Abstract
‘Frankfurt-style cases’ (FSCs) are widely considered as having refuted the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) by presenting cases in which an agent is morally responsible even if he could not have done otherwise. However, Neil Levy (J Philos 105:223–239, 2008) has recently argued that FSCs fail because we are not entitled to suppose that the agent is morally responsible, given that the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener is enough to make an agent lose responsibility-grounding abilities. Here, I distinguish two kinds of Frankfurt counter-arguments against the PAP: the direct and the indirect counter-arguments. I then argue that Levy’s argument, if valid, can shed doubt on the indirect argument but leaves the direct argument untouched. I conclude that FSCs can still do their job, even if we grant that the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener can modify an agent’s abilities.
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Notes
This is known as the flickers of freedom defense. See for example: van Inwagen (1983).
This is known as the dilemma defense. See for example: Ginet (1996).
Granted, she would still deserve blame for not trying to save the child while she thought she could, but this blame would be directed at what her omission reveals about her, and not a result of her being responsible for the child’s death.
This explanation of Levy’s FECs directly leads to the following predictions: that FECs can only be cases in which the very nature of what the agent does or omits to do depends on what the agent can achieve in counterfactual scenario. Omissions are a paradigmatic case, since they essentially depend on what the agent could have done. Thus, one would expect to find FECs more easily in cases involving omissions, and this would explain why Levy has indeed proposed only cases involving omissions.
Such considerations might lead one to the stronger prediction that FECs will be only found in cases of omissions and never in cases of commissions. However, this more particular prediction rests on the plausible but controversial claim that the nature of commissions never depends on what the agent could have done in counterfactual scenarios—a claim I am not certain of. Imagine that Peter tries to kill Jones but Jones shoots Peter before Peter can fulfill his murderous intention. Imagine also the Peter was also persuaded that it was the only way to save his own life, but that lurking in the shadow was Black, an evil neuroscientist who would have taken control over Peter and prevented him from killing Jones if Jones had only uttered “Frankfurt”. If one admits that killing in self-defense means killing while there was no softer way of saving oneself, one could say that the presence of this counterfactual intervener is enough to transform Jones’ ‘killing in self-defense’ into a simple ‘killing’. However, this is no problem for my defense of FSCs, for all I need is that there are FSCs in which the nature of the agent’s action does not depend on what other possibilities are opened to him.
For an objection to Levy that rests precisely on the distinction between commission and omission, and concludes that the lesson FECs draw from omissions cannot be transposed to actions in FSCs, see Clarke (2011).
One might be tempted to say that Levy just has to translate his argument from the language of “abilities” to the language of “possibilities” and argue that, because the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener is enough for the agent to gain possibilities if FECs, then it is possible that the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener is enough to make the agent lose possibilities in FSCs. However, this is no objection to FSCs because it is exactly what FSCs presuppose: that the mere presence of the counterfactual intervener makes the agent lose the possibility to do otherwise. This objection would only work if such an argument showed that agents in FSCs lose the very possibility of doing what they have to do, which would be a very strange conclusion.
Three, for example, in Pereboom’s version. See Pereboom (1995).
More on this in Section 3.
Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk and paid $0.3 for their participation. All lived in United States. Mean age was 31.93 and 79 were women.
χ 2(1, N = 179) = 0.93, p = .34.
Further reasons to doubt this claim come from a pilot study for that study in which we found that participants who declared having done the comparison were (also non-significantly) more likely to deny moral responsibility to the agent.
Only category (iv) was predicted a priori. Other categories were constructed from participants’ answers to the pilot study I referred to in the previous footnotes.
Cohen’s kappa = .74.
For example, one participant answered that: “Because Jones decided to steal the car, he is responsible.”
For example, one participant answered that: “Mr. Jones stole the car on his own. The decision-making device never was activated.” (This particular answer also fell into category iii).
For example, one participant answered that: “He did it without the device changing his impulses”.
One can trust participants’ introspection on this question, since participants who answered that it was easy spent less time on the questionnaire (M = 130.3 s) than participants who answered they had to think a lot (M = 168.4 s) and that this difference was statistically significant (Welch t-test: N = 179, t = −2.9, df = 25.2, p < 0.01).
See van Inwagen (1983).
In his paper, Frankfurt (1969) also sketches an alternative error-theory, according to which the PAP would derive some of his plausibility from a misleading psychological association with what he calls the ‘doctrine of coercion’ (according to which moral responsibility is excluded by coercion). Frankfurt then proceeds to show that (i) either the doctrine of coercion is wrong (ii) either the truth of the PAP cannot be inferred from its truth.
For example, Levy (2008) concludes his paper this way: “For the time being, FSCs should not be seen as having broken the dialectical stalemate that characterized the free will debate before they burst onto the scene” (p.239). Similarly, in a later paper on the same argument (Levy 2012), he writes: “I argued that [Frankfurt-style cases] are not sound. Or rather, I argued that we are not entitled to the conclusion to which they seem to lead us: that agents can be free or morally responsible, despite lacking alternative possibilities” (p.607). Thus, Levy thinks that his argument leads to the conclusion that FSCs cannot be used to undermine PAP. It is this conclusion I reject here, and not the most modest conclusion that his argument sheds doubt on one of the ways FSCs can be used to undermine PAP.
Note that this is not because (direct) intuitions about FSCs and FECs clash and cannot be true at the same time. If we grant that the presence of the neuroscientist make Jillian gain an ability in FECs, this shows only that the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener can change an agent’s ability. This is perfectly compatible with the claim that (i) agent in FSCs do not lose abilities or (ii) that they lose abilities but are still morally responsible.
Of course, as a reviewer for this journal rightly points out, this does not mean that choosing this solution commits one to doubt any intuition about moral responsibility (such as intuitions about ‘regular’ and mundane cases). All I want to stress is that if one thinks that Levy’s argument is still strong enough to undermine IFA when intuitions about FECs and FSCs are unreliable, then one must conclude that DFA and IFA are also still strong enough to undermine PAP in these conditions.
Some might not agree with my claim that current results in experimental philosophy cannot be interpreted in a way that makes them compatible with the hypothesis that people are naturally drawn to incompatibilism. However, even if they could, it would still be true that one cannot say that current results warrant the thesis that people’s default view is incompatibilism. Thus, at best, one could say that no conclusion about people’s default position has been established. Once again, in absence of a clear intuitive default position, this would bring us back to the logical level, at which compatibilism is the default position.
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Acknowledgments
For their useful and challenging comments on previous versions of this paper, I would like to thank Hichem Naar and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. I also thank Eva Pool and Vanessa Sennwald for coding the experimental data. Finally, I thank the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences and the University of Geneva, where this research was carried.
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Cova, F. Frankfurt-Style Cases User Manual: Why Frankfurt-Style Enabling Cases Do Not Necessitate Tech Support. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 505–521 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9456-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9456-x