Zachary Akin

This essay contributes to recent debate surrounding Frankfurt-style omission cases. While most philosophers writing on free will and moral responsibility now reject the thesis that responsibility for acting requires the ability to do otherwise (“The Principle of Alternative Possibilities,” or “PAP”), far more controversy remains regarding the thesis that responsibility for omitting to act requires the ability to do what was left undone (“The Principle of Possible Action,” or “PPA”). Frankfurt-style omission cases are widely considered less persuasive as counterexamples to PPA than Frankfurt-style action cases are as counterexamples to PAP. This has led many who reject PAP to nevertheless retain a commitment to PPA. In an insightful recent article, Joseph Metz claims to have discovered a principled difference between actions and omissions which explains why this surprising asymmetry holds. If Metz’s proposal is correct, opponents of PAP who accept PPA—himself included—stand to benefit significantly from endorsing it. Here, I argue that Metz’s proposed explanation why there are no successful omission FSCs fails to account for why omission FSCs do not undermine PPA regardless of whether any such cases successfully do so.

In this paper, I defend divine conceptualism against one prominent critique from William Lane Craig in his book God and Abstract Objects. Craig argues that the divine conceptualist’s only way out of the “bootstrapping objection” results in an unpalatable concession of defeat to the metaphysical anti-realist. Craig’s argument depends on an analysis whereby God is causally or logically prior to the divine concepts. Given this, the conceptualist may resist it by adopting—following Ralph Cudworth—a version of divine conceptualism which does not construe the relationship between God and God's thoughts as one of either causal or logical priority.

In this essay, I argue that despite the apparent promise of the recently popular “robust omissions reply” to John Martin Fischer’s well-known robustness objection to flicker of freedom style responses to arguments against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) based on Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs), the robustness objection succeeds after all. Though I concede that the robust omissions reply is successful with the most promising extant variety of FSC (modified blockage) in view, I present a new kind of case—“Fischer-type modified blockage”—in which I claim the subject is basically morally responsible for what he’s done despite his lacking access to any robust alternative possibilities, and against which the robust omissions reply is ineffective. Along the way, I take advantage of an opportunity to show that my Fischer-type modified blockage case also serves to effectively undermine an otherwise promising recent defense, from Justin Capes, of David Widerker’s “W-defense” argument for PAP.

According to one recently popular “flicker of freedom” style response to Frankfurt-style arguments against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities—the “Triple O” flicker strategy—agents in Frankfurt-style cases are really or most fundamentally morally responsible for performing an action (A-ing) on their own, but not for A-ing simpliciter. This essay has two related aims. First, I offer an interpretation of the Triple O strategy which insulates it against an objection raised by Carolina Sartorio in “Flickers of Freedom and Moral Luck.” Second, I argue that a sub-version of the strategy (“the inheritance view”) according to which agents in Frankfurt-style cases are derivatively responsible for A-ing simpliciter in virtue of A-ing on their own, for which they are basically responsible, is untenable. I show that “A-ing simpliciter” is not plausibly an outcome of “A-ing on one’s own” in the sense required for the transfer of responsibility. Several candidates for the generative relation via which responsibility might be transferred are canvassed, and it is found that none of these relations plausibly hold between an agent’s A-ing on his own and his A-ing simpliciter. Next, I identify the generative relation (if any) that does hold between these items and show that the direction of generation problematically conflicts with the direction of the inheritance view’s purported transfer of responsibility.