Abstract
Harry Frankfurt Journal of Philosophy, 66, 829–839, (1969) famously gave cases in which an agent lacks alternate possibilities and yet seems morally responsible. Such cases purportedly falsify the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), which states that the ability to do otherwise is necessary for moral responsibility. There is an enormous body of literature debating whether or not Frankfurt cases and their variants do in fact falsify PAP. In order to sidestep Frankfurt cases altogether, Garry Young Philosophia, 44, 961–969, (2016) argues for a different version of PAP, namely, PAP(S), on which alternate possibilities are sufficient rather than necessary for moral responsibility. Young also argues for another sufficient but not necessary condition, the ‘Twin World Condition’ (accounting for whether the agent S would have done something other than action E if S had alternate possibilities). Only one of PAP(S) and TWC needs to be satisfied for moral responsibility. I argue here that Young’s proposal as it stands generates too much moral responsibility. So I present versions of Young’s conditions that avoid this problem. I also argue that even with those revisions, Young’s proposal does not limit moral responsibility as effectively as PAP does.
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Notes
More precisely, Frankfurt argues that PAP as originally formulated is false. He argues that PAP should be changed to the following principle: “A person is not morally responsible for what he has done if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise. ”
I will not attempt to list everything that has been published about Frankfurt cases. I don’t think that would be particularly helpful even if it were feasible. But besides Young (2016) which is obviously a very recent paper on the topic and which mentions and in some cases summarizes some of the literature, Fischer (2010) is a fairly recent paper which gives not just an interesting suggestion but also a nice overview of the competing positions and how they have been motivated and supported. Palmer (2014) then responds to Fischer’s attack on PAP as articulated not just in Fischer (2010) but also in Fischer (2000), (Fischer 2006), and (Fischer 2013). See also Cain (2014), Davidson (1980), Di Nucci (2009), (Di Nucci 2010a), (b), (Di Nucci 2011a), (b), (Di Nucci 2012), and (Di Nucci 2014), Elzein (2013), Ginet (1996) and (Ginet 2002), Goetz (2005), Janzen (2013), Kane (1985) and (Kane 1996), Levy and McKenna (2009), Lockie (2014), McKenna (1997), Otsuka (1998), Pereboom (2001) and (Pereboom 2009), Steward (2006), Widerker (1995), Widerker and Goetz (2013), Wyma (1997), and Young (2007).
One might think that these cases run roughshod over an important distinction between questions of responsibility and questions of moral value. That S is responsible for E does not entail that there is much or even any moral value in S’s doing E. But as I’ll show, this worry highlights my main point in raising cases such as these: PAP(S) as stated in Young (2016) coupled with Young’s definition of an alternate possibility entail that moral value and mere responsibility are conflated. This is a problem (albeit a soluble one) for Young’s proposal as originally stated, not a problem with these cases.
In this case, though, the options are not different with respect to the number of people being killed. Perhaps one might say that this is a morally relevant difference. Even in that case, though, it seems wrongheaded to say that S therefore did something morally praiseworthy.
In Case 1 the options are also mutually exclusive but, of course, this isn’t terribly important here. For presumably it would be worse to kill everyone on both tracks than to kill everyone on just one track.
Praise, blame and ascriptions of moral responsibility in general seem to come in a wide range of degrees. So we might say that S has some but not much moral responsibility for brushing S’s teeth for a second or two less than the maximum time available. And we might say something similar for the other cases considered: S in each case ought to be given a little bit of praise or blame for E but not as much as S ought to be given if S had options clearly morally superior or inferior to E. Or so goes a fairly plausible objection. But by my lights, this objection takes for granted a claim that requires a good deal of support, namely, that the scope of moral responsibility extends to cases such as S buying red grapes, S brushing S’s teeth for one or two seconds less than the maximum, and other such cases. One can admit that moral responsibility comes in a broad range of degrees without thereby conceding that the scope of moral responsibility extends to such innocuous cases. Without providing adequate support for that claim, the objection comes tenuously close to assuming what is at issue. This is not to say, of course, that I do not think there is any good case to be made for the extension of moral responsibility to seemingly innocuous cases. But without carefully supporting that claim the objection is, I think, far from fatal.
Note that Young does not once mention the category of actions which seem to be neither obviously moral or immoral. Yet it seems that such cases make up many of our everyday decisions where we decide between alternate possibilities. But as I suggest here, I think that a more precise version of ‘alternate possibilities’ might be able to deal with these cases.
One subtler modification to TWC: I’ve removed the clause ‘owing to the possibility of intervention’. It undesirably narrowed the scope of TWC. In TWC*, S in W1 lacks alternate possibilities that are clearly morally superior or inferior to E. So when S does E in W1, S might have alternate possibilities that are not clearly morally superior or inferior to E. That absence might be due to someone having the ability to take control of every neuron and synapse in S and force S to do E if a single neuron within S indicates that S intends to do something other than E (as in Frankfurt cases). But it is much more likely that S lacks such alternate possibilities in W1 simply because E happens to be an action that is not part of a group of possibilities normally falling within the domain of moral responsibility. People aren’t normally praised or blamed for buying (or not buying) red grapes. S is praised or blamed for buying grapes just in case S could have done something that was clearly morally superior or inferior.
Presumably, “1” is the lower limit for the number of alternate possibilities in W2.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Patrick Bondy, Chris Heathwood, Bob Pasnau, Rob Rupert, and the anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for helpful comments and discussions.
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Coren, D. On Young’s Version of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. Philosophia 45, 585–594 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9792-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9792-x