Abstract
Is determinism compatible with moral responsibility? Until recently, most philosophers — compatibilists and incompatibilists alike — believed that the answer to this question depends crucially on whether persons are (in the relevant sense) able to act otherwise in a deterministic world. They had this belief because they accepted the intuitively very plausible Principle of Alternate Possibilities (henceforth: PAP):
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person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise.1
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References
H. G. Frankfurt, `Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’, Journal of Philosophy 66, 1969, 829: reprinted in H. G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ), 1988, 1.
For a different view - see M. Klein, Determinism, Blameworthiness, and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990 ) and Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will ( Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996 ).
B. Berofsky, Freedom from Necessity ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987 );
D.C. Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having ( Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984 );
J. M. Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will ( Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 1994 ).
D. Blumenfeld, `The Principle of Alternate Possibilities’, Journal of Philosophy 68, 1971, 339–45;
P. v. Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will ( Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983 );
P. v. Inwagen, `Ability and Responsibility’, The Philosophical Review 87, 1978, 201–224.
R. Heinaman, Incompatibilism without the Principle of Alternative Possibilities’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 64, 1986, 266–76;
M. B. Naylor, `Frankfurt on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities’, Philosophical Studies 46, 1984, 249–58.
J. W. Lamb, `Evaluative Compatibilism and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities’, Journal of Philosophy 90, 1993, 517–527;
D. Widerker, `Libertarianism and Frankfurt’s Attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities’, Philosophical Review 104, 1995, 247–261.
What I have in mind here is the non-fulfilment of something like M. Klein’s U-condition - see op. cit. note 3, 2, 49, 51. Because I endorse this condition, I believe that incompatibilists could (but, as I argue in the next section, should not) concede that Frankfurt’s example refutes JPAP (interpreted incompatibilistically) and still hold determinism to be incompatible with moral responsibility on grounds other than the inability to do otherwise in a deterministic world.
In fact, Frankfurt seems to confuse PAP and JPAP. Consider, for instance, the following passage: `But the principle of alternate possibilities is false. A person may well be morally responsible for what he has done even though he could not have done otherwise’ (op.cit. note 1, 1). It is natural to read the passage as if the proposition expressed by the latter sentence is supposed to establish the proposition expressed by the former. But it seems it does not. For on a natural reading of the second sentence, it states the negation of what I have called JPAP. That is, the occurrence of `even though’ suggests that `may’ is to be read as relative to the information stated in the bit following `even though’. But the negation of JPAP does not entail the negation of PAP. For it is conceivable that no one could ever act otherwise, no one is ever responsible for anything and yet this is never so in virtue of the fact that the person in question could not have done otherwise. In that case PAP would be (trivially) true and JPAP false.
The incompatibilist version of JPAP that I discuss in the next section does not depend on Jones being not-responsible for this reason and, thus, is not refuted by the Distant Past Counterfactual Intervener.
Some compatibilists will, I suspect, insist that there is no reason not to ascribe moral responsibility to Jones in the Distant Past Counterfactual Intervener. And they should be as unimpressed by the present line of argument as incompatibilist defenders of PAP should be unimpressed by Frankfurt’s own example. In the present context, however, such a compatibilistic response seems much less reasonable than a similar compatibilist response to Frankfurt’s example precisely because Frankfurt’s example contains no information as to whether Jones is responsible for the sources of his action.
It is noteworthy that Frankfurt does not explicitly claim in Frankfurt, op. cit. note 1, that Jones is morally responsible for doing what he does. This is so, despite the fact that this is what he must claim for his example to constitute, as he says it does, a counterexample to PAP. The only related, but different, explicit claim Frankfurt makes is the (already quoted) comparative one that since the fact that Jones could not have acted otherwise `played no role at all in leading him to act as he did’ this fact cannot render him morally non-responsible for what he did. Thus, Jones `will bear exactly the same moral responsibility for what he does as he would have borne if Black had not been ready to take steps to ensure that he do it’, op. cit. note 1, 7). Despite the absence of any such explicit claim, many have - perhaps in the light of what Frankfurt is required to claim for his example to refute PAP - taken him to make just this further claim; see, for instance, D. Blumenfeld, op. cit. note 6, 340, 341; J. M. Fischer, `Responsibility and Control’, Journal of Philosophy 89, 1982, 20–44: reprinted in J. M. Fischer (ed.), Moral Responsibility (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1986), 176; J. M. Fischer, op. cit. note 5, 134 and M. B. Naylor, op. cit. note 7, 250.
See, for instance, A. J. Ayer, `Freedom and Necessity’, Philosophical Essays (London: Macmillan 1954 ); reprinted in G. Watson, Free Will ( Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982 ), 22.
K. Lehrer, `Cans without Ifs’, Analysis 29, 1968, 29–32; reprinted in G. Watson, op. cit. note 15, 41–45. Incompatibilists are qua incompatibilists neither committed to deny nor affirm that the compatibilist analysans provides a necessary condition of moral responsibility.
R. M. Chisholm, `Human Freedom and the Self’, Lindley Lecture 1964; reprinted in G. Watson, op. cit. note 15, 27. Again, the analysans requires refinements and may in any case not capture every form of incompatibilism. I can ignore these finer details, however, since precisely which analysans of `ability to do otherwise’ incompatibilists accept does not matter for the purpose of evaluating those aspects of Frankfurt’s argument on which I focus.
One might similarly distinguish between a compatibilist and an incompatibilist version of PAP.
I say `appears’,because it is not clear that Frankfurt’s example is one in which the agent could not have done otherwise (even) in the compatibilist sense. For adding some time-references to the description of the case the essentials seem to be these: if Jones shows any signs at tl to decide at t3 not to do A at t4,Black will intervene at t2 to make sure Jones decides at t3 to do A at t4 and if Jones shows no sign at tl to decide at t3 to do A at t4,he will do so. But it would be, as Lamb argues, a fallacy to infer from these two claims that Jones could not have refrained from doing A at t4. For nothing in the description of the case rules out that Jones could have shown no signs at tl of deciding at t3 not to do A at t4 and yet decide at t3 not to do A at t4 - see J. W. Lamb, op. cit. note 8, 521–24. That inference requires the (further) premiss that if Jones shows no signs at tl to decide at t3 to do A at t4,Jones cannot do A at t4. However, for the present purpose - which is to argue that Frankfurt’s counterexample poses no threat to incompatibilism - this line of objection can be ignored. In any case, Frankfurt’s case can be modified along the following lines to cater partly for Lamb’s objection: if Jones decides at t3 not to do A at t4,Black will intervene at some time between t3 and t4 to make Jones change his mind and do A at t4. In this case, it is true in the compatibilist sense that Jones could not at t3 have done otherwise at t4: had he decided at t3 not to ch A at t4,he still would have done A at t4.
I say `might’ rather than `would’ to cater for the possibility that though the events after the onset of Black’s monitoring of Jones follows deterministically from the events immediately preceeding it, these events themselves do not follow deterministically from still earlier events. Frankfurt mentions a related scenario in H. G. Frankfurt, op. cit. note 1, 6n.
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Lippert-Rasmussen, K. (2000). Does Moral Responsibility Presuppose Alternate Possibilities?. In: van den Beld, T. (eds) Moral Responsibility and Ontology. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2361-9_7
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