Could you be responsible without any alternatives?
A hidden device would have forced your choice, but it never activates, because you choose that way on your own. Were you free?
- Reading time
- 4 min
- Difficulty
- Deep
- Branch
- Free will
- First posed
- Harry Frankfurt, 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility', 1969
The setup
Jones is deciding whether to vote for a particular candidate. Unknown to him, a neuroscientist named Black has implanted a device in his brain. Black wants Jones to vote for the candidate. If Jones shows any sign of deciding to vote the other way, the device will activate and make him vote for the candidate anyway.
As it happens, Jones decides on his own, for his own reasons, to vote for the candidate. The device never activates. It sits there, unused, a silent guarantee.
Was Jones morally responsible for his vote? Almost everyone says yes: he chose freely, for his own reasons, exactly as he would have without the device. Yet he could not have done otherwise. Had he started to choose differently, the device would have stopped him.
Harry Frankfurt published this kind of case in 1969 to challenge a principle that philosophers had long taken for granted: the principle of alternate possibilities, which says a person is morally responsible for what they did only if they could have done otherwise.
Why it matters
The principle of alternate possibilities was the bridge connecting determinism to the loss of responsibility. If determinism means you could never have done otherwise, and responsibility requires that you could have, responsibility falls. Frankfurt cases attack the second step.
If they work, the free will debate shifts. The question is no longer whether you could have done otherwise, but whether your action came about in the right way, from your own reasons. That is good news for compatibilism.
Key terms
- Principle of alternative possibilitiesThe principle that a person is morally responsible for an action only if they could have done otherwise. Frankfurt cases are designed to refute it.
- Moral responsibilityBeing the appropriate target of praise or blame for what one does.
- CompatibilismThe view that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. Freedom, on this view, is acting on your own reasons and desires without compulsion, not escaping the laws of nature.
- Flicker of freedomA reply to Frankfurt cases: even when the agent cannot do otherwise, there remains a tiny alternative, such as starting to choose differently, which is enough to ground responsibility.
The positions
The cases succeed
Jones is responsible though he could not have done otherwise, so responsibility does not require alternative possibilities.
The dilemma defence
The cases only work by quietly assuming determinism, which is the very point in dispute.
Responsibility needs alternatives
The principle of alternate possibilities is true, and Frankfurt cases do not refute it.
Arguments and objections
The cases succeed
- Best argument
- What makes Jones responsible is the actual history of his action: he deliberated and chose for his own reasons. The device played no role in what actually happened. Since a factor that plays no role in what happened cannot affect whether you are responsible for it, the mere existence of the device cannot remove his responsibility. Responsibility is about the actual sequence, not about alternative ones.
- Strongest objection
- The device has to detect a 'sign' that Jones is about to choose otherwise. That sign is itself an alternative: Jones could have started to choose differently. So Jones still had a small 'flicker of freedom'.
- The reply
- Frankfurt's defenders reply that a mere flicker, like an involuntary twitch, is far too thin to ground responsibility. Being able to blush differently is not what we mean by being able to do otherwise.
The dilemma defence
- Best argument
- Robert Kane, David Widerker and Carl Ginet posed a dilemma. Either the sign that Black watches reliably determines Jones's later choice, or it does not. If it does, then determinism is assumed, and an incompatibilist will deny that Jones is responsible. If it does not, then Jones could still have chosen otherwise after the sign appeared, so he had alternatives after all.
- Strongest objection
- Frankfurt's defenders have built elaborate new cases designed to avoid both horns, for example by having the device block only the neural pathways needed to choose otherwise, without determining which choice is made.
- The reply
- Critics say each new version reintroduces the problem in subtler form, and the debate has continued for decades.
Responsibility needs alternatives
- Best argument
- It seems unfair to blame someone for something they could not have avoided. If the device would have forced the outcome regardless, Jones bears responsibility at most for deciding on his own, not for the outcome, which was inevitable. Peter van Inwagen distinguished responsibility for acts from responsibility for consequences.
- Strongest objection
- This appears to concede the central point: Jones is responsible for his decision, even though he could not have made a different one.
Who argued what
- The cases succeed Harry Frankfurt, John Martin Fischer, Michael McKenna
- The dilemma defence Robert Kane, David Widerker, Carl Ginet
- Responsibility needs alternatives Peter van Inwagen
Variations
Locke's locked room
The idea has an ancestor in John Locke. A man is carried, while asleep, into a room and locked in. He wakes and stays willingly, glad of the company of someone there. He could not have left, but he stayed by choice. Locke used this to argue that voluntariness does not require the ability to do otherwise.
The blocked pathway
In David Hunt's version, the device does not monitor a sign; it simply blocks every neural pathway except the one Jones actually uses. Jones's brain runs exactly as it would have, and he chooses for his own reasons, but no other choice was possible. Does blocking roads you never travelled reduce your responsibility for the road you took?
Go deeper
Why this matters for compatibilism
Compatibilists once had to argue that, even under determinism, a person 'could have done otherwise' in some sense, such as 'would have, if they had wanted to'. Frankfurt cases let compatibilists drop that commitment and focus on the source of an action instead: whether it flowed from the agent's own reasons-responsive mechanism. This shift, developed by Fischer and Ravizza, became one of the dominant positions in the field.
Related ideas
Further reading and sources
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Moral Responsibility
- WikipediaFrankfurt cases
- BookThe Importance of What We Care About, Harry Frankfurt · reprints the 1969 paper
- BookMoral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities, David Widerker and Michael McKenna (editors)
Open questions
- If a choice could not have gone any other way, in what sense is it a choice?
- Does an unused safeguard change anything about what you did?
- Is a flicker of an alternative enough to make you responsible?