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Pereboom’s Frankfurt case and derivative culpability

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Notable versions of this dilemma have been put forward by Kane (1985, p. 51, 1996, pp. 142–144, 191–192), Ginet (1996) and Widerker (1995). For a recent defence, see Goetz (2005).

  2. I will be focusing on Pereboom’s example, but it should be noted that there are a great many theorists who aim to show that an agent can appear responsible in circumstances where any alternatives present are irrelevant to our ascription of responsibility E.g. See Hunt (2000, 2005), Stump (1999a, b, 2003), Widerker (2006, 2009), Fischer (1999, 2003, 2006), McKenna (2003), and Robb and Mele (1998, 2003).

  3. For another version of the buffer strategy, see Hunt (2005).

  4. Whilst this discussion is intended to speak only to those who agree that such an presupposition is question-begging, it should be noted that some theorists have offered compelling arguments to the conclusion that the presupposition of determinism is not question-begging at all. Most notably Fischer (1999, 2006, 2010), and Haji and McKenna (2004, 2006).

  5. Whilst there’s some dispute about whether the third of these features is really present in this example, my own focus will be on the second.

  6. In fact, Joe may still appear to have robust alternatives in a further way to Jack. Jack presumably cannot at the very time of impact choose instead to sober up. But Joe presumably could avoid deciding to cheat his taxes at that very moment by instead attending to what’s morally at stake, creating a further suspicion that he has a robust alternative to deciding as he does at the time in question, as pointed out by Franklin (commenting on Hunt’s version of the example) (Franklin 2011) and by Palmer (2011). This line of argument has been strongly contested by Hunt and Shabo, who maintain that the agent’s ability to avoid deciding otherwise when he does is irrelevant to his responsibility for deciding this way simpliciter (Hunt and Shabo, 2012). It should be noted of course, that neither Palmer nor Franklin explicitly claim that when an agent is responsible, he is responsible just for performing the action at the specific time he does. Rather, the claim is that a condition of responsibility (simpliciter) is that at the time of the wrongdoing, the agent could have done otherwise. It’s debatable whether a defence of the latter claim commits us to a defence of the former one. For my purpose, however, I will leave this an open dispute. I needn’t settle this for the line of argument I am pursuing in this discussion.

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I am also grateful to Max Garfinkel for his helpful input during discussions about this topic.

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Correspondence to Nadine Elzein.

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Elzein, N. Pereboom’s Frankfurt case and derivative culpability. Philos Stud 166, 553–573 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0061-y

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