Why Frankfurt examples beg the question

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 540-547

  Woodward, P A ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84883766022     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9833.00156     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), hereafter "F&R." All references to F&R are to this volume.
2. See Bernard Berofsky, ed., Free Will and Determinism (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 8.
3. See, for example, F&R, 29ff. These examples are named for their inventor, Harry Frankfurt, who presented them in his paper "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility" (Journal of Philosophy 66 [1969]: 829-39).
4. I am assuming here that the intervention of the other agent severs the process that leads to the performance of the action from the process that leads, unwittingly, to the intervention of the other agent. In making this assumption I am following Alan Donagan's discussion of novus actus interveniens (see his The Theory of Morality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977], 44ff). In that discussion Donagan cites the "general principle of the traditional legal doctrine of tort, that 'the free, deliberate and informed act or omission of a human being, intended to produce the consequence that is produced, negatives causal connection.'" (Donagan quotes H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honoré, Causation in the Law [Oxford: Clarendon, 1959], 129.)
5. John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), hereafter "Fischer." All page references to Fischer are to this volume.
6. The three versions of the strategy that are not Fischer's can be found in the following publications: Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (New York: Clarendon Press, 1983), 166-80
7. William Rowe, Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 75-93
8. and Margery Bedford Naylor, "Frankfurt on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities," Philosophical Studies 46 (1984): 249-58.