Disputatio, Vol. IX, No. 45, October 2017
Received: 05/09/2017 Accepted: 02/11/2017
© 2017 Pablo Rychter. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License
Does Free Will Require
Alternative Possibilities?
Pablo Rychter
University of Valencia
BIBLID [0873-626X (2017) 45; pp. 131–146]
DOI: 10.1515/disp-2017-0001
Abstract
In this introductory study I discuss the notion of alternative possibilities and its relation to contemporary debates on free will and moral
responsibility. I focus on two issues: whether Frankfurt-style cases refute the principle of alternative possibilities, and whether alternative
possibilities are relevant to grounding free will and moral responsibility. With respect to the first issue, I consider three objections to
Frankfurt-syle cases: the flicker strategy, the dilemma defense, and
the objection from new dispositionalism. With respect to the second
issue, I consider the debate between Alternative Possibilities views and
Actual Sequence views, as framed by Carolina Sartorio in her Causation
and Free Will. I then explain how these two issues are relevant to the
papers included in this volume.
Keywords
Alternative possibilities, Frankfurt, actual sequence, free will, moral
responsibility.
1 Alternative possibilities and Frankfurt-style cases
Much of the recent, and not so recent, debate on free will and moral
responsibility has focused on the notion of alternative possibilities: on
whether an agent could have done otherwise than she actually did.
A central question in this area is whether alternative possibilities are
a necessary condition for free will. This was in fact the question
that motivated the II Blasco Disputatio, at which the papers collected
here were originally presented. In this introductory study, I intend
to clarify the notion of alternative possibilities and its relation to contemporary debates on free will and moral responsibility. I will focus
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132 Pablo Rychter
on two issues: whether Frankfurt-style cases refute the principle of
alternative possibilities, and whether alternative possibilities are relevant to grounding free will and moral responsibility.
Let us start by identifying the notions of free will and moral responsibility that are relevant to our central question (‘does free will
require alternative possibilities’) and to the discussions in this volume. The notion of moral responsibility that we are interested in
may be pinned down by its relations with the notion of desert. We say
that an agent, S, is morally responsible for A (and the consequences of
A) when it would be appropriate to blame or praise S for A (here we
can take A to be any ‘ordinary action’ involving bodily movements,
like shooting a gun, but also ‘mental actions’ like deciding or choosing
to shoot a gun, and even omissions like not shooting a gun). That is to
say, an agent deserves blame or praise only for that which she is morally responsible for. What does it take for an agent to be morally responsible in this sense? There are probably many relevant conditions
that should be mentioned even in a schematic answer to this question. However, for our present purposes, we can focus on just one: it
seems that S is morally responsible for A only if S enjoys some kind of
freedom in performing A; only if performing A is the result of S’s free
will. Thus, it seems initially plausible that enjoying some kind of free
will is a metaphysical condition on moral responsibility, although
those who think that we have no free will at all will either disagree
with this, or claim that, likewise, we are never morally responsible.
What does it take for an agent to enjoy free will? Again, there are
probably many relevant conditions that should be mentioned even
in a schematic answer to this question. For our present purposes,
though, we can focus only on those conditions that have to be met in
order to account for moral responsibility. That is to say, even if there
could be much more to be said about what freedom is (and about
whether it obtains or not), we need only focus on what is sometimes
called the free-will condition on moral responsibility or, alternatively, the
free will that is relevant to moral responsibility. It is this restricted notion
of free will that we have in mind when we ask our central question
of whether alternative possibilities are necessary for free will, and it
is the notion I will focus on in what follows.
Having identified the relevant notion of free will, let us turn now
to the notion of alternative possibilities. It seems initially plausible
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Does Free Will Require Alternative Possibilities? 133
that, in order for S to perform A freely, it must be possible for S to do
otherwise than A. That is, it must be possible for S not to perform A.
