Moral responsibility and unavoidabll action

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 97, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 195-227

  Hunt, David P ^a  

^a WHITTIER COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 33748850945     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1018331202006     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Harry Frankfurt, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," Journal of Philosophy 66 (December 4, 1969), pp. 829-839.
2. Frankfurt H. Journal of Philosophy Ibid., p. 829.
3. Frankfurt's challenge is contained in "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," where he notes (p. 835, n. 2) that a similar argument had been formulated in lectures by Nozick.
4. For Fischer's contributions, see especially his "Responsibility and Control," Journal of Philosophy 79 (January 1982), pp. 24-40,
5. and recent book, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control, Aristotelian Society Series, v. 14 (Oxford, UK & Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994).
6. David Blumenfeld, "The Principle of Alternate Possibilities," Journal of Philosophy 68 (June 3, 1971), p. 339.
7. "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," p. 830.
8. "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility", Ibid.
9. "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility", Ibid., p. 835.
10. This is why James W. Lamb appears to me to achieve at most a hollow victory against Frankfurt et al. in his "Evaluative Compatibilism and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities," Journal of Philosophy 90 (October 1993), pp. 517-527. His "weak principle of alternate possibilities" is essentially PAP+ minus its parenthetical clause: "the thesis that a person is morally responsible for doing something only if at some time there is something he could have avoided doing" (p. 527). So far as this principle goes, Jones might be morally responsible for murdering Smith even though he faced only one alternate possibility in his entire life - say, at his first birthday party when he sucked on the black jelly bean but could have sucked on the pink one instead. But if Jones is morally responsible for murdering Smith given this single alternate possibility, he is surely morally responsible for murdering Smith when this possibility is subtracted from the situation - because it can't possibly be relevant to his responsibility for murdering Smith that he could have sucked a differently colored jelly bean on his first birthday. Though Lamb's weak principle of alternate possibilities seems so weak that it can't possibly sustain the connection between alternate possibilities and moral responsibility, it is worth noting that the counterexamples I ultimately develop against PAP are equally damaging to his weak principle as well.
11. This amendment is suggested in Blumenfeld, op. cit., and in Robert Cummins, "Could Have Done Otherwise," Personalist 60 (October 1979), pp. 411-414. Here, and in the principle referenced in footnote 10, I have supplied the contrapositive of the formula actually employed by the authors, in order to make the wording more comparable with that of PAP.
12. This is Frankfurt's own suggestion, in "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," pp. 838-839, for what remains true once PAP is abandoned. See footnote 9.
13. Since the content of PAP gets filled in differently by different theories of moral responsibility, this part of the Frankfurt scenario must be left suitably vague, lest Frankfurt's argument defeat PAP for one theory but not for others. Except for its tolerance of unavoidability, a good Frankfurt scenario should be neutral between competing theories of moral responsibility.
14. Frankfurt himself, in a more recent essay, characterizes what I am calling a 'Frankfurt scenario' in the following terms: "The distinctively potent element in this sort of counterexample to PAP is a certain kind of overdetermination, which involves a sequential fail-safe arrangement such that one causally sufficient factor functions exclusively as backup for another. The arrangement ensures that a certain effect will be brought about by one or the other of the two casual factors, but not by both together. Thus the backup factor may contribute nothing whatever to bringing about the effect whose occurrence it guarantees." See "What We Are Morally Responsible For," in How Many Question ? Essays in Honor of Sidney Morgenbesser, ed. Leigh S. Cauman, Isaac Levi, Charles Parsons, and Robert Schwartz (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982).
15. "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," p. 837.
16. David Widerker, "Libertarianism and Frankfurt's Attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," Philosophical Review 104 (April 1995), pp. 248-249.
17. Widerker D. Philosophical Review Ibid., p. 251.
18. David Widerker offers a similar argument in "Libertarianism and Frankfurt's Attack on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities."
19. Widerker, "Libertarian Freedom and the Avoidability of Decisions," and Fischer, "Libertarianism and Avoidability: A Reply to Widerker," both in Faith and Philosophy 12 (January 1995), pp. 113-125.
20. discuss this exchange in "Frankfurt Counterexamples: Some Comments on the Widerker-Fischer Debate," Faith and Philosophy 13 (July 1996), pp. 395-401.
21. Robert Heinamann, in "Incompatibilism without the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (September 1986), pp. 266-276, may be an exception - but it's not clear that the sense of evitability and inevitability at work in his argument is the one that is relevant to moral responsibility.
22. Peter van Inwagen, "Ability and Responsibility," Philosophical Review 87 (April 1978), pp. 201-224.
23. William L. Rowe, "Two Concepts of Freedom," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 61 (1987), pp. 43-64.
24. A similar approach, which does not appeal to agent-causation but still fits the general contours of Rowe's line, is taken by Margery Bedford Naylor in "Frankfurt on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities," Philosophical Studies 46 (September 1984), pp. 249-258.
