Description
In 1969, Harry Frankfurt wrote an article that would prove to be a turning point in the literature on moral responsibility. He introduced a certain style of examples – Frankfurt cases – that aim to falsify a principle regarding responsibility that was until then accepted almost unanimously, namely the Principle of Alternative Possibilities – PAP. This set the stage for a decades-long debate between those defending the PAP, and those constructing Frankfurt cases in order to falsify it. Although there has been an increase in the complexity and level of detail in the positions that are being put forward in this debate, neither side is ready to concede and the debate appears to be pretty much stuck in a stalemate.Importantly, both sides of the Frankfurt debate agree that an agent choosing C can be responsible for some outcome O only if C is somehow causally connected to O. More specifically, the overwhelming majority of authors agrees that this causal connection consists precisely of actual causation. On top of this very specific connection between responsibility and causation, the two concepts are also more generally related. The literature on Frankfurt cases and their relation to the PAP is flooded with causal language. Moreover, more often than not, the crux of the argument invokes the causal relations that hold between an action performed by the agent and the events which precede it. Therefore it is hard to overestimate the role played by causation in the Frankfurt debate. This makes it all the more striking that for the most part, the advances in the causation literature have been entirely ignored in the literature on Frankfurt cases. This paper aims to set this straight, by applying the developments from the causation literature to the Frankfurt cases and their relation to the PAP.
Concretely, I will analyse the Frankfurt debate by making use of causal models. I do so without engaging with the metaphysical positions that often drive the debate (regarding (in)determinism, (in)compatibilism, source vs. lee-way, etc.). This allows us to assess the compatibility of the Frankfurt cases and the PAP unhindered by a bias towards any particular metaphysical agenda. After suggest- ing various ways of formalising the PAP using the language
of causal modelling, I defend the position that a moderate version of the PAP is compatible with all of the Frankfurt cases. Here the aim is not to settle the metaphysical debate over the PAP itself, but to clarify that as far as concerns the causal commitments, these different metaphysical positions are compatible. Thus the primary objective is to show the advantage of using causal models to bring clarity to an otherwise hopelessly muddled debate.
| Period | 16 Aug 2018 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Causes, Norms, and Decisions Workshop |
| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |