Michael Robinson

According to the most popular versions of the flicker defense, Frankfurt-style cases fail to undermine the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) because agents in these cases are (directly) morally responsible not for making the decisions they make but for making these decisions on their own, which is something they could have avoided doing. Frankfurt defenders have primarily focused on trying to show that the alternative possibility of refraining from making the relevant decisions on their own is not a robust alternative, while generally granting that this alternative cannot easily be eliminated from successful cases of this sort. In a recent issue of this journal, Stockdale (2022) attempts to sidestep the debate concerning robustness and develops a novel kind of Frankfurt-style case in which agents are unable to avoid making the relevant decisions on their own. The fundamental problem with Stockdale’s argument is that it hinges on an implausible conception of acting on one’s own. I help clarify the pertinent sense of what it means to do a thing on one’s own in this context and show that these new cases are unable to overcome the targeted versions of the flicker defense of PAP.

One way to defend the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) against Frankfurt‐style cases is to challenge the claim that agents in these scenarios are genuinely morally responsible for what they do. Alternatively, one can grant that agents are morally responsible for what they do in these cases but resist the idea that they could not have done otherwise. This latter strategy is known as the flicker defense of PAP. In an argument he calls the W‐Defense, David Widerker adopts the former approach. I argue that, while Widerker's argument does a poor job showing that these agents are not morally responsible for what they do, it does a very good job highlighting the alternative possibilities that remain open to agents in these cases and illustrating their moral significance (or robustness). In doing so, my aim is to co‐opt Widerker's argument to bolster the most promising versions of the flicker defense.

In a recent issue of this journal, Gamble and Saad offer a taxonomy of conscientious objection in health care with the aim of increasing the common ground in the debate over conscientious objection to prevent parties from talking past each other and help facilitate greater progress on this issue. Although we agree that this is an important and worthwhile project, Gamble and Saad's proposal suffers from several serious weaknesses that limit its ability to do the work set out for it. In this paper, we identify some of the major problems with this particular attempt in order to highlight some desiderata for a taxonomy of conscientious objection in health care that can serve as a guide for developing improved taxonomies of this kind in the future.

Promises to perform supererogatory actions present an interesting puzzle. On the one hand, this seems like a promise that one should be able to keep simply by performing some good deed or other. On the other hand, the only way to keep it is to do something that exceeds one’s duties. But any good deed that one performs, which might otherwise have been supererogatory, will not go above and beyond what one is morally required to do in such a case because one has an obligation that one does not normally have—namely, an obligation to do something supererogatory. Thus, some scholars have argued that promises of this sort cannot possibly be kept and so are wrong to make. I show that, far from being impossible, keeping promises to supererogate is easy, and so there is nothing wrong with making promises of this sort.

The longstanding dominant view is that health care practitioners should be permitted to refrain from participating in medical interventions when they have a conscientious objection to doing so in a broad range of cases. In recent years, a growing minority have been fervently advocating a sea change. In their view, medical professionals should not be permitted to refuse to participate in medical interventions merely because doing so conflicts with their own moral or religious views. One of the most commonly offered arguments in support of this position focuses on the fact that health care practitioners knew what they were getting into when they voluntarily chose to take on their professional roles; nobody forced them to do this. I will argue that, despite its popularity among opponents of conscientious refusal, this argument from voluntariness fails to provide us with a good reason to reject broad accommodationism in favour of non-accommodationism. No data are available. NA.

:This essay advances a version of the flicker of freedom defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities and shows that it is invulnerable to the major objections facing other versions of this defense. Proponents of the flicker defense argue that Frankfurt-style cases fail to undermine PAP because agents in these cases continue to possess alternative possibilities. Critics of the flicker strategy contend that the alternatives that remain open to agents in these cases are unable to rebuff Frankfurt-style attack on the grounds that they are insufficiently robust. Once we see that omissions are capable of constituting robust alternatives, even when they are not intentional, it becomes clear that agents in these cases do indeed possess robust alternative possibilities—alternatives that are ineliminable from cases of this sort. The upshot is that Frankfurt-style cases are theoretically incapable of providing us with good grounds for rejecting PAP.

In a series of recent papers, Saul Smilansky has argued that compatibilists have no principled way of resisting the view that prepunishment is at least sometimes appropriate, thus revealing compatibilism to be a radical position, out of keeping with our ordinary moral judgments. Recent attempts to resist this conclusion seem to have overlooked the biggest problem with Smilansky’s argument, which is this: Smilanksy argues that the most obvious objection to prepunishment—namely, that it is inappropriate because it involves punishing the innocent for crimes they have not committed—is unavailable to compatibilists. If compatibilism is true, he says, then if it is causally determined that someone is going to commit a crime, the fact that one has not yet done so is a mere temporal matter bearing no moral significance. I argue that there is no reason for compatibilists to accept this point. Compatibilists can (and should) resist Smilansky's claim that one’s not yet having committed a crime is morally insignificant and so resist the temptation to prepunish.

