Frankfurt-Style Cases User Manual: Why Frankfurt-Style Enabling Cases Do Not Necessitate Tech Support

Rescuing Frankfurt-Style Cases

Why Frankfurt-Style Cases Don’t Help (Much)

Contemporary debates about free will and moral responsibility frequently focus on arguments around Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs). Their centrality reflects the fact that they have widely been seen to constitute a decisive step forward in a debate that had seemed to be irredeemably bogged down. In Fischer’s (1994) influential phrase, they break the ‘dialectical stalemate’ that had come to be char...

Vihvelin on Frankfurt-Style Cases and the Actual- Sequence View

This is a critical discussion of Vihvelin’s recent book Causes, Laws, and Free Will. I discuss Vihvelin’s ideas on Frankfurt-style cases and the actual-sequence view of freedom that is inspired by them.

On the Impertinence of Frankfurt-Style Argument

As Daniel Speak notes in a recent article, the debate over Frankfurt-style examples (FSE) has focused overwhelmingly on whether such examples in fact show the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) to be false. According to Speak, in the rush to attack and defend the examples themselves, a subtler and more devastating criticism of the FSE has been missed. For even if the FSE falsify PAP, ...

The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories

Harry Frankfurt’s article, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” triggered a huge literature discussing whether Frankfurt presents a case (or perhaps a template for a case) in which an individual is morally responsible for behavior that he or she could not have avoided.1 In his seminal article (which in a sense goes back to an example originally presented by John Locke in An Essay...