If S could not avoid doing A at all, S is not really free with respect to
A. This is the notion of alternative possibilities we are interested in,
and the plausible-sounding claim we are considering is the basis of
what Harry Frankfurt (1969) called the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP): ‘a person is morally responsible for what he has done only
if he could have done otherwise’. Unlike this formulation of PAP,
we are focusing on the free-will condition on moral responsibility,
rather than on moral responsibility itself, and our central question
is ‘are alternative possibilities a necessary condition on free will, as
it intuitively seems to be the case?’ Frankfurt famously argued that
they are not. His argument was based on what is commonly referred
to as a ‘Frankfurt-style scenario’ (FSC), which is a case with the
following basic features: an agent, Jones, performs A as a result of
his own reasoning and decision.1 However, unbeknownst to Jones,
there is a second agent, Black, who monitors Jones’ process of deliberation leading to A. Black is interested in Jones’ performing A and
so, if Black thought, as result of his monitoring of Jones’ process of
deliberation, that Jones was not going to perform A, he would have
intervened (using perhaps advanced neuro-scientific technology) to
cause Jones to perform A. However, Black prefers not to intervene
if it is not necessary and, as it happens, it is not. Jones performs
A through his own decision.2 About such a case, most people have
1 Here, again, we can take ‘A’ to range over overt actions, mental actions, and
omissions. Frankfurt’s original example seems to involve an ordinary action, but
later FSCs are built around mental actions, so that in these examples Black has control over Jones’ decisions and choices. Even if for ease of exposition I will sometimes focus on cases of the first sort, I take my discussion to apply equally to both.
2 Frankfurt’s original description of the case is as follows: ‘Suppose someone
—Black, let us say—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 about
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 something other than
what he wants him to do. If it does become clear that Jones is going to decide to
do something else, Black takes effective steps to ensure that Jones decides to do,
and that he does do, what he wants him to do’. (Frankfurt 1969: 835)
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134 Pablo Rychter
the following two intuitions: (i) Jones is morally responsible with
respect to A, and (ii) Jones could not have done otherwise. These
two intuitions, if taken at face value, would be enough to refute PAP
and to give a negative answer to our question of whether free will
requires alternative possibilities.
FSCs have been object of an intense and on-going debate that is
about to reach its fiftieth anniversary. In order to fully appreciate the
implications of FSCs for our understanding of free will and moral
responsibility, it is, in my opinion, useful to distinguish two questions: (i) do FSCs succeed as counterexamples to PAP? (ii) do FSCs
succeed in motivating an account of free will and moral responsibility in which alternative possibilities play no explanatory role? These
are, in my opinion, two independent and open questions, and I will
briefly consider each of them in the next two sections. My purpose
is not to offer a comprehensive discussion of the questions, but rather
to offer some hints that may be useful to the reader of the papers
included in this issue.
2 Do Frankfurt-style cases succeed in refuting PAP?
In order to address the question whether FSCs are successful counterexamples to PAP, it will be useful to consider the debate between
compatibilists and incompatibilists, i.e. between those who affirm and
those who deny that free will is compatible with the truth of causal
determinism, which for our present purposes we can define as the view
that the laws of nature, together with the present state of the world,
completely determine how things will be in the future. This is so
because PAP plays a prominent role in what may be called the master
argument for incompatibilism: (P1) An agent S is free with respect to
A only if S could have avoided doing A; (P2) If causal determinism is
true, nobody can avoid doing what they actually do (as it sometimes
said, what they actually do is a necessary consequence of the past and
the laws of nature). Therefore, (C) If determinism is true, nobody is
free with respect to anything. The fact that PAP is a premise of this
argument has two important consequences for our present discussion. On the one hand, it is clear that if FSCs succeed, a major argument for incompatibilism is compromised. On the other, in order
for FSCs to be dialectically appropriate against incompatibilism, they
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Does Free Will Require Alternative Possibilities? 135
must not rest too directly on views that an incompatibilist would
obviously reject.
With this background in mind we can now ask: do FSCs actually
refute PAP? In order to do so, our intuitive judgments about Jones
(that he is morally responsible for what he did, and that he could not
have done otherwise) should be true. But it has been argued on different grounds that they are not, and that, contrary to appearances,
Jones could have done otherwise. Let us briefly consider three arguments for this conclusion.
