ABSTRACT
Harry Frankfurt challenges principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) only as it applies to a proposition p that says that the subject acted in a certain way at a certain time. He states the principle he challenges, which he dubs ‘the principle of alternate possibilities,’ as follows: a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. Frankfurt presents the example that is supposed to do the trick in the following words: Suppose someone wants Jones to perform a certain action. Black is prepared to go to considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers to avoid showing his hand unnecessarily. For the only way Jones could have prevented it would have been by preventing Black’s mechanism from being set up or by disabling it after it was set up. But there was no time at which Jones knew or should have known anything about the existence of Black’s mechanism.
