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LIT-294: Moral Responsibility and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-269); worth reading as the standard, even-handed map of the PAP debate and the best available stand-in for Frankfurt 1969. It gives the recipe, both of Frankfurt's own cases, and the main defences and replies, with precise citations. It is a stand-in for the *argument's reception*, not for the 1969 text, which it quotes only through Fischer's retelling, and it links FSCs to the hierarchical theory in a single paragraph (§5.1).
Version2
Tagsfree-will, agency, ethics, metaphysics
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-269 — Moral Responsibility and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-119 — An agent can be morally responsible for what she did although she could not have done otherwise, when what made the action unavoidable played no part in bringing it about, so the principle of alternate possibilities is false, THEORY-121 — Moral responsibility requires guidance control, moderate reasons-responsiveness of the agent's own actual-sequence mechanism, and not regulative control over alternative possibilities, so responsibility is compatible with causal determinism

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Robb (2020), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, eds.); first published 9 Jul 2020, no substantive revision to date; archived as https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2026/entries/alternative-possibilities/ — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alternative-possibilities/

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-09-29 at the owner’s request, as one of the texts assembled to represent Harry Frankfurt’s account of higher-order volitions, whose 1971 statement is paywalled. published: is the first appearance (ADR-002).

It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-269 is the close reading of 2026-09-29, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the standard, even-handed map of the PAP debate and the best available stand-in for Frankfurt 1969. It gives the recipe, both of Frankfurt’s own cases, and the main defences and replies, with precise citations. It is a stand-in for the argument’s reception, not for the 1969 text, which it quotes only through Fischer’s retelling, and it links FSCs to the hierarchical theory in a single paragraph (§5.1).

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