Free will · Quiz question 11/35
The Principle of Alternate Possibilities & Frankfurt Cases
When you turned down the temptation, could you really have said yes? Frankfurt cases and whether responsibility needs alternative possibilities.
A friend suggests the two of you skim some money nobody would ever notice. You think it over for a long time — and say no.
In that moment, you genuinely could have said yes.
The idea that you're only responsible if you could have done otherwise is called the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP). In 1969 Harry Frankfurt attacked it with a famous thought experiment: someone secretly plants a device in your brain that will step in if you're about to choose differently — but you choose that way on your own, so the device never fires. You couldn't have done otherwise, yet you still seem responsible.
If you agreed with this line, you think the future was genuinely open at the moment of choice — the libertarian intuition. Roderick Chisholm tried to explain that kind of freedom as "agent causation": the agent themself is an undetermined cause.
Frankfurt cases changed the whole debate. If what matters for responsibility isn't alternative options but how the action came about — from your own desires and will — then determinism doesn't threaten responsibility. Critics like David Widerker replied that for the device to "read" your intentions in advance, determinism must already be assumed, so the argument begs the question. The fight is still going.
Responsibility requires really being able to do otherwise. Even Frankfurt cases leave a "flicker" of alternative.
Key names: Chisholm, Widerker, KaneWhat matters isn't how many options you had but whether the action came from you.
Key names: Harry Frankfurt, John Martin FischerNobody can be the ultimate source of their actions, so neither condition can be met.
Key names: Galen Strawson, Pereboom