Moral responsibility and buffered alternatives

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 126-145

  Hunt, David P ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34249906840     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4975.2005.00109.x     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Harry G. Frankfurt, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," Journal of Philosophy 66 (December 4, 1969), 829-39.
2. David Widerker is particularly notable for deploying this sort of dilemma against the Frankfurtian-for example, in his "Libertarianism and Frankfurt's Attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," Philosophical Review 104 (April 1995), 247-61.
3. See also Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 142-43.
4. For Fischer, see his The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), chap. 7;
5. for Stump, see her "Libertarian Freedom and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," in Faith, Freedom and Rationality, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder and Jeff Jordan (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 73-88.
6. John Martin Fischer, "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility," Ethics 110 (1999), 113.
7. For a similar assessment of the dialectical situation, see Derk Pereboom, "Source Incompatibilism and Alternative Possibilities," in Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, ed. David Widerker and Michael McKenna (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Pub. Ltd., 2003), 190-93.
8. I first presented this alternative to the standard Frankfurt counterexample in "Moral Responsibility and Unavoidable Action," Philosophical Studies 97 (January (II) 2000), 195-227.
9. In "Freedom, Foreknowledge and Frankfurt," in Widerker and McKenna, pp. 159-83, I develop such counterexamples in greater detail, referring to the non-counterfactual mechanisms at work in them as "passive alternative-eliminators." John Fischer, however, has dubbed them "blockage cases," and the name has stuck.
10. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. II, chap. XXI, section 10.
11. Others who endorse this strategy include Michael Zimmerman, whose "The Moral Significance of Alternate Possibilities" features a counterexample modeled closely on my own, and Michael McKenna, who develops and defends a variation on my example (he calls it "limited blockage") in "Robustness, Control, and the Demand for Morally Significant Alternatives: Frankfurt Examples with Oodles and Oodles of Alternatives." Both these papers may be found in Widerker and McKenna, pp. 301-25 and pp. 201-17, respectively.
12. John Fischer has also given qualified support to the blockage approach, while astutely identifying some of its vulnerabilities in his "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility." Another counterexample that is often treated as a species of blockage, though it is significantly different from the kind of example I offer, is Al Mele and David Robb's much-discussed " preemption" case, first presented in "Rescuing Frankfurt-Style Cases," Philosophical Review 107 (1998), 97-112.
13. Robert Kane distinguishes the two species of blockage by calling the Hunt cases "pure blockage" and the Mele/Robb cases "modified blockage"; see his "Responsibility, Indeterminism and Frankfurt-Style Cases: A Reply to Mele and Robb," in Widerker and McKenna, pp. 91-105.
14. Yet another kind of counterexample associated with blockage is divine foreknowledge-or so I argue in "Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt," also in Widerker and McKenna, pp. 159-83.
15. John Martin Fischer, "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility";
16. Derk Pereboom, "Alternative Possibilities and Causal Histories," Philosophical Perspectives 14: Action and Freedom (2000), 119-37;
17. Robert Kane, "Responses to Bernard Berofsky, John Martin Fischer and Galen Strawson," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (2000), 157-67;
18. David Widerker, "Theological Fatalism and Frankfurt Counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," Faith and Philosophy 17 (April 2000), 249-54.
19. Al Mele and David Robb offer a vigorous defense against this charge in "Bbs, Magnets and Seesaws: The Metaphysics of Frankfurt-Style Cases," in Widerker and McKenna, pp. 127-38.
20. See Pereboom's Living without Free Will, pp. 18-37.
21. Peter van Inwagen, "When Is the Will Free?" reprinted in Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will, ed. Timothy O'Connor (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 219-38.
22. For an example of the first, see Eleonore Stump, "Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility: The Flicker of Freedom," Journal of Ethics 3 (1999), 299-324;
23. for an example of the second, see John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
24. Living without Free Will, 18-22.