ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the moral significance of alternate possibilities. Intrinsic value is the most fundamental type of value. The varieties of extrinsic value are to be understood in terms of intrinsic value. In light of this, there is no reason to take alternate possibilities to be in general any more relevant to judgments about extrinsic value than to judgments about intrinsic value. The view that moral responsibility requires alternate possibilities is intuitively very attractive. It is only relatively recently that this view has been subjected to sustained critical scrutiny, although there are traces of such scrutiny to be found in classical philosophy. Harry Frankfurt’s position on principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) has not been universally accepted. One way to attack it is to argue that, in the cases that he and others have given, either the agent possesses alternate possibilities after all, or the agent is not in fact morally responsible for his behavior.