2.1 The flicker strategy
According to a first argument, even if Jones could not avoid doing
A, he could at least try or intend not to do A. In fact, one might think
that some such possibility is constitutive of FSCs: it is because of
Black’s sensitivity to such a possibility that he is able to tell whether
or not his intervention is necessary. In other words, it seems to be
part of a FSC that Jones could have behaved, in some respect, significantly differently from how he actually did: he could have behaved
in a way (perhaps by trying or intending not to do A) such that Black
would have judged that his intervention was needed. This becomes
clearer in those FSCs that, unlike Frankfurt’s original example, involve some prior sign of Jones’ subsequent behaviour. The prior sign is
an event in Jones’ deliberation process, which Black uses in order to
determine whether his intervention is needed or not. Its presence is
a reliable indicator that Jones will do A, and its absence by a suitable
time would have triggered Black’s intervention. In this kind of FSCs,
it is clear that, in a way, Jones could have done otherwise than he
actually did: he could have failed to give the prior sign and triggered
Black’s intervention. But then there was, after all, an alternative possibility open to him, and thus we do not have a counterexample to
PAP. For reasons that will be clear shortly, this argument is known
as the flicker strategy.
There are, in my view, two complementary answers to this argument. A first, straightforward answer goes like this: that Jones could
have tried to do otherwise (or fail to give the appropriate prior sign)
is of course a counterfactual possibility, but it is not an alternative possibility in the sense that is relevant to a defence of PAP. It is not a
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136 Pablo Rychter
scenario in which Jones does otherwise in the sense of doing other than
A. He only does otherwise in the sense of doing A by different means;
means that involve the intervention of Black. This is too weak a sense
of ‘doing otherwise’. What PAP arguably requires is that an agent be
able to do other than A, rather than just merely to do A by different
means. In my opinion, this straightforward reply is enough to resist
the present argument against the efficacy of FSCs. However, it can
be combined with the kind of reply developed by Fischer (1994) and
others since then. Fischer focuses on cases where Black’s intervention is triggered by the ‘presence of some involuntary sign, such as a
blush or twitch or even a complex neurophysiological pattern’, and
notes that, even if it is true that Jones could have shown this sign,
so showing that it is an alternative possibility, such alternative possibility is a mere ‘flicker of freedom’. Flickers of freedom like that
are not under the agent’s control and they are therefore not robust
enough as to ground attributions of moral responsibility (it would
be implausible to say that Jones is morally responsible for what he
did partly because he did not blush or show the relevant neurological pattern). It may be suggested that PAP should be understood as
requiring the existence of robust alternative possibilities, and so the
mere flickers of freedom that FSCs allow for are not enough to save
PAP from refutation. Part of the literature on FSCs deals with the
issue of what it takes for an alternative possibility to be robust in the
required sense. In my opinion, most of that discussion is relevant for
the question of what grounds free will (to be addressed in the next
section) and can be bypassed here. For the present purposes we can
say, following the suggestion of our first straightforward answer to
the argument, that a counterfactual possibility is a robust alternative
to doing A (and thus relevant to the truth of PAP, if the principle is
understood as suggested above) if it is a possibility of failing to do A.
2.2 The dilemma defence
A second argument against the efficacy of FSCs as counterexamples
to PAP is what is sometimes called the dilemma defence, versions of
which were presented by Kane (1996), Widerker (1995), and Ginet
(1996). The argument is based on the idea that FSCs must involve
a prior sign that Jones will do A, and starts with the following disBrought to you by | EP Ipswich
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Does Free Will Require Alternative Possibilities? 137
junction: either the occurrence of the prior sign causally determines
Jones’ subsequent behaviour or it does not (it is just a merely reliable indicator that does not completely rule out the possibility that
Jones fails to do A). If the first, the dilemma defender claims that
Frankfurt’s attack on PAP is dialectically inappropriate against incompatibilists: once we make explicit the assumption of a deterministic causal connection between the prior sign and Jones’ doing A,
an incompatibilist would probably say that she no longer shares the
intuition that Jones is morally responsible for what he does. Her view
is, after all, that moral responsibility is incompatible with that kind
of causal determination. But if the intuition that Jones is morally
responsible is rejected, we have no counterexample to PAP. Thus,
if Frankfurt’s argument against PAP is to have any force for an incompatibilist, FSCs should be understood as not involving a deterministic connection between the prior sign and Jones’ action. We
are then on the second horn of the dilemma. But, now, if there is no
deterministic causal connection of that sort, it is possible that Jones
gives the sign (as a result of which Black fails to intervene) and nevertheless fails to do A. Thus, it is not true that Jones could not fail
to do A. And, thus, we do not have a counterexample to PAP either.
