ABSTRACT

Frankfurt cases are often presented as counterexamples to the principle that one is morally responsible for one’s action only if one could have acted otherwise. But ‘could have acted otherwise’ is context-sensitive; it’s therefore open to a proponent of this principle to reply that although there is a salient sense in which agents in Frankfurt-style cases couldn’t have acted otherwise, there’s another, different sense in which they could have, and it is this latter sense which is relevant to what we are morally responsible for doing. In this paper, I will evaluate the prospects of this contextualist response. I will argue that despite some initial signs of promise, the response fails, for reasons that were clearly anticipated in Frankfurt’s original paper.

摘要

法兰克福的案例经常被作为反例来反驳这一原则，即只有在一个人本可以采取其他行动的情况下，一个人才对自己的行为负有道德责任。但“本可以采取其他方式”是上下文相关的；因此，这一原则的支持者可以回答说，尽管在法兰克福式案件中代理人不可能采取其他方式行事有一种明显的意义，但他们可以有另一种不同的意义，就是后一种意义这与我们在道德上应负责任的行为有关。在本文中，我将评估这种情境主义反应的前景。我会争辩说，尽管有一些初步的承诺迹象，但响应失败了，原因在法兰克福的原始论文中已经明确预料到了。