Alternative Possibilities and Frankfurt Cases 1055.1. Compatibilist and Incompatibilist Source Views
But first we want to make a point concerning how, after Frankfurt’s article,
various positions in the debate came to be classified. Early on, John Fischer
(1982, 1994) correctly pointed out that Frankfurt’s argument does not refute the
incompatibilist claim that moral responsibility requires that the actual causal
history of the action not be deterministic. For it leaves untouched the view that
moral responsibility requires that one’s action not actually result from a deter-
ministic causal process that traces back to factors beyond one’s control—back to
causal factors that one could not have produced, altered, or prevented. Note that
the above Frankfurt example does not specify that Jones’s action is causally
determined in this way. If it were specified that his choice is deterministically
produced by factors beyond his control, then at least for some the intuition that
he is morally responsible might fade away.
This reflection suggests an alternative requirement on the sort of free will
required for moral responsibility, one related to the L- Reply:
(Source) An action is free in the sense required for moral responsibility
only if its causal history, and in particular its causal source, is of an appro-
priate sort.Frankfurt’s own compatibilist version of a source account (to be examined in
Chapter 9) is one on which the agent’s will to perform the action is endorsed by
the agent’s second- order desires: she must not only will the action, but she must
want to will it. In this view, if the action has this sort of causal history, it will
have its source in the agent in such a way as to facilitate her moral responsibility
for it. And access to alternative possibilities is not required.
The source incompatibilist will affirm that part of what it is to be an appropri-
ate source of an action is that it not be causally determined by factors beyond the
agent’s control:
(Indeterminism) An action is free in the sense required for moral responsib-
ility only if it is not produced by a deterministic process that traces back to
causal factors beyond the agent’s control.A natural, causal interpretation of what it is for a factor to be beyond an agent’s
control is for it to be outside of her causal reach (Sartorio, 2015).
While leeway incompatibilists would also argue that the actual causal history
of a morally responsible action must be indeterministic, they maintain this is so
only because an indeterministic history is required to secure alternative possibil-
ities (e.g., Ginet, 1997, 2007). Source incompatibilists, by contrast, contend that
the role the indeterministic causal history plays in explaining why an agent is
morally responsible is independent of facts about alternative possibilities. On
their view, it’s that an indeterministic history allows the agent to be the source of
her actions in such a way that they are not causally determined by factors beyond
her control.