Capacities and Counterfactuals: A Reply to Haji and McKenna

Dialectica 66 (4):607-620 (2012)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In a recent paper, Ishtiyaque Haji and Michael McKenna argue that my attack on Frankfurt-style cases fails. I had argued that we cannot be confident that agents in these cases retain their responsibility-underwriting capacities, because what capacities an agent has can depend on features of the world external to her, including merely counterfactual interveners. Haji and McKenna argue that only when an intervention is actual does the agent gain or lose a capacity. Here I demonstrate that this claim is false: capacities are dispositions that can be constituted by features of the environment that are currently inactive. I also reply to two other objections: that my argument begs the question against historical accounts of moral responsibility and that it leaves the very locus of free action, our mental acts, untouched

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-03-01

Downloads
66 (#222,838)

6 months
3 (#447,120)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Neil Levy
Macquarie University

Citations of this work

Countering Cova: Frankfurt-Style Cases are Still Broken.Neil Levy - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (3):523-527.
Frankfurt in Fake Barn Country.Neil Levy - 2014 - Metaphilosophy 45 (4-5):529-542.
Leeway Compatibilism and Frankfurt‐Style Cases.Yishai Cohen - 2016 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (2):89-98.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The extended mind.Andy Clark & David J. Chalmers - 1998 - Analysis 58 (1):7-19.
Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility.John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza - 1998 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Mark Ravizza.
Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1969 - Journal of Philosophy 66 (23):829-839.
The Significance of Free Will.Robert Kane - 1996 - New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.

View all 19 references / Add more references