Colton Carlson

The "flicker of freedom" defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) continues to challenge Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs). Flickers are often assumed to entail indeterminism, and thus to conflict with compatibilist theories of moral responsibility. This paper argues that a refined version of the flicker strategy-one appealing to weak, non-robust, fine-grained alternative possibilities-is not mutually exclusive to compatibilism, and thus does not obviously require indeterminism. Drawing on Vihvelin's dispositional account of ability, I show that agents in FSCs retain a compatibilist form of leeway that remains both morally relevant and immune to determinism. Specifically, I argue that such leeway is morally relevant insofar as it indicates an agent's exercise of agency in the actual sequence, thereby verifying rather than competing with the sourcehood condition on moral responsibility. I term this view Wide Source Compatibilism: a compatibilist account that preserves the insights of both leeway and actual-sequence theories. Therefore, actual-sequence compatibilists should also endorse a form of leeway compatibilism. The result is a more resilient compatibilism, one in which leeway strengthens, rather than undermines, the actual sequence.

The W-Defense has been a leading argument in defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. In this paper, I discuss Palmer and Liu’s (2021) recent application of the W-Defense as an argument for action-omission symmetry. I then employ the W-Defense as an argument in favor of leeway compatibilist action-omission symmetry—that is, I show that the W-Defense is compatible with a leeway compatibilist view regarding action-omission symmetry. Afterwards, I extend the W-Defense as a defense for praise-blame asymmetry. The upshot is that the W-Defense may be consistently used to defend both action-omission symmetry and praise-blame asymmetry, resulting in a new and attractive hybrid view available to compatibilists, which I dub semi-symmetry. I close by highlighting significant advantages the semi-symmetry view has over current Frankfurt-style compatibilist views, including Fischer’s (2017) latest asymmetry thesis, Cyr’s (2021) hard-line symmetry, as well as a new compatibilist reply to Swenson’s (2015, 2016, 2024) “No Principled Difference Argument”.