Moral responsibility without alternative possibilities

A standard strategy for trying to show false the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) – the principle that alternative possibilities for action are required for moral responsibility – is what has come to be known as a Frankfurt-style counterexample or a Frankfurt story, after Harry Frankfurt’s well-known kind of counterexample to PAP. The author proposed a Frankfurt story which is immune to the criticism of David Widerker’s. It is a revised version of a Frankfurt story presented earlier by John Martin Fischer. Fischer’s own example, like most Frankfurt stories, is vague about how the fictional coercive mechanism works and what it operates on; but for purposes of examining Widerker’s argument, it helps to spell out the details of the coercive mechanism and to consider the theory of mind that a Frankfurt story presupposes. For that reason, he revised Fischer’s example to make the operation of the coercive mechanism clearer.

© Routledge, 2019.