In The Right and the Good, W. D. Ross commits himself to the view that, in addition to being distinct and defeasible, some prima facie duties are more binding than others. David McNaughton has argued that there appears to be no way of making sense of this claim that is both coherent and consistent with Ross's overall picture. I offer an alternative way of understanding Ross's remarks about the comparative stringency of prima facie duties, which, in addition to being compatible with his view as presented in the text, provides us with a coherent, and indeed plausible, account of what it means for some duties to be more binding than others.

Charles Hermes argues that the Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility fails because one of the inference rules on which it relies, Rule A, is invalid. Rule A states that if a proposition p is broadly logically necessary, then p is true and no one is, or ever has been, even partly morally responsible for the fact that p. Hermes purports to offer a counterexample to Rule A which focuses on agents’ moral responsibility for disjunctions. Hermes’s objection is motivated by the idea that the logic of moral responsibility ought to be based on the logic of truthmakers rather than the logic of propositions. I show that the logic of moral responsibility does not track the logic of truthmakers and defend the validity of Rule A against Hermes’s objection.

A great deal of attention has been paid recently to the claim that traditional Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), which depend for their success on the presence of a perfectly reliable indicator (or prior sign ) of what an agent will freely do if left to act on his own, are guilty of begging the question against incompatibilists, since such indicators seem to presuppose a deterministic relation between an agent’s free action and its causal antecedents. Objections of this sort have given rise to considerable efforts to construct alternative Frankfurt-type counterexamples that do not rely on prior signs of this kind and so do not presuppose determinism in a way that incompatibilists should find objectionable. One consequence of this shift in the way Frankfurt-type counterexamples are formulated is that it provides an opportunity for the forceful resurgence of certain versions of the so-called flicker defense of PAP. In this paper I develop two versions of the flicker defense, indicate their advantages over other versions of this strategy, and defend them against objections. Insofar as either of these is successful, it will show not only that PAP has yet to be falsified by any of the modified Frankfurt-type counterexamples currently on offer but that cases of this sort are in principle incapable of falsifying PAP

It has long been held that a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise. This is commonly known as the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). In this dissertation I defend PAP against two main lines of attack. The first comes from a class of putative counterexamples to PAP devised by Harry Frankfurt, commonly known as Frankfurt-style cases. The second line of attack I consider comes from various attempts in recent years to reconceive the nature of moral responsibility in a way that straightforwardly entails that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility. I argue that these challenges are unsuccessful in undermining the view that moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise and, in doing so, attempt to clarify the moral significance of possessing alternatives of this sort

Philosophers employing Frankfurt-style cases to challenge the principle of alternative possibilities have mostly sought to construct scenarios that eliminate as many of an agent’s alternatives as possible—and all alternatives at the moment of action, within the agent’s control—without causally determining the agent’s actions. One of the chief difficulties for this traditional approach is that the closer one gets to ruling out absolutely all alternative possibilities the more it appears that agents’ actions in these cases are causally determined. “Limited-blockage” versions of these cases are meant to sidestep this worry by blocking all and only those alternatives that are intrinsically relevant to moral responsibility (“robust alternatives”) while leaving open all other alternatives, including a significant range of alternatives that are within the agent’s voluntary control at the moment of action. I argue that, owing to the fact that omissions (and not just actions) are capable of constituting robust alternative possibilities, limited-blockage cases cannot avoid collapsing into the more traditional sort of Frankfurt-style case to which they are meant to be an alternative and so are vulnerable to the very same concerns they are meant to avoid

In his book, Building Better Beings, Manuel Vargas argues that we should reject libertarianism, on the grounds that it is naturalistically implausible, and embrace revisionism rather than eliminativism, on the grounds that the former is a shorter departure from ordinary thinking about moral responsibility. I argue that Vargas fails to adequately appreciate the extent to which ordinary judgments about moral responsibility involve ascriptions of basic desert as well as the centrality of basic desert in the ordinary conception of moral responsibility. Insofar as this is correct, we have good reason to think, first, that libertarianism is much more naturalistically plausible than Vargas maintains and, second, that we ought to opt for eliminativism over revisionism in the event that libertarianism turns out to be implausible