Summary Of Alternate Possibility Of Frankfurt
In his paper Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibilities, Frankfurt presented his compatibilism view regarding to the issue of whether human beings have free will. However, after a thorough inspection into his arguments and the cases which he employed to support his reasoning, I find myself unconvinced by his logic. In the following, I shall illustrate the Frankfurt-style argument, examine the fallacies within his reasoning, argue that why I consider compatibilism to be false, and finally, give an explanation of why free will is inherently incompatible with determinism
The traditional argument for incompatibilism can be summarized as follows:
Principle of Alternate possibilities(PAP): a person is morally responsible for what he has …show more content…
However, his conclusion failed to prove that PAP is false. The case is not actually proving that a person is morally responsible for what he has done even if he could not have done other wise, but instead, it is trying to disprove the statement that a person is morally responsible for a certain action if and only if he could have performed a different action. We shall name this statement as PAP2. However, in Frankfurt’s case, we can see that a necessary condition for Jones responsibility to be valid is that he has the freedom to choose not to perform the action no matter whether he is later manipulated or not. There is at least an instant which he could ‘choose’. And this instant must exist, for if not, the controller could not know what is Jones decision and thus could not decide whether to force him or not. Thus, the story conveys that people are morally responsible for an inevitable action given that the action is the result of certain choices that they could have avoided. This is sufficient enough to disprove PAP2. Nevertheless, it does not by any means disproves PAP, which requires a situation in which Jones could not have done anything else other than he actually did, since Jones could have make a different choice, and the controller cannot interfere with the choice making process. To reject PAP, Frankfurt would have to establish a scenario in which Jones is not only unable to perform anything other than the expected action, but also unable to even choose to perform another
The traditional argument for incompatibilism can be summarized as follows:
Principle of Alternate possibilities(PAP): a person is morally responsible for what he has …show more content…
However, his conclusion failed to prove that PAP is false. The case is not actually proving that a person is morally responsible for what he has done even if he could not have done other wise, but instead, it is trying to disprove the statement that a person is morally responsible for a certain action if and only if he could have performed a different action. We shall name this statement as PAP2. However, in Frankfurt’s case, we can see that a necessary condition for Jones responsibility to be valid is that he has the freedom to choose not to perform the action no matter whether he is later manipulated or not. There is at least an instant which he could ‘choose’. And this instant must exist, for if not, the controller could not know what is Jones decision and thus could not decide whether to force him or not. Thus, the story conveys that people are morally responsible for an inevitable action given that the action is the result of certain choices that they could have avoided. This is sufficient enough to disprove PAP2. Nevertheless, it does not by any means disproves PAP, which requires a situation in which Jones could not have done anything else other than he actually did, since Jones could have make a different choice, and the controller cannot interfere with the choice making process. To reject PAP, Frankfurt would have to establish a scenario in which Jones is not only unable to perform anything other than the expected action, but also unable to even choose to perform another