Frankfurtian Reflections: A Critical Discussion of Robert Lockie’s “Three Recent Frankfurt Cases”

Rescuing Frankfurt-Style Cases

IRP Discussion Papers Robert Moffitt

The 1981 federal Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) increased the benefit-reduction rate in the AFDC program, thereby generating possible work disincentives for welfare recipients. This paper reviews the theoretical basis for the existence of such disincentives, provides a statistical framework for their empirical measurement, and reviews critically the studies that have been completed to...

The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School

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...

REPRINTS AND REFLECTIONS Smoking and lung cancer: recent evidence and a discussion of some questions

This report reviews some of the more recent epidemiologic and experimental findings on the relationship of tobacco smoking to lung cancer, and discusses some criticisms directed against the conclusion that tobacco smoking, especially cigarettes, has a causal role in the increase in broncho-genic carcinoma. The magnitude of the excess lung-cancer risk among cigarette smokers is so great that the...