Abstract
Philosophers employing Frankfurt-style cases to challenge the principle of alternative possibilities have mostly sought to construct scenarios that eliminate as many of an agent’s alternatives as possible—and all alternatives at the moment of action, within the agent’s control—without causally determining the agent’s actions. One of the chief difficulties for this traditional approach is that the closer one gets to ruling out absolutely all alternative possibilities the more it appears that agents’ actions in these cases are causally determined. “Limited-blockage” versions of these cases are meant to sidestep this worry by blocking all and only those alternatives that are intrinsically relevant to moral responsibility (“robust alternatives”) while leaving open all other alternatives, including a significant range of alternatives that are within the agent’s voluntary control at the moment of action. I argue that, owing to the fact that omissions (and not just actions) are capable of constituting robust alternative possibilities, limited-blockage cases cannot avoid collapsing into the more traditional sort of Frankfurt-style case to which they are meant to be an alternative and so are vulnerable to the very same concerns they are meant to avoid.
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Notes
The term ‘robust alternatives’ was coined by Fischer (1994, pp. 137–147) to refer to alternative possibilities that are capable of grounding ascriptions of moral responsibility. In order to be robust, an alternative must figure into an explanation of why an agent is morally responsible for what she actually does.
Counterexamples to PAP need not be restricted to cases involving actions. Since PAP is generally taken to apply to both actions and omissions, a case in which an agent is genuinely morally responsible for omitting to perform some action she could not have done otherwise than omit to perform would also serve as a counterexample to this principle. Here, following custom, I focus on cases involving moral responsibility for actions (as opposed to omissions) merely for the sake of simplicity.
An agent is basically morally responsible for some action she performs when her responsibility for that action is not inherited from (or in virtue of) her responsibility for other actions. Moral responsibility that is inherited in this way is derivative, or indirect (see Mele 2006, p. 86). For arguments that agents can be basically morally responsible for things other than certain mental actions, see Adams (1985) and Smith (2005, 2006).
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.
Presumably McKenna would also say that compatbilists who maintain that moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise should abandon PAP in favor of PSA. Here, however, his focus is restricted to incompatibilist proponents of PAP.
Strictly speaking, given that PSA is restricted to cases of blameworthiness, it entails only a version of PAP that is similarly restricted in scope. According to McKenna, this is done only for ease of presentation. Presumably, then, when McKenna says that “it is PSA and not PAP that ought to serve as the incompatibilist demand for alternative possibilities,” he means to refer to a broadened version of PSA, one with application to all cases of moral responsibility and not just those involving blame (p. 210). It is not immediately obvious just how such a principle is supposed to be formulated. Certainly it will have it that an agent’s being morally responsible for some action A requires both that it was within her control to perform an alternative action B and that B was an action of a certain sort. In cases of blameworthiness, as we have seen, B must have been such that (i) performing B was morally less bad than performing A and (ii) it would have been reasonable for the agent to have considered performing B as an alternative to performing A. But what are to be the correlates to (i) and (ii) in cases of praiseworthiness and responsibility for morally neutral actions? Even if an agent’s being praiseworthy for performing some action A requires that it was within her control to perform an alternative action B that was morally less good than A, do we want to say that it must have been reasonable for her to have considered performing B? Does being morally responsible for performing a morally neutral action, such as deciding to wear one pair of socks rather than another, require that there was an alternative action available that was either morally better or worse? Whatever the case, the important thing to see here is that if moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities of a particular sort, then moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities (simpliciter). Thus, though there are questions about exactly what sorts of alternative possibility would be included in an unrestricted version of PSA, any unrestricted version of this principle is going to entail PAP.
In some ways, McKenna appears to echo Fischer’s claim that if moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities it is because it requires alternative possibilities of a certain sort—namely, robust. There is at least one respect, however, in which Fischer and McKenna differ. Whereas Fischer implies that those who accept PAP should also accept something like PRAP (a broadened version of PSA perhaps—one that encompasses all cases of moral responsibility, not just blame), McKenna argues that they ought to opt for PSA instead of PAP, rejecting the latter in favor of the former.
Perhaps what McKenna means to suggest is not just that Casper would not have found this to be a reasonable alternative but that he would have been correct: Given that Casper is presented with the option of pressing the Good button, it would in fact have been unreasonable of him to have considered simply deciding not to press the Bad button and yet not press the Good button. In that case, it should be emphasized that, as far as PSA(*) is concerned, what matters here is not whether it would have been reasonable for Casper to have considered simply deciding not to press the Bad button as an alternative to deciding to press the Good button but, rather, whether it would have been reasonable for Casper to have considered this as an alternative to deciding to press the Bad button. Even if it would not have been reasonable for Casper to have considered simply deciding not to press the Bad button as an alternative to deciding to press the Good button, it unquestionably would have been reasonable for him to have considered this as an alternative to what he actually did.
