Alternative Possibilities and Frankfurt Cases 1233 Against Tax Evasion, Carlos Moya (2011) objects that the usual standards for exempt-
ing alternatives are not in place in Frankfurt examples:
In normal circumstances, with no device lurking, the standards for exempting
alternatives would have risen to deciding not to evade taxes and not evading them;
merely attending to moral reasons would not have been enough; but since Joe
could not have decided and acted that way, the standards lower to the next best
action he could perform in order to fulfill his moral duties, which so becomes an
exempting alternative. (2011: 17)
Pereboom (2014) replies that the feature of the context that Moya claims to alter the
standard from the usual one is the unavailability of what would under normal circum-
stances be an exempting alternative. This conjecture, he argues, is itself motivated by
the alternative- possibilities requirement, which is in contention. The idea is that
Moya’s justification is not independent of this requirement, and so his proposal may
not be a satisfying response.
Michael Robinson (2012) develops a further way to resist Pereboom’s example by
relying upon the Dilemma Defense, but also borrowing from the Flicker Defense. His
idea is that, in keeping with the Dilemma Defense, agents cannot be assumed to be
causally determined prior to acting freely, and that in the absence of causal determina-
tion, an agent will always have a robust alternative, identified at the initial moment of
free action as an alternative that is open to the agent and of which she is reasonably
aware. Robinson concludes that, whenever an agent acts freely, it is always up to her
not to act on her own as she actually does, and this openness is robust, since she will
be aware that by not acting as she does, she’ll not be acting wrongly. Pereboom’s
response would invoke the specification that for Joe even to begin to choose other-
wise would require his greater attentiveness to the moral reasons, and that this is con-
sistent with his not being causally determined, since he could freely choose to become
more attentive.
4 This section is a shortened version of Pereboom (2012a), a slightly revised version of
which is included in Pereboom (2014: chapter 1).
5 Here, Pereboom revises the example involving Adam relative to Pereboom (2012a;
2014) due to a helpful comment by Austin Duggan.