ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the availability of alternative possibilities is in a significant sense irrelevant to explaining an agent’s moral responsibility for an action. Arguments of the kind devised by Harry Frankfurt provide an especially formidable challenge to alternative possibility conditions on moral responsibility. Significantly, however, John Fischer points out that this type of argument would not refute the claim that moral responsibility requires that the actual causal history of the action not be deterministic. The claim that moral responsibility for an action requires that the agent could have done otherwise is surely attractive. Michael McKenna has argued that what is critically necessary for moral responsibility is a power for alternatives of a certain sort – specifically, a power to be the author of one’s action or not. The 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.
