Mesh, Reasons-Responsive, Leeway Theories 227by something close to a conditional specification after all. So suppose that an
agent acts badly, and the leeway compatibilist claims that despite being causally
determined, he could have refrained instead. On Vihvelin’s proposal, this is to
say that for some intrinsic property the agent had at the time of action t, and for
some time t′ after t, if he were in a test- case at t and tried to refrain and retained
that intrinsic property until time t′, then in a suitable proportion of these test
cases his trying to refrain and having the intrinsic property would be a complete
cause of his refraining. But just as on the conditional compatibilist proposal
above we can ask what happens if the agent cannot choose otherwise, we can
wonder what results if the agent lacks the ability to try. So suppose she can’t
actually try to refrain due to some psychological disorder, but in a suitable pro-
portion of test cases in which she does try, the refraining is caused in the right
way. Then Vihvelin’s analysis specifies that she has the narrow ability, even
though it’s intuitive that due to her disorder she doesn’t.
A further key feature of Vihvelin’s work is the set of criticisms of Frankfurt’s
attack on the alternative possibilities requirement for free will and moral
responsibility.
Vihvelin develops an original strategy to oppose Frankfurt’s argument. She
divides Frankfurt- style examples into two sorts: Bodyguard cases are those in which
the trigger for the neuroscientist’s intervention is the subject’s trying or beginning
to do otherwise than the action at issue—it’s something the agent does; while in
Preemptor cases the intervention is triggered by some event that occurs earlier than
trying or beginning to perform the action at issue, and it is not something the agent
does. Vihvelin argues that in all Bodyguard cases the agent has a relevant altern-
ative, namely the beginning or trying to do otherwise, while in Preemptor cases the
intervener will always be sufficiently remote so as to preserve the agent’s ability to
do otherwise. Many extant cases, we believe, fall to this dilemma.^22
Furthermore, according to Sartorio, the kind of example that Pereboom (2000,
2001, 2014) and Hunt (2000, 2005) have been developing since the late 1990s is
not impugned by either strategy (Sartorio classifies an example of this kind as a
Bodyguard case, Kittle as a Preemptor example). Again, its distinguishing fea-
tures are these: The trigger for intervention is a necessary condition for the
agent’s availing herself of any robust alternative possibility (without the inter-
vener’s device in place), while this trigger itself is not a robust alternative pos-
sibility (and the absence at any specific time of the cue for intervention in no
sense causally determines the action the agent actually performs). In response to
Vihvelin’s criticism of Bodyguard cases, the agent’s availing herself of the
necessary condition for not performing the action is not a robust alternative to
the action in question, for the reason that availing herself of that necessary con-
dition would not exempt her from responsibility for the action in question—it
would not have gotten her off the hook. (We discussed an example like this, due
to Pereboom, in detail in Chapter 5, Section 3.2.)
Vihvelin’s leeway compatibilist proposal is a detailed attempt to revive the
spirit of classical compatibilism. Further proposals of this sort are likely to
appear in the near future, and to become the focus of intense discussion.