refraining, she was cognitively sensitive to the fact that she could so voluntarily act or refrain, and to the fact that if she voluntarily so acted or refrained she would then be, or would likely be, blameless” (Pereboom 2014: 13). In our example, refraining from lying satisfies this condition, but sucking the candy does not.
In effect, after the last quotation, he goes on: “But it’s intuitive that Joe is also blameworthy for deciding to evade taxes, and for this, at least prima facie, he has no robust alternative” (Pereboom 2012: 304).
Lockie holds that, in the alternative sequence, the decision is not Joe’s, but, if at all, the neuroscientist’s.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for making this objection.
Deciding to do A (unlike deliberating as to whether to decide or do A or B) is plausibly taken to be a simple, basic mental act, so that it is quite strange to speak about trying to decide to A.
Lockie’s approach differs importantly from Moya’s, whom he defers to at several places. Moya accepts Joe’s full moral responsibility for his decision to evade taxes, and tries to defuse Pereboom’s example by arguing for the robust character of his attending to moral reasons regarding that decision, not merely regarding his lack of sufficient attention to those reasons; this latter point is gladly conceded by Pereboom, as we have seen above, and does not have a bite against Pereboom’s argument.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for inviting me to respond to Lockie on this point. Of course, if Joe is aware both of moral reasons and of the fact that only by becoming attentive to these reasons he can avoid the decision to evade taxes, then it is even clearer that he decides to evade reason in full awareness that this decision is morally wrong.
I owe this consideration to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia.
In favor of my reading, under which Joe is a knowing tax evader, and aware that his decision to evade taxes is morally wrong, I can make some additional considerations. According to Pereboom, for an agent to be blameworthy for a decision, this decision (or action) has “to be hers in such a way that she would deserve to be blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong” (2014: 2). Now, a successful Frankfurt case has to raise a strong intuition in favor of the agent’s moral responsibility (blameworthiness). It is then clear that Pereboom intends his example to be read in such a way that Joe understands that his decision is morally wrong, so that he is aware of its moral wrongness.
Lockie quotes Frankfurt in support of this difference: “With respect to any action, Kant’s doctrine [OIC] has to do with the agent’s ability to perform that action. PAP, on the other hand, concerns his ability to do something else” (Frankfurt 1983: 95–6).
My remarks at almost the end of section 5 are also relevant here. But let me add some additional considerations here.
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Acknowledgements
This article is part of the research project ‘The Scope and Limits of Responsibility’ (FFI2012-33470), supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. I am grateful to Sergi Rosell for comments on a previous draft of this paper
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Moya, C.J. Frankfurtian Reflections: A Critical Discussion of Robert Lockie’s “Three Recent Frankfurt Cases”. Philosophia 44, 585–605 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9701-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9701-3