Alternative Possibilities and Frankfurt Cases 121or prevents the exercise of this power to refrain (Wolf, 1990: 110; Nelkin,
2011: 66–8).
The leeway incompatibilist is apt to raise the following objection. Due to the
intervention set- up it seems not to be up to the agent exercise the interference-
free ability successfully at the relevant time, and whether this is required for
moral responsibility would seem to be what’s at issue between leeway and
source theorists (Clarke, 2009). The controversy between these opposing sides is
whether the agent has access to an exempting alternative possibility, and this is
highlighted in Widerker’s W- Defense. Despite possessing an interference- free
ability to refrain, the agent in the Frankfurt case would appear to lack access to
this exempting alternative. If when he decides to kill Smith it’s not up to Jones
to successfully exercise his interference- free ability to refrain from so deciding,
it’s plausibly not up to him to avoid the blameworthiness he actually incurs.
5.6. Final Words
Frankfurt’s challenge has had a massive and continuing influence on the free will
debate. Many participants in the debate, both compatibilist and incompatibilist,
are convinced by his argument. But a significant and vocal minority disagrees,
and for these theorists the intuition that blameworthiness requires access to an
exempting alternative remains strong.
The fact that incompatibilists can and have accepted Frankfurt’s argument has
several interesting consequences for the free will debate. A resolute source
incompatibilism would diminish the importance of two historical differences of
opinion between incompatibilists and compatibilists (Kane, 1996: 58–9). One
such difference concerns whether “could have done otherwise” should be ana-
lyzed conditionally as the classical compatibilist does, for example, as “if she
had chosen otherwise she would have done otherwise.” As we saw in Chapter 3,
compatibilists have contended for the conditional analysis, incompatibilists have
argued against it. However, if whether an agent could have done otherwise is not
crucial to moral responsibility, then the status of this controversy loses signifi-
cance. The second controversy concerns the Consequence Argument. If whether
an agent could have done otherwise is not crucial to moral responsibility, how
the debate over this argument is resolved becomes less momentous.
A final point: As we’ve indicated, paradigmatic leeway incompatibilists
would advocate an indeterminist condition on moral responsibility only because,
as they see it, indeterminism is required for robust alternatives. Source incom-
patibilists would also hold that moral responsibility requires that the action’s
actual causal history have certain indeterministic features, and significantly, they
may in addition allow that alternative possibilities for action—not necessarily of
the robust sort—are entailed by the actual causal history having these features
(Della Rocca, 1998; Pereboom, 2001). Still, on any source incompatibilist view,
the aspect of the action that has the important role in explaining why an agent is
morally responsible is the nature of the actual causal history of the action, and
not the alternative possibilities.