Morał z przykładów frankfurtowskich

Przekład na podstawie: “The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories”, Philosophical Review 119 (2010): 315–336. Przekład za zgodą Autora Autor argumentuje, że morał przykładów frankfurtowskich jest następujący: jeśli determinizm przyczynowy wyklucza odpowiedzialność moralną, to nie na mocy eliminacji alternatywnych możliwości, a następnie odpowiada na najważniejsze wyzwanie dla tej tezy, mianowicie argument nazywany „obroną przez dylemat”.

A Case for Classical Compatibilism

In this article the author makes the case for a hybrid sourcehood–leeway compatibilist account of free will. To do so, she draws upon Lehrer’s writing on free will, including his preference-based compatibilist account and Frankfurt-style cases from the perspective of the cognizant agent. The author explores what distinguishes kinds of intentional influence in manipulation cases and applies this distinction to a new perspectival variant of Frankfurt cases, those from the perspective of the counterfactual intervenor. She argues that it matters what kind of intentional influence is at issue in the counterfactual intervention and, further, that our judgments about desert of praise (and blame) are affected by occupying the POV of the counterfactual intervenor. The author concludes that such attention to perspectival variants of Frankfurt cases supports the view that compatibilist sourcehood accounts of moral responsibility require an additional compatibilist could-have-done-otherwise condition to capture a more robust sense of moral responsibility.

Must Knowers Be Agents?

This chapter explores agency as it applies to epistemic evaluation, using epistemic analogues of the well-known Frankfurt cases against the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. It argues that the satisfaction of manipulable counterfactual conditions is neither necessary nor sufficient for either moral or epistemic responsibility, nor is it necessary for knowledge. But what a person does in counterfactual circumstances is a sign of the presence of agency, and the argument here is that agency is necessary for epistemic responsibility and for knowledge. The chapter argues that agency is operative in getting epistemic credit and knowledge. The scope of agency includes those evaluative aspects of belief investigated by epistemology. In other work the author has argued that it is artificial to separate epistemology from ethics. The role of agency in beliefs as well as in acts further supports this position.

Is epistemic safety threatened by Frankfurt cases? A reply to Kelp

I intend to argue that the counterexamples inspired by the Frankfurt-type cases against the necessity of an epistemic safety condition for knowledge are not plausible. The epistemic safety condition for knowledge is a modal condition recently supported by Sosa (2007) and Pritchard (2015), among others, and can be formulated as follows: (SC) If S knows that p on basis B, then S’s true belief that p could not have easily been false on basis B. I will try to argue that the safety condition, expressed in (SC), is still necessary for knowledge and that, therefore, epistemic safety is not threatened by Frankfurt-type cases. In particular, I want to show that Kelp’s counterexamples are ineffective against (SC).

Frankfurt cases and the Newcomb Problem

A standard argument for one-boxing in Newcomb’s Problem is ‘Why Ain’cha Rich?’, which emphasizes that one-boxers typically make a million dollars compared to the thousand dollars that two-boxers can expect. A standard reply is the ‘opportunity defence’: the two-boxers who made a thousand never had an opportunity to make more. The paper argues that the opportunity defence is unavailable to anyone who grants that in another case—a Frankfurt case—the agent is deprived of opportunities in the way that advocates of Frankfurt cases typically claim.

The Freedom Required for Moral Responsibility

Some philosophers argue that we do not need freedom to do otherwise or access to alternative possibilities for moral responsibility. These philosophers are actual-sequence theorists of moral responsibility who are motivated by Frankfurt cases, in which there is pre-emptive overdetermination. They contend that in these cases the agent is morally responsible but does not have freedom to do otherwise or access to alternative possibilities. Others have rejected the actual-sequence approach. They contend that the sort of freedom to do otherwise required for moral responsibility is indeed present in the Frankfurt cases. This essay explores the significance of the debate between these two camps. Are the two views importantly different or mere notational variants of each other? I examine these questions with attention to Terry Irwin’s discussion of Aristotle on responsibility.

Free Will and Open Alternatives

In her recent book Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio develops a distinctive version of an actual-sequence account of free will, according to which, when agents choose and act freely, their freedom is exclusively grounded in, and supervenes on, the actual causal history of such choices or actions. Against this proposal, I argue for an alternative- possibilities account, according to which agents’ freedom is partly grounded in their ability to choose or act otherwise. Actual-sequence accounts of freedom (and moral responsibility) are motivated by a reflection on so-called Frankfurt cases. Instead, other cases, such as two pairs of examples originally designed by van Inwagen, threaten actual-sequence accounts, including Sartorio’s. On the basis of her (rather complex) view of causation, Sartorio contends, however, that the two members of each pair have different causal histories, so that her view is not undermined by those cases after all. I discuss these test cases further and defend my alternative-possibilities account of freedom.