Harry Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility”

Posted: Mon, Oct 20, 2025

Free will in contemporary action theory: The sort of “control” that figures in moral responsibility (esp. praiseworthiness/blameworthiness).

  • The traditional theory: Free will is grounded at least in part in alternative possibilities or “leeway” (which would exclude coercion, maybe determinism, etc.)
  • The new theory: Free will is grounded entirely in the actual explanations or sequences of our actions.

The consequence argument attacks only free will in the alternative possibilities conception.

In what came to be known as “Frankfurt cases,” agents freely perform inevitable acts.

  • In other words, these are cases of free will without alternative possibilities; so the traditional theory must be false.
  • The case of Jones4 subject to an alternative possibilities blocker (pp. 835–36): His decision to do whatever it is is not undermined by his lack of alternative courses of action.

Motivating the new theory:

  • Having no alternative possibilities is irrelevant to the explanation of why Jones4 decides to act the way he does.
  • What is relevant is the actual sequence of events leading up to his decision—on the leading view, the actual reasons/causes of his decision.

The current literature is dominated by one worry: “Flickers of freedom.”

  • While Jones4 can’t decide to do otherwise, he could at least try.
  • If he tries, he will be blocked by intervention, but then he’s not acting freely.
  • So, alternative possibilities always go with free will.

The robustness response: Whatever flickers of freedom Jones4 retains, they are not “robust” enough to ground his free will.

  • Frankfurt, for his part, anticipates this and gives a useful case in a footnote: “We can imagine that Jones4 has often confronted the alternatives—A and B—that he now confronts, and that his face has invariably twitched when he was about to decide to do A and never when he was about to decide to do B. Knowing this, and observing the twitch, Black would have a basis for prediction” (p. 835 n. 3).
  • Jones4 could have tried to do otherwise by not twitching his face. Is this free will?