Blockage cases: no case against PAP.
| Autor | Moya Espí, Carlos J. |
| Cargo | Principle of Alternative Possibilities |
RESUMEN: Según el Principio de Posibilidades Alternativas (PPA), un agente es moralmente responsable de algo que hizo sólo si podría haber actuado de otro modo. Harry Frankfurt sostuvo que el PPA era falso sobre la base de ejemplos ("casos Frankfurt") en los que un dispositivo contrafáctico, y no activado, asegura que el agente decidirá y hará lo que de hecho decide y hace por sí mismo, en el caso de que muestre algún signo de que va a decidir y hacer algo distinto. Los problemas que plantean estos casos han llevado a algunos pensadores a diseñar ejemplos en los que el factor contrafáctico es reemplazado por un dispositivo que bloquea de hecho las posibilidades alternativas. Sostengo que, aun cuando estos casos no asumieran ilícitamente el determinismo, no tienen éxito frente al PPA, porque violan una condición plausible de la responsabilidad moral que Fischer ha denominado "capacidad de respuesta a razones".
PALABRAS CLAVE: posibilidades alternativas, responsabilidad moral, razones, decisión
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Harry Frankfurt's path-breaking article, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility" (Frankfurt 1969) made a strong case against the widely assumed view that alternative possibilities are required for moral responsibility for a certain action. Frankfurt himself called this assumption the "Principle of Alternate Possibilities" (PAP). According to this principle, in Frankfurt's own words, "a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise" (Frankfurt 1969, p. 829). Frankfurt's criticism of PAP rested mainly on a counter-example to it. Following Frankfurt's steps, many other putative counter-examples to PAP have been produced. Until recently, they have shown the same basic structure as Frankfurt's original example. We shall call them 'classical Frankfurt cases'. Classical Frankfurt cases feature an agent who, on her own, deliberates, decides to perform a certain action and does so; however, unknown to her, if she showed some inclination towards an alternative way of acting, she would be prevented from acting in such an alternative way by a factor which would then be activated; but, since she shows no such inclination, this factor remains causally inert.
An important feature of classical Frankfurt cases, then, is that the factors that prevent the agent from doing otherwise are purely counterfactual. This feature confers on these cases a significant advantage, namely that the intuition that the agent is morally responsible for what she does is very strong and natural, for we feel that she would have decided and acted in exactly the same way if the counterfactual factors, which ensure that she could not do otherwise, had been absent. This clearly distinguishes these cases from typical coertion or compulsion cases, in which the coercive or compulsive factor causally affects the agent's decision, so that we strongly feel that she does not decide and act in a sufficiently autonomous, self-determined way to ascribe her full responsibility. However, there is a price to pay for this important advantage of classical Frankfurt cases, namely that, since the counterfactual factors' activation is contingent upon the agent's showing a certain relevant sign, the agent is bound to have alternatives of some sort. She must be able to show of not to show the relevant sign. The nature of these alternatives, then, depends on what this sign is supposed to be in the particular case at hand. So, the presence of alternatives of some sort is a structural feature of classical Frankfurt cases. And this means that they contain a crack in which defenders of PAP can insert a wedge.
Some thinkers have thought of construing Frankfurt cases with no such crack. In these cases, any alternatives, however thin, are ruled out because the counterfactual factors have been replaced by actual blocking mechanisms. These prevent any alternatives from arising without, however, causing them not to arise. The general idea is to get the agent to decide and do on her own something which, owing to the blocking device, is nonetheless the only thing she can actually decide and do. This means that there need be no sign that the agent could show, and the alternatives of showing that sign or not are simply not available. This advantage over classical Frankfurt cases, however, does not go for free. As one may expect, one difficulty is to convincingly show that a mechanism that is actually blocking alternatives is not thereby exerting any causal influence on the actual process of decision making. A related difficulty is that the intuition that the agent is morally responsible is likely to be much less firm and stable than in classical Frankfurt cases.
Both classical and blockage Frankfurt cases have to respect some adequacy conditions if they are to be plausible. One of them is that determinism has not to be assumed, even implicitly, for this will beg the question against incompatibilists, and these will not judge that the agent is morally responsible. Besides, there are also some requirements related to rational control. The process of practical reasoning and decision making has to meet some minimal standards: the agent must be able to consider reasons and to decide according to them while the process develops. A defective process or an impaired capacity of...
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