It is very widely held that Frankfurt-style cases—in which a counterfactual intervener stands by to bring it about that an agent performs an action but never actually acts because the agent performs that action on her own—show that free will does not require alternative possibilities. This essay argues that that conclusion is unjustified, because merely counterfactual interveners may make a difference to normative properties. It presents a modified version of a fake barn case to show how a counterfactual intervener can (...) make the difference between an agent knowing a fact or merely truly believing that fact, by eliminating veretic epistemic luck. If counterfactual interveners can make this kind of difference to the epistemic status of agents, the essay argues, there is no reason why they can't make an analogous difference to agents' moral responsibility. It concludes that reflection on these cases reveals that despite the mountains of words spilled on the topic, we still don't fully understand what role access to alternative possibilities plays in whether or not agents are morally responsible for their actions. (shrink)

“Frankfurt-style cases” are widely considered as having refuted the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by presenting cases in which an agent is morally responsible even if he could not have done otherwise. However, Neil Levy has recently argued that FSCs fail because our intuitions about cases involving counterfactual interveners are inconsistent, and this inconsistency is best explained by the fact that our intuitions about such cases are grounded in an internalist prejudice about the location of mental states and capacities. In response (...) to this challenge, we argue that there is no inconsistency in our intuitions about cases involving CIs, as soon as we draw the comparison properly, and that intuitions about such cases do not rest on an internalist prejudice, but on a more basic distinction between two kinds of dispositions. Additionally, we discus... (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt Journal of Philosophy, 66, 829–39 famously attacked what he called the principle of alternate possibilities. PAP states that being able to do otherwise is necessary for moral responsibility. He gave counterexamples to PAP known since then as “Frankfurt cases.” This paper sidesteps the enormous literature on Frankfurt cases while preserving some of our salient pretheoretical intuitions about the relation between alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. In particular, I introduce, explain, and defend a principle that has so far been (...) overlooked, namely, “the principle of doxastic moral asymmetry” : a rational agent, S, is morally responsible for an action that S performed, E, only if, when S did E, S justifiably believed either that E was closer to S’s most praiseworthy alternate possibility than it was to S’s most blameworthy alternate possibility, or that E was closer to S’s most blameworthy alternate possibility than it was to S’s most praiseworthy alternate possibility. (shrink)