Alternative Possibilities and Frankfurt Cases 103(PAP) An action is free in the sense required for moral responsibility only if
the agent could have done otherwise than she actually did.Again, this principle was generally accepted into the 1960s.
But Frankfurt disagreed. His challenge to the alternative- possibilities require-
ment involves, first of all, examples in which an agent considers performing
some action, but a backup, such as a neuroscientist, is concerned that she will
not come through. So if she were to manifest an indication that she will not or
might not perform the action, the neuroscientist would intervene and make her
perform the action anyway. But as things actually go, the neuroscientist remains
idle, since the agent performs the action on her own. Here is a version of Frank-
furt’s original example (Sartorio, 2016):
A neuroscientist, Black, wants Jones to perform a certain action. Black is
prepared to go to considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers to avoid
showing his hand unnecessarily. So he waits until Jones is about to make up
his mind what to do, and he does nothing unless it is clear to him (Black is
an excellent judge of such things) that Jones is going to decide to do some-
thing other than what he wants him to do. If it were to become clear that
Jones is going to decide to do something else, Black would take effective
steps to ensure that Jones decides to do what he wants him to do, by directly
manipulating the relevant processes in Jones’s brain. As it turns out, Black
never has to show his hand because Jones, for reasons of his own, decides to
perform the very action Black wants him to perform.The idea is that even though Jones could not have avoided the action he per-
forms, he is still intuitively morally responsible for this action. After all, he did it
on his own and Black never intervened.
In Frankfurt’s diagnosis, this sort of example illustrates a distinction between
two types of factors: factors that cause or causally explain the action, and factors
that contribute to making the action inevitable even though they do not cause or
causally explain the action (Frankfurt, 1969; Sartorio, 2016). In the example
above, Black’s intentions contribute to making the action inevitable, but they do
not cause or causally explain the action, since Black ends up not doing anything
at all to produce the action. The factors that cause and causally explain the action
are instead the ordinary ones, such as the agent’s reasons and deliberation.
Frankfurt argued that the reason the alternative- possibilities requirement
seemed initially plausible is that we tend to conflate the two kinds of factors.
When we think about cases in which an agent lacks the ability to do otherwise,
we tend to assume that the factors that make the action inevitable are also those
that cause and causally explain the action. Frankfurt examples are unusual cases
in which these two types of factors come apart, and instructively so. In such
cases the action is caused and can be causally explained by ordinary factors such
as deliberation and sensitivity to reasons, while factors that saliently make the
action inevitable are causally idle (Frankfurt, 1969; Sartorio, 2016).