ABSTRACT

Frankfurt’s ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’ broke with the tradition of understanding the kind of freedom required for responsibility in terms of alternative possibilities. At the same time, it inspired and motivated a new family of views in its place: views that focus exclusively on actual sequences or the actual causes of behaviour. But, what exactly does that ‘exclusiveness’ claim amount to? At first sight, it may seem natural to interpret it as the claim that the only facts that are relevant to an agent’s freedom are certain facts about actual causes. This would imply that any non-actual (counterfactual) facts are simply irrelevant to the freedom of agents. This paper argues that this interpretation is mistaken, and proposes a better one. It also discusses the related but more general question of the type of project that we are invested in when giving a theory of freedom: Are we interested in the bottom-level grounding facts, or are we interested in some higher-level facts?

摘要

法兰克福的“替代可能性和道德责任”打破了从替代可能性的角度理解责任所需的那种自由的传统。与此同时，它激发并激发了一个新的观点家族：专注于专注的观点关于实际顺序或行为的实际原因。但是，这种“排他性”主张到底是什么？乍一看，将其解释为声称与代理人的自由相关的唯一事实是有关实际原因的某些事实似乎很自然。这意味着任何非实际（反事实）事实都与代理人的自由无关。本文认为这种解释是错误的，并提出了更好的解释。它还讨论了在给出自由理论时我们所投资的项目类型的相关但更普遍的问题：我们是对底层的基础事实感兴趣，还是对一些更高层次的事实感兴趣？