The assessment of this argument is a complex issue. I will just
mention here three lines of reply. First, the proponent of the FSC
could hold onto the first disjunct (the prior sign causally determines
that Jones does A) and downplay the incompatibilist’s resistance to
seeing Jones as morally responsible for what he does. At the very
least, she could say that FSCs are successful counterexamples to
PAP under the assumption of compatiblism. This would already be
a significant result, given that, before Frankfurt’s discussion, PAP
was assumed by compatibilists and incompatibilists alike. Second, a
proponent of the FSC could instead assume the second disjunct (the
prior sign does not causally determine that Jones does A) and argue
along the lines of Fischer’s considerations against the flicker strategy:
even if it is a possibility that Jones gives the prior sign and fails to
do A, it is not clear that this possibility is robust enough (cf. Fischer
2007: 60). In fact, given that the prior sign is a reliable indicator, the
possibility in question should be very extraordinary (i.e. very unlikely to be actualised). Arguably, such extraordinary alternative possibilities cannot account for our judgments of moral responsibility and
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138 Pablo Rychter
are therefore not robust. A third line of reply consists of developing
FSCs in which—as in Frankfurt’s original case—there is no prior
sign, therefore blocking the dilemma defence at its very start. This
sort of FSCs is described by Mele and Robb (1998), and subsequently
discussed by Fischer (1999), Kane (2003), Widerker (2003), and by
Ferenc Huoranszki, in his contribution to this volume.
2.3 The ‘new-dispositional’ defence
Finally, a third argument for the conclusion that Jones could have
done otherwise comes from the view that has been called ‘new dispositionalism’, versions of which are held by Smith (2003), Vihvelin
(2004) and Fara (2008). New dispositionalists agree with some early
compatibilists like Moore and Ayer that having the ability to do otherwise amounts to having a disposition, or a collection of dispositions. However, those early compatibilists relied on a simple conditional analysis of dispositions (roughly, on this analysis an object x has
a disposition P just in case certain manifestation Q would obtain if x
were in some appropriate conditions). New dispositionalists, on the
other hand, rely on an approach to dispositions that became popular
since Lewis’ discussion of finkish dispositions (Lewis, 1997). On
this ‘new’ account, having a disposition is having an intrinsic property
that, in appropriate circumstances, would contribute to cause a particular outcome. According to this analysis, an object may have a disposition even if the disposition’s manifestation fails to be triggered in
the sort of conditions where it would normally be triggered. A very
fragile glass vase, for instance, would normally break if it falls on
the floor, but if may fail to break if it is very carefully packaged. The
packaging does not deprive the vase of its fragility, but only prevents
its manifestation from occurring. This is so because, as follows from
Lewis’ analysis, the fragility of the vase has to do with its intrinsic
properties, which remain unaffected by the packaging.
Let us now consider a situation that is just like the original FSC,
except for the fact that Black is not present (i.e., an ordinary situation
in which Jones does A for his own reasons). About that situation, we
are inclined to say that Jones has the ability to do other than A. After
all, the whole point of Black’s presence is to elicit the intuition that
Jones could not have done otherwise. If Black is removed from the
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Does Free Will Require Alternative Possibilities? 139
scenario, we no longer have that intuition and are rather inclined to
say that Jones can do other than A. Now, if Jones has the ability to
do otherwise in this case, and if having the ability to do otherwise is
having a certain intrinsic property, then Jones must retain that ability when Black is back in the picture. The presence of Black does not
deprive him of his ability any more than the packaging deprives the
vase of his fragility. It prevents Jones from exercising his ability, but
the ability is still in place. But if Jones is able to do otherwise, as it
follows from this analysis, FSCs are no counterexample to PAP.
