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Agency without Avoidability: Defusing a New Threat to Frankfurt's Counterexample Strategy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Seth Shabo
Seth Shabo*
Affiliation:
University of Delaware, Newark, DE19716, USA
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Extract

Many believe that we are not morally responsible for what we cannot help doing. Call this ‘the Traditional View of Responsible Agency.’ Some forty years ago, Harry Frankfurt (1969) challenged this view, thereby initiating a new stage of the free-will debate. In contrast to the previous stage, in which debate centered on how best to accommodate the Traditional View, contemporary theorists have focused on whether this view should be accepted at all. If the link between moral responsibility and avoidability is severed, an important threat to compatibilism is neutralized.

In the wake of Frankfurt's challenge, a tremendous literature has sprung up, with many ingenious responses matched by equally thoughtful extensions of Frankfurt's original argument. Quite recently, an altogether new line of response has been proposed. This new approach, versions of which have been advanced by Maria Alvarez (2009) and Helen Steward (2009), attempts to support the Traditional View indirectly, by appealing to the conditions for action, rather than to the conditions for moral responsibility per se.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 505 - 522
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2011

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank John Fischer for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for detailed feedback and for suggestions that resulted in improvements to the manuscript.

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