Abstract
A great deal of attention has been paid recently to the claim that traditional Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), which depend for their success on the presence of a perfectly reliable indicator (or prior sign) of what an agent will freely do if left to act on his own, are guilty of begging the question against incompatibilists, since such indicators seem to presuppose a deterministic relation between an agent’s free action and its causal antecedents. Objections of this sort have given rise to considerable efforts to construct alternative Frankfurt-type counterexamples that do not rely on prior signs of this kind and so do not presuppose determinism in a way that incompatibilists should find objectionable. One consequence of this shift in the way Frankfurt-type counterexamples are formulated is that it provides an opportunity for the forceful resurgence of certain versions of the so-called flicker defense of PAP. In this paper I develop two versions of the flicker defense, indicate their advantages over other versions of this strategy, and defend them against objections. Insofar as either of these is successful, it will show not only that PAP has yet to be falsified by any of the modified Frankfurt-type counterexamples currently on offer but that cases of this sort are in principle incapable of falsifying PAP.
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Notes
The term ‘flickers of freedom’ was coined by Fischer (1994, pp. 137–147) to refer to those alternatives that remain open to agents in Frankfurt-type counterexamples.
It should be noted that, relying as it does on the decidedly incompatibilist intuition that determinism and moral responsibility are mutually exclusive, this is not a line of argument available to compatibilist defenders of PAP. Compatibilists who wish to resist the conclusion of Frankfurt’s argument cannot do so on the grounds that it is question-begging to assert that agents can be morally responsible for their actions despite their being causally determined.
For their reply to this and other concerns, as well as a detailed account of the sort of mechanism they have in mind, see Mele and Robb (2003).
Here, ‘A’ is meant merely as a stand-in for whatever it is for which one is morally responsible. It is left open whether ‘A’ should be understood narrowly to refer only to actions or more broadly to include such things as consequences of action, modes of action, and omissions, as well, perhaps, as beliefs and desires.
For ease of expression, I will sometimes refer simply to Jones’s setting the post office on fire. All such references, however, should be understood to apply both to his setting fire to the post office and to his decision to do so.
Readers will recognize Box as a straightforwardly souped-up version of Locke’s (1690/1965, bk. II, ch. xxi) locked room.
Perhaps some will worry that, unlike counterfactual interveners in Frankfurt scenarios, the box plays an actual role in Jack’s remaining inside it. It is important to note, however, that since Jack never even attempts to get out of the box, the nature of the box itself—in particular, those properties that make it impossible for Jack to break through—play no causal role in bringing it about that Jack acts as he does. Just as in Frankfurt-type counterexamples, Jack acts just as he would have had the box not been impossible to penetrate.
To be clear, the argument being made here is that, just as in Box, it is the conjunction of the fact that Jones’s circumstances ensure he will set fire to the post office together with the fact that his being in this situation was entirely beyond his control which prevents him from being morally responsible for setting the post office on fire simpliciter. Thus, the reasons offered here for denying Jones’s moral responsibility for setting fire to the post office simpliciter are ones that could plausibly be found to have force even for one not already committed to the truth of PAP. Even one who is not inclined to deny that Jones could be morally responsible for setting the post office on fire simpliciter merely on the grounds that circumstances ensured he would do so might nevertheless think this judgment warranted when it is added that his being in such circumstances was something over which he had absolutely no control.
van Inwagen (1978) makes a similar point while arguing for a version of the flicker defense that focuses on the ability of agents in Frankfurt-type counterexamples to prevent certain particular events from occurring. Roughly, his argument is that Frankfurt scenarios guarantee the obtaining of a state of affairs in which an event of a certain type occurs. Which particular event (of that type) will occur, however, remains entirely up to the agent. Assuming that agents are morally responsible for the occurrence of event particulars, rather than for the fact that a certain state of affairs was obtained, he argues, Frankfurt cases fail to falsify the view that moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities. Fischer (1986, pp. 180–181) contends that it is a weakness of van Inwagen’s strategy that its success depends on a contentious (and, in his mind, dubious) essentialist principle of event individuation, according to which x is the same particular event as y if and only if x and y have the same causal history. I take it to be an advantage of the versions of the flicker strategy developed in this paper that they remain neutral on the question of how actions and events are to be individuated.
Naylor (1984) has also argued for this point.