The assessment of this objection is a complex and on-going issue.3
A central issue is whether the ability to do otherwise that, according
to new dispositionalists, Jones retains even in the presence of Black,
is the relevant one for the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. More specifically, as suggested by Clarke (2009) and
Whittle (2010), it may be argued that whereas Jones retains a general
ability to do otherwise (and that this could be understood as the possession of a disposition analysed in terms of intrinsic properties), he
lacks the sort of specifc ability (i.e. the ‘power to exercise a general
ability in a given occasion’) that incompatibilists like van Inwagen
(1983: 12–13) took to be ruled out by the truth of determinism.
And since, arguably, we should also understand PAP as involving this
more specific ability, a FSC could still constitute a counterexample
to it.
3 Alternative possibilities vs actual sequences
as the grounds of freedom
Even if, for one reason or other, FSCs are not successful in showing
that PAP is false, they may nevertheless be sufficient for motivating
views on free will and moral responsibility in which alternative possibilities play no explanatory role. We can illustrate this by focusing
on the debate about the grounds of free will and moral responsibility, as framed by Carolina Sartorio, both elsewhere (Sartorio 2016)
3 Critical discussions of new dispositionalism are offered by Clarke (2009),
Whittle (2010), and Vetter and Jaster (2017). In the present volume, the papers
by T. Cyr, M. Hart, and N. Elzein and T. Pernu all discuss the notion of ability in
a way that is relevant to the final evaluation of the view.
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140 Pablo Rychter
and in her contribution to this volume. Rather than asking whether
alternative possibilities are a necessary condition to free will, Sartorio focuses on the question of what grounds free will. The different views that aim to answer this question are not supposed to offer
merely necessary (or merely necessary and sufficient) conditions of
free will, but rather conditions in virtue of which an action is free.
Sartorio characterises two broad answers to the question of what
grounds free will: the alternative possibilities (AP) answer, and the
actual-sequences (AS) answer. The main difference between the two
is the role played by alternative possibilities. According to the AP
answer, part of what makes it the case that an action is free is the fact
that the agent had alternative courses of action open to her; courses
of action that she did not take. Other things may be required in the
explanation of freedom, including facts about the actual sequence
of events leading to the action. But having alternative possibilities is
a necessary condition that makes the explanatory work: part of the
reason why someone is free is that she has alternative possibilities; a
reason why someone may fail to be free is the mere absence of alternative possibilities. According to the AS answer, on the contrary,
the presence or absence of alternative possibilities is irrelevant to
explaining why an action is or fails to be free. Whether an action is
free or not, according to the AS answer, is exclusively a matter of the
actual events that result.
It is worth emphasising two features of the debate so construed:
first, AP views do not claim that alternative possibilities are the complete grounds of freedom: everything freedom is grounded in. In fact,
an AP view may take on board most or even all the positive claims
made by an AS view. The disagreement is only about the AS theorist’s negative claim that alternative possibilities are not part of what
freedom is grounded in. Second, this negative claim that characterises AS views should be distinguished from the claim that alternative
possibilities are not a necessary condition of free will. Drawing on
the idea that necessary conditions are not always grounding conditions (Fine: 1994), AS theorists may accept that alternative possibilities are a necessary condition of free will and so that PAP is true.
That is why whether FSCs are successful or not as counterexamples
to PAP is not the main concern for AS theorists.
That does not mean, however, that FSCs are without interest for
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Does Free Will Require Alternative Possibilities? 141
AS theorists. On the contrary, AS views are motivated by reflection
on them. Whether or not Frankfurt succeeds in refuting PAP, his
argument supports the idea that the reasons why an agent is free and
responsible may lie wholly within the limits of the events that actually lead to the action: all we need to look at in order to explain why
Jones is free and morally responsible is the actual sequence of events
that results in his action. It is because this sequence of events satisfies
certain metaphysical conditions (in addition to the relevant epistemic
conditions) that we hold Jones responsible for what he did. It is only
for that reason that we do so. We do not, in addition, have to even
consider whether or not Jones could have done otherwise.
