ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that the availability of alternative possibilities is in a significant sense irrelevant to explaining an agent’s moral responsibility for an action. At the same time he do not want to disavow incompatibilism, but rather to defend a version in which the pivotal explanatory role is assigned to features of the causal history of the action, and not to the availability of alternative possibilities. Those incompatibilists who incline towards the view that an alternative possibilities condition has the more important role in explaining an agent’s moral responsibility leeway incompatibilists, and those who are predisposed to maintain that an incompatibilist condition on the causal history of the action plays the more significant part source incompatibilists. This Frankfurt-style argument indicates that the availability of alternative possibilities is not relevant per se to explaining an agent’s moral responsibility for an action.