Similarly, we might also think that, in general, a person is morally responsible for A-ing only if he is also morally responsible for A-ing on his own. Here, too, however, we can imagine cases where this generalization fails to hold true. Suppose, for example, that, wanting to burn down the post office but fearing he lacks the nerve to go through with it on his own, Jones hires Black to use his device to compel him to set the post office on fire. In this case, it seems pretty clear that Jones is (at least partly) morally responsible for torching the post office, even though this is not something he does (or is morally responsible for doing) on his own.
The claim that Nelda is morally responsible for drinking the poison and so killing herself on her own should not be taken to imply that she is blameworthy (or praiseworthy) for what she does. No assumption is being made about the moral value of her action.
A referee for this journal points out that, assuming Nelda is aware that her sentence includes lighting her own pyre and that she will therefore kill herself either way, her situation is epistemically different from that of agents in Frankfurt-type counterexamples. As a result, the actual sequence leading up to Nelda’s taking the poison includes deliberation only over whether to kill herself on her own, not deliberation over whether to kill herself simpliciter. “This,” the referee suggests, “might arguably isolate her moral responsibility for killing herself on her own from her moral responsibility for killing herself simpliciter, in a way that wouldn’t happen in the typical Frankfurt-type counterexample, where the agent is unaware of the counterfactual intervener.” It is unclear, however, exactly why this difference in deliberative content (rather than the fact that her being in this situation was entirely beyond her control) would isolate Nelda’s responsibility for killing herself on her own from responsibility for killing herself simpliciter. Suppose someone cuts in front of me while I am waiting in line at the grocery store, and I immediately and non-actionally come to acquire an intention to hit him in the back of the head. I do not deliberate at all about whether to hit him in the back of the head since the role of deliberation is to resolve practical uncertainty about what to do, and I am not the least bit uncertain. Indeed, my only uncertainty in this case concerns which of the items in my basket to hit him with: the wine bottle or the frozen chicken. After brief deliberation, I quickly settle on the wine bottle and proceed to exact vengeance. It certainly seems that I am morally responsible both for hitting the person in the back of the head and for hitting him with a wine bottle, even though the actual sequence of events does not include deliberation over whether to hit him, only deliberation over what item to use to do so. Thus, the mere fact that an agent does not deliberate over whether to do a thing before doing it does not seem sufficient to preclude his being morally responsible for having done it.
Insofar as this correct, some might want to maintain that it is deciding on one’s own to do a thing, rather than so deciding simpliciter, for which one is always basically morally responsible, not just in Frankfurt-type scenarios (and other similar cases). No doubt the congruity of such a view is appealing. Depending on how closely one takes the distinction between the objects of basic and derivative moral responsibility to track differences in control, however, one might hold that considerations of this sort ought to outweigh considerations of symmetry. By these lights, if in typical (non-Frankfurtian) cases the control agents have over whether they will decide to do a thing simpliciter matches the control they have over whether they will so decide on their own, then, unlike in Frankfurt cases, there might not be any good reason to deny that they can be basically morally responsible both for deciding on their own and for deciding simpliciter. I take no stand here on this issue.
Though I maintain that what agents in Frankfurt-type counterexamples are basically morally responsible for is deciding on their own to act as they do, PAPb itself remains neutral on the issue of whether the class of objects of basic moral responsibility ought to be restricted to certain modes of action (such as doing a thing on one’s own), certain types of mental action (such as deciding), or whether it should include such things as overt physical actions, consequences of actions, beliefs, and desires. In this way, and perhaps unlike some other principles offered by flicker theorists, PAPb is able to, as Shabo puts it, retain “the sheen of an all-purpose principle, one with a life in and outside of Frankfurt-style scenarios” (2007, p. 69). Cf. Timpe 2006.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to clarify this point.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, I wish to thank Al Mele, Michael McKenna, Randy Clarke, Walt Schaller, Sara Chant, Travis Rodgers, and an anonymous referee for this journal. A much earlier version of the first half of this paper was presented at the 2007 Pacific-Mountain Regional Meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers. I am grateful to the audience there, and especially to Dan Speak, for their feedback.
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Robinson, M. Modified Frankfurt-type counterexamples and flickers of freedom. Philos Stud 157, 177–194 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9631-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9631-z