Some theorists have defended a “simple view” of intentional action according to which an agent intentionally performs an action A only if she intends to A (Adams 1986; McCann 1986, 1989, 1991). I believe others have shown that there are good reasons for rejecting this view (Bratman 1987; Mele 1987, 1992). Though an A-ing’s being intentional requires that it be suitably related to some sort of intention (e.g., an intention to try to A), it does not require an intention to A. Plausibly, the same is true of intentional omission (see Clarke 2010). In saying that an agent who is prevented from forming an intention to omit to A may be unable to intentionally omit to A, I do not mean to suggest that intentionally omitting to A requires intending to omit to A (what one might think of as a “simple view” of intentional omission). But since any intention in virtue of which Casper’s omitting to decide to press the Bad button might be intentional could be blocked by further, fairly trivial modifications to the case, this is not an issue I intend to make any hay of here.
This example comes from Bratman (1987, p. 123).
Here it is worth noting that typical examples of nonintentional action mostly involve side-effects of actions performed intentionally: a runner who wears down the soles of her shoes in the course of running a marathon; a sniper who alerts the enemy to his presence in the course of shooting at his target (Harman 1976, p. 433); a dentist who inflicts pain upon her patient in the course of performing a needed medical procedure (Mele and Sverdlik 1996, p. 274). As such, they are only indirectly within an agent’s control. Though these nonintentional actions are indeed performed voluntarily, their voluntariness derives from their relation to other, intentional actions, which are within the agent’s direct voluntary control. By contrast, there is nothing else an agent needs to do in order to knowingly and voluntarily omit to perform some action; he simply omits to do so. (This is not to say that omitting to A entails knowingly and voluntarily omitting to A. Certainly there are other conditions that must be met in order for an agent who is omitting to A to be knowingly and voluntarily omitting to A—namely, (i) that the agent is aware he is omitting to A and (ii) that omitting to A is within his voluntary control. The point here is that there is nothing else that he needs to do in order for his omitting to A to count as a case of knowingly and voluntarily omitting to A.) This potentially suggests the following asymmetry between nonintentional actions and omissions: Whereas nonintentional actions are only indirectly within an agent’s voluntary control, nonintentional omissions are (or at least can be) within an agent’s direct voluntary control.
No doubt McKenna would maintain that, just as with deciding not to press the Bad button, one could describe the case in such a way that simply omitting to decide to press the Bad button was not a deliberatively significant alternative—namely, by stipulating that Casper would not have considered this to be a relevant option. But, just as with deciding not to press the Bad button, the problem with this response is that, even according to McKenna’s own view, an alternative’s being deliberatively significant is a function of what an agent ought to find reasonable (or relevant), not what an agent in fact finds reasonable (or relevant). It is always reasonable for an agent to consider not doing that which she knows to be wrong as an alternative to doing it.
Some readers may observe a general resemblance between the criticism of the limited-blockage strategy developed in this paper and Ginet’s (2002) response to a Frankfurt-style case offered by Pereboom (2001) called “Tax Evasion.” Both maintain that agents in these cases had robust alternative possibilities having to do with their ability to have omitted to act as they did. There are at least two ways, however, in which my argument differs significantly from Ginet’s. First, Ginet’s response pushes the so-called “timing worry” that faces a number of Frankfurt-style cases. He argues that, although the agent in Tax Evasion could not have avoided deciding to cheat on his taxes, it was possible for the agent to have refrained from making that decision at the time that he did (and so been forced to make the decision at a slightly later time). Responses of this sort apply only to cases in which there are ensuring conditions in place to guarantee that the agent cannot avoid making the decision he actually makes. Thus, it cannot be applied to limited-blockage cases (such as Brain Malfunction), which are meant to allow agents a wide range of (nonrobust) alternatives to deciding and acting as they actually did (let alone the time at which they made the decisions). Second, and more important, Ginet’s response accepts Pereboom’s assumption that a robust alternative must be (or at least involve) an intentional action (viz., a “willing”). He argues that the agent in Tax Evasion could have refrained from deciding at t 1 to cheat on the grounds that the agent could have done something else (brought about a different event) at that time. A central part of the version of the flicker strategy I develop in this paper, however, involves rejecting the assumption that an alternative must be either an action or at least intentional (in the case of omissions) in order to be robust.
Whether Brain Malfunction, so modified, would still qualify as a limited-blockage example depends on whether it is an essential feature of cases of this sort that agents have access to a wide range of alternative possibilities (“oodles and oodles” of them, as McKenna puts it). If not—if the sole defining characteristic of these cases is that they eliminate all and only robust alternatives—then, while such a version of Brain Malfunction would technically count as a limited-blockage example, it would be indistinguishable in effect from other modified Frankfurt-style cases (just as, when dealing with a barrel of all red apples, a policy of removing all the apples and a policy of removing all and only the red apples both result in an empty barrel).
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Achnowledgments
I wish to thank Al Mele, Michael McKenna, John Fischer, Travis Rodgers, and an anonymous referee for this journal for their many helpful comments. A shortened version of this paper was presented at the 2012 Pacific Divisional Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I am grateful to my audience there—and especially to my commentator, Ben Mitchell-Yellin—for their feedback.
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Robinson, M. The limits of limited-blockage Frankfurt-style cases. Philos Stud 169, 429–446 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0190-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0190-y