25. According to Naylor, "Frankfurt's case is one in which it is entirely up to Jones whether or not to do A on his own but not entirely up to him whether or not to do A" (p. 252). Naylor argues that this is compatible with Jones's moral responsibility under the terms of PAP. The reason is that Jones is responsible, not for murdering Smith, but for murdering (choosing to murder) Smith on his own. The latter is not unavoidable: were Jones to trigger the mechanism he would thereby gain access to an alternative possibility, namely, murdering (choosing to murder) Smith under coercion from the mechanism. This is the morally relevant alternative, and its availability shows PAP to be undefeated by Frankfurt's counterargument.
26. The Metaphysics of Free Will, p. 141.
27. The Metaphysics of Free Will Ibid., pp. 134-147.
28. The Metaphysics of Free Will Ibid., p. 144.
29. Or change the example to make the complexity more evident. Suppose Jones has an obligation to make his child-support payments by t, but he deliberately refrains from doing so; nor does he at any point so much as take any steps in the direction of making the payments. Because of its complexity, any deviation toward making the child-support payments could be nipped in the bud by the mechanism, even if the deviation were reserved until the last moment. Yet Jones is morally responsible for his failure to pay child-support by t.
30. "Libertarianism and Frankfurt's Attack on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities," p. 253.
31. I want to thank Bill Rowe for bringing this objection to my attention.
32. Fischer himself, in The Metaphysics of Free Will, acknowledges the difficulty of defeating a determined PAPist: "a flicker theorist can point out that even the fanciest, most sophisticated Frankfurt-type example contains some alternative possibility, no matter how exiguous. And, indeed, it is hard to imagine how to construct any kind of non-question-begging example in which it is clear both that there are absolutely no such possibilities and the agent is morally responsible for his action" (p. 145).
33. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Bk. II, ch. XXI, § 10. Of course Locke has his own agenda here, which is not entirely the same as Frankfurt's.
34. Or suppose that he finds the other person's company desirable because he knows that his presence is guaranteed to annoy that person. Michael J. Zimmerman, in "Moral Responsibility, Freedom, and Alternate Possibilities," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 63 (1982), pp. 243-254,
35. offers this embellishment on Locke's example, adding that "Harry Frankfurt... bases his argument on cases essentially similar to the case just given" (p. 243).
36. I develop this example at greater length in my "Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt" (under consideration), presented in 1996 at the Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
37. "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," pp. 836-837.
38. On pp. 146-147 of The Metaphysics of Free Will, Fischer appears to suppose that the only way to rule out absolutely all alternatives to an action is by causally determining that action: "if we simply imagined that all the alternative possibilities disappear by positing the truth of causal determinism (together with incompatibilism about causal determinism and alternative possibilities), we appear to beg the issue to which the claim about the lack of a requirement of alternative possibilities for moral responsibility was designed to apply. Thus, the sort of metaphysical gridlock characteristic of Dialectical Stalemates again rears its ugly head." The three examples in this section, by avoiding causal determinism in the actual sequence, are supposed to break the stalemate.
39. The Metaphysics of Free Will Ibid., p. 829.
40. See the chapter "Fate" in Taylor's Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
41. For the superiority of theological over logical fatalism, see David Widerker, "Two Forms of Fatalism," in God, Foreknowledge and Freedom, ed. J.M. Fischer (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1989).
42. This is St. Augustine's solution to the problem of theological fatalism, as I argue in my "Augustine on Theological Fatalism: The Argument of De Libero Arbitrio III. 1-4," Medieval Philosophy and Theology 5 (1996), pp. 1-30.
43. defend its title to be the correct solution to this problem in my "Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt," op. cit.,
44. and in my "On Augustine's Way Out," Faith and Philosophy (forthcoming).
45. Finally, I challenge the relevance of purely theological solutions in my "What Is the Problem of Theological Fatalism?" International Philosophical Quarterly (March 1998), pp. 17-30.
46. The full argument for this position in Fischer's The Metaphysics of Free Will is considerably richer than I can deal with adequately here; see especially pp. 147-154. Fischer's position has shifted somewhat since his earlier "Responsibility and Control," Journal of Philosophy 89 (January 1982), pp. 24-40, where he could write: "the approach I am developing concedes this dissociation [of responsibility from control], but argues that the transition from this discussion to the compatibility of determinism with responsibility is a spurious transition. This is because the reason why determinism threatens responsibility is not that it undermines control, but because of the way in which it undermines control; determinism involves actual-sequence compulsion, and such compulsion might be incompatible with moral responsibility" (p. 34).
47. Much of this further argument in The Metaphysics of Free Will involves Fischer's account of "weak reasons-responsiveness" in ch. 8. Perhaps the rejection of PAP removes one obstacle to the compatibility of moral responsibility with a weakly reasons-responsive but causally determined actual sequence; but it by no means entails it.
48. I am especially grateful to William Rowe, Leslie Stapp, and David Widerker for their useful comments on an earlier draft.