Abstract
Frankfurt’s famous counterexample strategy challenges the traditional association between moral responsibility and alternative possibilities. While this strategy remains controversial, it is now widely agreed that an adequate response to it must preserve an agent’s ability to do otherwise, and not the mere possibility, for only then is her alternative possibility sufficiently robust to ground her responsibility. Here, I defend a more stringent requirement for robustness. To have a robust alternative, I argue, the agent must have the right kind of ability, where the right kind is such that it is up to her whether she does otherwise. I argue that this kind of power attribution is epistemically conditioned. While a few writers have defended an epistemic condition for robustness, seeing this condition as a consequence of the relevant power attributions will provide much-needed support and clarification, while also illuminating the kind of ability in which free will consists.
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Notes
While not all compatibilists have followed Frankfurt in rejecting the avoidability requirement, a vast majority has. This goes for compatibilists like John Martin Fischer (1982, 1994, 1999; cf. Fischer and Ravizza 1998), who embrace Frankfurt’s challenge to PAP, as well as for compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett (1984) and R. Jay Wallace (1994), who reject the avoidability requirement (at least primarily) for their own reasons. A number of incompatibilists have endorsed Frankfurt’s challenge to PAP as well, including David Hunt (2000, 2005), Derk Pereboom (2001), Eleonore Stump (1996, 2003), and Linda Zagzebski (2000). These theorists all adopt what Fischer describes as an “actual-sequence approach” to moral responsibility.
In Fischer’s well-known phrase (1994, ch.7), an agent who lacks an enabling alternative has a mere “flicker of freedom,” as opposed to the full-blown freedom that could plausibly explain the agent’s moral responsibility.
But see Steward 2012, pp. 36–42 and Shabo 2013 for discussions of this type of power attribution. As for the revision to Fischer's condition for robustness, I have defended such a revision in Shabo 2013. However, I believe that stating the revision in terms of an epistemic condition, as I do here, has significant advantages. These include allowing for the argument I provide in section 3, showing that the epistemic condition is rooted in Fischer’s core insight about robust alternative possibilities (and not a further condition), more clearly illustrating the problem with views that neglect this condition (as I do in section 5), and drawing out a substantive implication of the revised condition for robustness (section 7).
I do not believe that this is the only important difference. In work in progress, I investigate another distinctive and overlooked feature of such power attributions in connection with the Problem of Luck for libertarians.
While the epistemic requirement undoubtedly has its supporters (see previous note), many who are sympathetic to the counterexample strategy and to Fischer’s adequacy condition have not expressly endorsed it. Significantly, this includes Fischer himself. And opponents of the counterexample strategy rarely address this alleged epistemic requirement, even when they accept Fischer’s condition (but see Franklin 2011 and Palmer 2011 for notable exceptions).
This type of response has been developed in two main ways. One version can be found in van Inwagen 1978, Naylor 1984, McKenna 1997, Wyma 1997, and Otsuka 1998, among others. The second version occurs in Kane 1985, p. 51, and is developed in Widerker 1995, Kane 1996, pp. 142–43, 191–92, and Ginet 1996. Characteristic of the first version is the thought that Jones could have begun or shown an inclination to do otherwise, thereby triggering Black’s intervention. The second version aims to preserve a robust alternative possibility by maintaining that Jones could have decided to do otherwise, Black’s presence notwithstanding, and that the ability to perform a different mental act constitutes a robust alternative possibility.
As Pereboom helpfully puts this point (2003, pp. 186–188), an adequate defense of the avoidability requirement must secure alternatives that are relevant per se to the agent’s moral responsibility, as opposed to merely being an indicator that the action is not deterministically caused, so that some other incompatibilist condition for responsibility is met.
According to van Inwagen’s “Promising Argument,” someone who knows that her two prospective actions have a roughly even objective probability will not be in a position to promise sincerely to adopt one course over the other, something she would presumably be in a position to do if she believed that she would be able to adopt that course when the time came (van Inwagen 2011). The argument’s conclusion is that, contrary to what libertarians maintain, we are not able, in the relevant sense, to perform causally undetermined actions. I discuss van Inwagen’s argument in work under consideration.
A third feature is that Alvarez’s response is not intended specifically as an incompatibilist defense of PAP; it is supposed to show that Jones’s action is relevantly avoidable on both the deterministic and the indeterministic horn of the dilemma (see Alvarez 2009, p. 62). My concern, however, is to show specifically that it fails on the indeterministic horn, in that it fails to secure a robust alternative (despite meeting Fischer’s existing condition for robustness). Hence I shall leave the deterministic horn to one side.
For a response to the controversial claim that action requires the power to refrain, see Capes 2012.
It must be stressed that the point is not simply that Gus does not understand how his not deciding at 3:14:59 to start pushing the button would result in his not pushing it; some outcomes may well be up to us even if we have a limited understanding of the processes by which they would come about. The point is, rather, that Gus does not understand that not deciding then to push the button would preclude his pushing it. His being unaware of this makes it especially clear that it is not up to him whether he pushes the button at 3:15, notwithstanding that the outcome depends on something that is up to him. Although the possibility of his merely “pushing” the button is an enabling possibility, it is not credible that, in virtue of this possibility, he has a choice about whether he pushes the button at 3:15.
Pereboom (2012, p. 301) has more recently offered a qualified condition, which requires only some suitable degree of “cognitive sensitivity” on the agent’s part. However, this difference is not important for the issue at hand, which is about whether the truth of the “should” claim is enough for robustness.
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Thanks are owed to John Fischer and to an anonymous referee for Acta Analytica for helpful comments on this manuscript.
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Shabo, S. Robustness Revised: Frankfurt Cases and the Right Kind of Power to Do Otherwise. Acta Anal 31, 89–106 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0266-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0266-8