104 Alternative Possibilities and Frankfurt Cases
Illustrating and making intuitive the distinction between factors that make the
action inevitable and those that cause or causally explain it is one of the three
key putative lessons of Frankfurt examples. The two others involve the claim
that this distinction is relevant to the nature of moral responsibility in a particular
way. One of these is that because we have the intuition that Jones is morally
responsible, and access to alternatives is ruled out by factors that make the action
inevitable, access to alternatives turns out not to be a requirement for moral
responsibility. The other is a thesis about what is relevant to accounting for
moral responsibility, given that access to alternative possibilities is ruled out.
When we judge Jones morally responsible, we focus just on the actual causal
history of his action: what he does do, the reasons he has for doing it, and the
deliberative process by which he decides what to do on the basis of his reasons
(Frankfurt, 1969; McKenna, 2005b, 2008b; Widerker, 2003). McKenna formu-
lates a response to the W- Defense on the basis of this suggestion, which he calls
the L- Reply (2005b, 2008b):
A person’s moral responsibility concerns what she does do and her basis for
doing it, not what else she could have done. (2008b: 785)A profitable way to view this debate is as a contest between the W- Defense and
the L- Reply.^1 A role that Frankfurt examples have in this debate is to decide this
contest. In analytic philosophy more generally, standoffs of this sort often occur,
and one item one might find in the philosopher’s toolkit is an example that prom-
ises to occasion the intuition that will break the tie.
In the face of this challenge from Frankfurt examples, defenders of the
alternative- possibilities requirement will typically concede the first putative
lesson, the distinction between inevitability- occasioning and causal factors. But
they will not allow that this distinction is relevant to moral responsibility. They
claim instead that factors that make an action inevitable will rule out moral
responsibility even if they are not causally efficacious. Now, to be successful, a
Frankfurt example needs to (1) feature the ruling out of relevant alternative
possibilities by factors not also causally efficacious in the production of the
action; and to (2) generate the intuition that the agent in the example is morally
responsible. In general, when defenders of the alternative- possibilities require-
ment, after examining a proposed Frankfurt example carefully, do have the clear
intuition that the agent is morally responsible, they tend to argue that despite
initial impressions the example does feature a relevant alternative possibility
after all. When they don’t have this intuition, they contend that there is some
feature of the actual causal history of the action, such as the agent’s causal deter-
mination, that undermines this intuition in a principled way. In the remainder of
this chapter, we will see how these strategies play out in the more specific types
of objections that defenders of the alternative- possibilities requirement have
raised.