ABSTRACT
The heart and soul of Thomas Reid’s account of human freedom lies in his conception of active power. In this chapter, the author suggests that a statement of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities than that implied by the quotations from Roderick M. Chisholm and Harry Frankfurt yield a viable principle connecting alternative possibilities and moral responsibility, a principle not subject to counterexamples of the sort developed by Frankfurt. Reid makes two alterations in John Locke’s account of active and passive power. First, he rejects the notion of ‘passive power.’ Second, he makes a very important addition to Locke’s account of active power. When the agent wills to perform some action, either the act of will results from the exercise of the agent’s power to cause it or the agent plays no causal role and the act of will is the necessary result of other causal factors, perhaps the agent’s desires and beliefs.
