108 Alternative Possibilities and Frankfurt Cases
Robustness: For an agent to have a robust alternative to her immoral action
A, that is, an alternative relevant per se to explaining why she is blamewor-
thy for performing A, it must be that(i) she instead could have voluntarily acted or refrained from acting as a
result of which she would be blameless, and
(ii) for at least one such exempting acting or refraining, she understood (at
some level) that she could so voluntarily act or refrain, and that if she
voluntarily so acted or refrained she would then be, or would likely be,
blameless. (Pereboom, 2014: 13)The Frankfurt defender’s response to the flicker defense is that Frankfurt exam-
ples can be constructed which, although they feature an alternative possibility,
that alternative possibility is not robust, and thus cannot serve to explain the
agent’s moral responsibility for her action. The resulting source view opposes,
specifically, the following version of PAP:
(PAP- Robust) An action is free in the sense required for moral responsib-
ility only if the agent has access to a robust alternative to that action.In addition, we can now characterize leeway views, whether compatibilist or
incompatibilist, as those that affirm that for an agent to be blameworthy for an
action, she must have available to her a robust alternative possibility, that is, one
that satisfies Robustness. Source views, by contrast, deny this. The leeway
incompatibilist, whose position will feature prominently in the discussion that
follows, holds in addition that the reason causal determination precludes moral
responsibility is that it rules out alternative possibilities altogether, but most
importantly, those of the robust sort.
5.3. The Dilemma Defense
The Dilemma Defense was initially suggested by Robert Kane and then systemat-
ically developed by Widerker (Kane, 1985: 51, 1996: 142–4, 191–2; Widerker,
1995: 247–61; cf. Ginet, 1996). It’s an objection raised from the point of view of
the leeway libertarian in particular. Here is Widerker’s version: For any Frankfurt
example, if causal determinism is assumed to hold in the actual sequence that
results in the action, then no libertarian can be expected to have the intuition that
the agent is morally responsible—it’s ruled out by the nature of the actual causal
history of the action. If, on the other hand, indeterminism in the actual sequence
is presupposed, the scenario will not serve the Frankfurt defender’s purpose, for
any such case will fall to a dilemma. In Frankfurt examples the actual situation
will feature a prior sign, such as Jones’s blush, that signals the fact that the inter-
vention is not required. If the prior sign causally determined the action, or if it
were associated with some factor that did, the intervener’s (or his device’s) pre-
dictive ability could be explained. However, then the libertarian, again, would not