Concurrent Session 6a: Possibilities and Moral Responsibility 

Chair: xxx(University)

Are Frankfurt-type Examples Really Relevant to Moral Responsibility?

Amit Pundik
Hughes Hall
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK

In his seminal paper 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility', Frankfurt argues against the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), according to which a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise.  An extensive body of literature has developed around the examples Frankfurt provides, both in support of and in disagreement with his claim.  However, this paper argues that even if Frankfurt's attack on the PAP is successful, the role that alternate possibilities play in moral responsibility differs from the role assigned to them by the PAP.  This paper proposes a new way of understanding the importance of alternate possibilities to moral responsibility by introducing an epistemic version of the PAP (the E-PAP).  According to the E-PAP, a person is not morally responsible for what he has done if he knew that he could not have done otherwise.  According to the E-PAP, it is the lack of alternative possibilities together with the person's justified belief in this fact which negate moral responsibility.  Unlike the traditional PAP, which is a responsibility-constituting principle, the E-PAP is responsibility-negating principle.  After defining the E-PAP in detail, the paper shows that the E-PAP is immune to most kinds of Frankfurt-type examples.  It also reflects our moral practices better than the traditional PAP.  Yet, like the traditional PAP, the E-PAP is incompatible with determinism.  The paper concludes that the incompatibilist concern, that is, the concern about the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility, is different from that assumed by Frankfurt, and to this concern, the Frankfurt-type examples are irrelevant.

Responsible Man: Moral Responsibility, Reasons and Foreseeable Consequences

Madeleine Hayenhjelm
Department of Philosophy
University College London
London, UK

Moral responsibility is often approached from the view-point of tying actions and their consequences to a particular agent: what makes a person accountable, blameworthy, causally responsible, for the consequences of that action? The role of reasons becomes one of explanation for the action that brought those consequences about and they influence how blameworthy we hold the agent for those consequences. In this paper I would like to start from the end more familiar to action theory and decision theory: which consequences should be taken into account, and in what way, in order for an agent to act morally responsibly? Here an interesting difference comes in view. When we want to hold a person accountable for an outcome already in place, we are interested in whether or not he intended that action and what his reasons for that action were. If the outcome was a good one, if the means were rational for that end, and if the reasons for wanting that outcome were good ones, then the questions about the moral and rational rightness seem settled. I shall argue that morally responsible action differs from this standard picture in one particular respect: the significance of unintended, undesired, but foreseeable possible outcomes of particular courses of action. Moral responsibility, I shall argue, is defined by the whole set of foreseeable outcomes and how they were taken into account in i) deliberation about what to do and ii) when preparing for and planning the intended action.