Dialectical delicacies in the debate about freedom and alternative possibilities

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 101, Issue 6, 2004, Pages 299-314

  Haji, Ishtiyaque ^a   Mckenna, Michael ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY   (Canada)

^b ITHACA COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33747474597     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2004101616     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Philosophers as disparate as Hume and Kant shared this view. For just a few of the many contemporary examples, see Carl Ginet, On Action (New York: Cambridge, 1990);
2. Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford, 1996);
3. David Lewis, "Are We Free to Break the Laws?" Theoria, XLVII (1981): 113-21;
4. and Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (New York: Oxford, 1983). As we shall make clear, some argue that moral responsibility requires freedom, but not freedom involving alternative possibilities. A minority position challenges the very basic assumption that moral responsibility requires freedom.
5. For example, in Moral Responsibility and Persons (Philadelphia: Temple, 1992), Eugene Schlossberger rejects the view that responsibility is a function of the agent's acting freely - see, for example, pp. 4-7, 117-18.
6. Similar ideas are suggested in Nomy Arpaly's Unprincipled Virtue (New York: Oxford, 2003), pp. 149-79.
7. See Harry G. Frankfurt, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," this JOURNAL, LXVI, 23 (December 4, 1969): 829-39, on p. 829.
8. We shall focus upon Frankfurt's well-known approach. For an alternative, see, for instance, Michael J. Zimmerman, "Taking Luck Seriously," this JOURNAL, XCIX, 11 (November 2002): 553-76. Zimmerman argues that considerations of luck impugn PAP.
9. See Carl Ginet, "In Defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities: Why I Don't Find Frankfurt's Argument Convincing," Philosophical Perspectives, X (1996): 403-17;
10. and David Widerker, "Libertarianism and Frankfurt's Attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," Philosophical Review, CIV (1995): 247-61.
11. See Ishtiyaque Haji, Moral Appraisability (New York: Oxford, 1998), pp. 30-41;
12. David Hunt, "Moral Responsibility and Unavoidability," Philosophical Studies, XCVII (2000): 195-227
13. and "Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt," in Widerker and Michael McKenna, eds., Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 159-83;
14. Alfred Mele and David Robb, "Rescuing Frankfurt-Style Cases," Philosophical Review, CVII (1998): 97-11
15. and also "BBs, Magnets, and Seesaws: The Metaphysics of Frankfurt-Style Cases," in Widerker and McKenna, eds., pp. 127-37;
16. McKenna, "Robustness, Control, and the Demand for Morally Significant Alternatives," in Widerker and McKenna, eds., pp. 201-17;
17. Derk Pereboom, "Alternative Possibilities and Causal Histories," Philosophical Perspectives, XIV (2000): 119-37
18. Living without Free Will (New York: Cambridge, 2001)
19. and "Source Incompatibilism and Alternative Possibilities," in Widerker and McKenna, eds., pp. 185-99;
20. and Eleonore Stump, "Libertarian Freedom and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," in Daniel Howard-Snyder and Jeff Jordan, eds., Faith, Freedom, and Rationality: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), pp. 73-88
21. and "Moral Responsibility without Alternative Possibilities," in Widerker and McKenna, eds., pp. 139-58.
22. See John Martin Fischer, "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility," Ethics, CX (1999): 93-139
23. "Frankfurt-Type Examples and Semi-Compatibilism," in Kane, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (New York: Oxford, 2002), pp. 281-308
24. and "Free Will and Moral Responsibility," in David Copp, ed., Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (New York: Oxford, forthcoming).
25. We ignore here the yet further dialectical context in which the Frankfurt defender means to persuade the committed compatibilist. This context has its own unique problems, but it does not center on contesting the assumption that an agent in a Frankfurt example is determined. For the best compatibilist resistance to Frankfurt examples, see Bernard Berofsky's "Classical Compatibilism: Not Dead Yet," in Widerker and McKenna, eds., pp. 107-26.
26. In fact, several prominent incompatibilists are in precisely this position. See, for example, Hunt; Pereboom, "Determinism al Dente," Noûs, XXIX (1995): 21-15
27. and Living without Free Will; Stump, "Libertarian Freedom and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities";
28. and Linda Zagzebski, "Does Libertarian Freedom Require Alternative Possibilities?" Philosophical Perspectives, XIV (2000): 231-48.
29. "Ultimate Responsibility and Dumb Luck," Social Philosophy and Policy, XVI (1999): 274-93, here p. 283.
30. See Mele and Robb, "Rescuing Frankfurt-Style Cases," and also "BBs, Magnets, and Seesaws: The Metaphysics of Frankfurt-Style Cases."
31. See, for example, Ginet's 2001 addendum to his "In Defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," pp. 85-87.
32. "Free Will and Moral Responsibility," Journal of Ethics (forthcoming).
33. See also "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility," and "Frankfurt-Type Examples and Semi-Compatibilism."
34. "Free Will and Moral Responsibility."
35. Stewart Goetz has pressed Fischer in just this way - see his "Frankfurt-Style Counterexamples and Begging the Question," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXIX (forthcoming 2005).
36. See Fischer's reply in "Free Will and Moral Responsibility."
37. Some might insist that the presumption of the (alleged) irrelevance of the intervener in the case of a determined agent is weaker than in the case of the undetermined agent. In the case of the undetermined agent, assuming the intervener does rule out all robust alternatives, there will, minimally, be nonrobust alternatives (or morally insignificant alternatives), and these might be entailed by other conditions that are significant and necessary for moral responsibility (such as ultimacy). But this would be to shift the focus of the Frankfurt debate as most understand it. For a discussion of Frankfurt's argument in light of nonrobust alternatives, see Haji, "Flickers of Freedom, Obligation, and Responsibility," American Philosophical Quarterly, XL (2003): 287-302.
38. This challenge is especially poignant for Kane. He is hard to fit within the dialectical parties as we have sorted them out. On the one hand, Kane maintains that an alternative possibilities condition, an AP condition (a PAP-like condition), is only one of two conditions necessary for libertarian free will and moral responsibility. According to Kane, another is an ultimacy condition. Ultimacy requires that an agent's freely willed actions ultimately trace back to factors that originate in the agent and cannot be traced back to causally sufficient conditions obtaining independently of the agent (The Significance of Free Will, pp. 58-59).
39. Hence, it seems that Kane is a theorist who can insist upon the Broad Dialectical Situation. He can argue that there are grounds - the grounds of ultimacy - independent from considerations of alternative possibilities that could be used to establish the incompatibility of free will and determinism. However, Kane argues that ultimacy itself requires dual control (control over different courses of action) and that dual control entails alternative possibilities - "The Dual Regress of Free Will and the Role of Alternative Possibilities," Philosophical Perspectives, XIV (2000): 57-79. On our view of the dialectical terrain, if Kane wishes to do battle with the Frankfurt Defender within the Broad Dialectical Context, then he should reconsider his claim that ultimacy entails alternatives. If he is unwilling to concede this point, we believe that he is forced to argue with the Frankfurt Defender in a Narrow Dialectical Context.