188 Seven Views of Contemporary Compatibilism
the exercising of the relevant capacities, skills, talents, and so on. (Nelkin,
2011: 66)Nelkin maintains that in a typical Frankfurt example involving blameworthy
action when a character like Jones acts on his own and Black remains inactive,
Jones retains the ability to do otherwise. Why? Because Black remains inactive
when Jones acts, and so Jones retains the relevant abilities, and nothing actually
interferes with them. Nelkin explains that the ability at issue here is not to be
confused with the more permissive notion of a general capacity, which clearly a
person can retain even when something is actually preventing her from exercis-
ing it—such as the ability to type even when on a desert island with no key-
boards about (67). So, Nelkin contends, there is a more finely specified notion of
ability beyond a mere general capacity that agents retain in Frankfurt examples,
and if they retain this ability, they retain leeway freedom. In particular, “they
have the skills, talents, and knowledge, but they also have unimpeded use of
their bodies and uncluttered piers in their sights” (67). Moreover, Nelkin notes,
getting to the heart of her disagreement with defenders of Frankfurt’s argument,
“The circumstances provide all that they might need to act [otherwise], but for a
counterfactual intervener” (67 [our brackets]).
We will not consider here the dispute between Nelkin and Frankfurt defend-
ers (see our brief assessment of the controversy in Section 5.5). Instead, consider
the distinct question as to whether Nelkin’s notion of ability is compatible with
determinism. Taking up this question (2011: 72–6), Nelkin explains that what it
amounts to is whether, under the assumption of determinism, when an agent per-
formed an action, determinism would interfere with her doing otherwise (74). To
this, Nelkin retorts that it would be no more interfering than indeterminism
would be (74–5). She then pursues a novel tactic, first advanced by Ned Markho-
sian (1999), to defeat the impression that determinism should be thought of as
interfering at all. Nelkin argues that agents as substances can be causes, and this
is compatible with determinism (Chapter 4).^3 This, Nelkin contends, helps to
dispel the impression that an agent’s being determined to do A interferes with
her ability to do something other than A (171).
It is unclear, however, that Nelkin’s appeal to agents as substance causes in
deterministic contexts is adequate to show how an agent is able to do otherwise
and, in the context of Nelkin’s own treatment, how it is that an agent is not
impeded from her doing otherwise. It is plausible on Nelkin’s agentcausal pro-
posal that determinism should not be thought of as forcing or impeding an agent
in her acting as she is actually causally determined to act. But granting Nelkin’s
agent-causal thesis, when an agent agent- causes her doing A on the supposition
of determinism, it remains true that there are prior causes determining her to
agent- cause her act of A- ing. So, it would seem true that in some sense she is
impeded from doing anything other than A. We leave this as a question that is
worth pursuing.
Finally, we turn briefly to the question of whether Wolf ’s and Nelkin’s account
of praiseworthiness can withstand the challenges of source incompatibilism.