Causal History Matters, but Not for Individuation

Introduction

In ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,’ Harry Frankfurt introduces a scenario aimed at showing that the having of alternative possibilities is not required for moral responsibility. According to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), an agent is morally responsible for her action only if she could have done otherwise; Frankfurt thinks his scenario shows that PAP is, in fact, false. Frankfurt also thinks that the denial of PAP gives credence to compatibilism, the thesis that an agent could both be causally determined in all her actions and yet be morally responsible.¹ Since its introduction, Frankfurt’s original example has generated a voluminous literature, including a plethora of other, more complicated, Frankfurt-style examples (FSEs). Commenting on the immense literature focused on FSEs, Kadri Vihvelin writes:

It is difficult to explain, to someone not working in this area, just how peculiar the situation is. On the one hand, Frankfurt stories, as they have come to be called, have had an impact in free will circles that is comparable to the impact of Gettier stories in epistemology. On the other hand, after over thirty years of debate and discussion, it is still controversial whether Frankfurt or any of his followers have succeeded in providing a genuine counterexample to PAP.²

By and large, most compatibilists have been willing to accept Frankfurt’s conclusion since it means that determinism would not rule out moral responsibility in virtue of ruling out alternative possibilities.³ As might be expected, incompatibilist appraisals of Frankfurt’s conclusion are much more varied. There are three major responses that incompatibilists give to FSEs. Some incompatibilists argue that FSEs only impugn PAP if they implicitly presuppose the truth of causal determinism, and thus beg the question against the incompatibilist.⁴ Other incompatibilists agree that PAP is false, but think that incompatibilism doesn’t require PAP. These incompatibilists think that the truth of causal determinism would rule out moral responsibility for some reason other than eliminating alternative possibilities.⁵ The third general incompatibilist response is to challenge FSEs directly and to argue that, contrary to Frankfurt’s claim, they do not show PAP to be false after all. John Martin Fischer has given the name ‘Flicker of Freedom Strategy’ to this third kind of response.⁶ According to the Flicker Strategy, closer inspection of FSEs shows there to be ineliminable differences between the actual and alternate scenario, as a result of which FSEs are not instances in which the agent truly lacks alternative possibilities. As Fischer puts it, ‘although the counterfactual interveners eliminate most alternative possibilities, arguably they do not eliminate all such possibilities: even in the Frankfurt-type cases, there seems to be a “flicker of freedom.”’⁷

Elsewhere, I have argued that the first two of these strategies fail, and have endorsed a version of the third strategy.⁸ In the present paper, I want to compare two different ways of developing this third strategy, showing why my favored version of this approach is preferable to another proposal recently defended by Gordon Pettit.⁹ (However, in the course of my argument, a brief discussion of the second strategy will also surface.) In ‘Moral Responsibility and the Ability to do Otherwise,’ Pettit sets out to defend PAP¹⁰ from FSEs via one form of the Flicker Strategy. In particular, Pettit assesses two facets of recent discussions surrounding FSEs, PAP and moral responsibility: ‘The first facet involves the issue of whether FSEs successfully describe situations lacking alternatives, and the second involves the significance of alternatives within FSEs, if there are any.’¹¹ I agree with Pettit’s overall evaluation of the first facet of the debate in that I think that FSEs are not scenarios in which all alternative possibilities are lacking (though I think there is reason to reject a contentious metaphysical principle that Pettit’s argument for the existence of alternative possibilities relies on). The heart of the debate about the Flicker Strategy focuses on the second facet Pettit mentions — namely, the significance of the remaining alternatives for moral responsibility. While I also agree with Pettit on his...