Do intuitions about Frankfurt-style cases rest on an internalist prejudice?

Philosophical Explorations 19 (3):290-305 (2016)
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Abstract

“Frankfurt-style cases” are widely considered as having refuted the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by presenting cases in which an agent is morally responsible even if he could not have done otherwise. However, Neil Levy has recently argued that FSCs fail because our intuitions about cases involving counterfactual interveners are inconsistent, and this inconsistency is best explained by the fact that our intuitions about such cases are grounded in an internalist prejudice about the location of mental states and capacities. In response to this challenge, we argue that there is no inconsistency in our intuitions about cases involving CIs, as soon as we draw the comparison properly, and that intuitions about such cases do not rest on an internalist prejudice, but on a more basic distinction between two kinds of dispositions. Additionally, we discus...

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Author Profiles

Florian Cova
University of Geneva
Hichem Naar
University of Duisburg-Essen

References found in this work

An Essay on Free Will.Peter Van Inwagen - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1969 - Journal of Philosophy 66 (23):829-839.
Living Without Free Will.Derk Pereboom - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Powers: A Study in Metaphysics.George Molnar - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Stephen Mumford.

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