What exactly are the metaphysical conditions that Jones’ action
satisfies and that, in the AS views, make it the case that his action
is free? This is a point where the various AS views differ from each
other. On the very influential theory of Fischer and Ravizza (1998),
Jones’ freedom is grounded in the reasons-responsiveness of the mechanism that results in his action. That mechanism (ordinary practical
deliberation) is reasons-responsive because it issues different outcomes depending on what reasons are presented to the agent (by
contrast, the mechanism that involves direct manipulation by Black
is not reasons-responsive in this sense). Sartorio (2016) offers an explicitly ‘causalist’ AS view, according to which all that matters for
whether an action is free is the actual causal history of that action. In
her view, Jones’ freedom is grounded in his reasons-responsiveness,
but his reasons-responsiveness is determined by the actual causal history of his action. What makes Jones reasons-responsive with respect to his action is that the action’s actual causal history has, as a
component, the absence of reasons for doing otherwise.
As can be seen in Sartorio 2016 and in Carlos Moya’s contribution
to this issue, part of the debate between AS views and AP views turns
on whether AS views can accommodate apparent counterexamples
to the claim that freedom supervenes on actual sequences understood
as causal histories: i.e. the claim that, necessarily, any two actions
that are indiscernible with respect to the causal histories issuing in
them, are also equally free or unfree. This claim follows from the
stronger claim that freedom is grounded in causal histories and, arguably, also from the basic AS commitment that freedom is grounded
in actual sequences (Sartorio 2016: 34). That is why AS views face the
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142 Pablo Rychter
challenge of explaining away the apparent counterexamples. Some
of these counterexamples were originally presented by Peter van Inwagen (1983) as part of his defence of PAP from Frankfurt’s attack.
For our present purposes, we can focus on the following pair of cases
described by Sartorio (2016: 56):
(Phones) I witness a man being robbed and beaten. I consider calling the police. I could easily pick up the phone and call them. But
I decide against it, out of a combination of fear and laziness.
(No Phones) Everything is the same as in Phones except that, unbeknownst to me, I couldn’t have called the police (the phone lines
were down at the time).
The intuition here is that there is a difference in moral responsibility
(and on the freedom condition attached to it) without a difference
in the actual sequence that leads to inaction: it seems that I am morally responsible for the police not being alerted in Phones, but not in
No Phones. And yet, the actual causal history that leads to the police
not being alerted seems to be the same in both cases: a combination
of fear and laziness. Whether or not the phone lines were in order
seems to be irrelevant to the actual causal history. Thus, the pair of
cases seems to be a counterexample to the supervenience claim that
arguably follows from AS views. It also points to the relevance of
alternative possibilities as a ground of freedom and moral responsibility, given that the only difference between Phones and No Phones
seems to be in my ability to do otherwise than I actually do.
If the AS theorist is to honour the intuition that there is a difference in moral responsibility between Phones and No Phones, it seems
that the only two options open to her are either (i) argue that, contrary to initial appearance, the causal history leading to inaction is
not the same in both cases; or (ii) give up the supervenience claim,
somehow arguing that it is not really a consequence of the basic claim
that freedom is grounded in actual sequences. Sartorio (2016: 61)
argues against this second strategy, and develops a subtle version of
the first. Her account relies on the idea that causation is extrinsic in
the sense that ‘a causal relation between C and E may obtain, in part,
owing to factors that are extrinsic to the causal process linking C and
E’ (Sartorio 2016: 71). In Phones and No Phones, the state of the phone
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Does Free Will Require Alternative Possibilities? 143
lines is an extrinsic factor that contributes to determine different
causal histories for my failure to call the police: given that in Phones
the lines are in working order, my laziness and fear do cause my not
calling the police. In No Phones, in contrast, because of the different
extrinsic factors, my laziness and fear do not cause my not calling the
police; at most, they cause my not trying to call the police. Sartorio
thus concludes that Phones and No Phones, and similar pairs of cases,
do not constitute a counterexample to the supervenience claim that
arguably follows from AS views.
We have claimed above that the failure of FSCs as counterexamples to PAP do not prevent FSCs from being a source of inspiration
for AS views. In the same spirit, it could be argued that the failure of
Phones and No Phones as a counterexample to the supervenience claim
does not prevent them from being a source of inspiration for AP
views. Even if the two cases do differ in the causal histories leading
to inaction, they certainly also differ in the availability of alternative
possibilities, and it is natural for the AP theorist to take this difference as making the relevant explanation work. In fact, this seems to
be van Inwagen’s own purpose in presenting his cases. In the same
direction, Carlos Moya, in his contribution to this volume, uses
Phones and No Phones (and variations on them) to argue for an AP
view. He asks us to consider a case that is just like No Phones, except
for the fact that ‘had I seriously considered calling the police, presumably for moral considerations, I would have found myself unable
to make the decision to call because of an outbreak of intense anxiety
and irresistible fear’. About this case, Moya claims that I am morally responsible for my decision of not calling the police (which, as
in the original case, issues from a combination of fear and laziness),
even if I could not have made a different decision. But, even in this
case, Moya argues, there is something I could have done and did not
do: I could have tried to make a different decision. And although this
trying would not have been successful, its possibility is part of what
explains that my decision is free. Thus, that I could have tried to call
the police is an alternative possibility that contributes to grounding
the freedom of my decision. Moya argues that the grounding character of this alternative possibility (or its robustness, as we could as
well say) is supported by ordinary intuitions about attributions of
moral responsibility: on the one hand, we tend to blame someone for
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144 Pablo Rychter
what they did when they fail to do their ‘reasonable best in order to
behave in a morally right way’. This is what happens with the agent
in the case considered: it seems that he is held blameworthy because
he could have done better than he did (even if he could not have decided otherwise). On the other hand, it seems that he would not be
held responsible for his decision if, for deep psychological reasons,
he could not even try to choose otherwise. In that case, his status as
a free and morally responsible agent would be compromised. Thus,
Moya concludes, alternative possibilities may do grounding work and
AP views are not refuted by cases like the one he considers.
4 The papers in this issue
We have focused on two central issues about alternative possibilities
and the ability to do otherwise: whether FSCs are successful as counterexamples to PAP, and whether alternative possibilities are part of
what grounds free will. Some of the papers in the present volume
address these two issues directly. In ‘Actual Causes and Free Will’,
Carolina Sartorio defends her own AS view, partially described
above, focusing on the role that absences of reasons play on it. On
the other hand, in ‘Free Willl and Open Alternatives’ Carlos Moya
argues for an AP view, as explained above. Moya argues that the possibility of doing better from a moral point of view is a robust alternative possibility that grounds freedom in FSCs and the like. Other papers in the issue can also be put in the context of the debate between
AS and PA theories: Taylor Cyr in ‘Is Semi-compatibilism Unstable?’
defends an AS theory like Fischer and Ravizza’s from recent arguments based on what abilities allegedly are. In ‘Supervenient Freedom and the Free Will Debate’, Nadine Elzein and Tuomas Pernu
offer a taxonomy of the free will debate centred in the requirement
of alternative possibilities, and argue against a recently proposed AP
view that they call ‘supervenient libertarianism’. The other three
papers presented here are more directly connected to the question of
the success of FSCs as counterexamples to PAP. In ‘Alternative Possibilities and Causal Overdetermination’, Ferenc Huoranszki offers a
comprehensive discussion of this issue and concludes that FSCs can
only do their intended job under very substantive assumptions about
the nature of agency, assumptions that Frankfurt’s dialectical opBrought to you by | EP Ipswich
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Does Free Will Require Alternative Possibilities? 145
ponents need not share. Benjamin Matheson is also pessimistic about
the success of FSCs and so in his ‘Alternative Possibilities, Volitional
Necessities, and Character Setting’ he explores an alternative route
to showing the irrelevance of alternative possibilities: the ‘Volitional
Necessities Argument’, suggested by Daniel Dennett, which Matheson defends from libertarian replies. Finally, in ‘A Modest Classical Compatibilism’, Matthew Hart draws on Kratzer’s semantics
for modal expressions in order to articulate a defence of PAP from
Frankfurt’s argument against it.4
Pablo Rychter
Departament de Filosofia
Facultat de Filosofia i CC.de l’Educació
Universitat de València
Avda. Blasco Ibáñez, 30
46010 València, Spain
[email protected]
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article. Research leading to this work was partially funded by the research projects FFI2016-75323-P and FFI2015-66372-P.
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