Summary Of Alternate Possibilities And Moral Responsibility By Harry Frankfurt
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Moral Responsibility
Moral responsibility seems to be a simple topic when glanced at, but reveals itself to be a very complex quandary when one delves into the deeper meanings behind trust and accountability. Harry Frankfurt has explored this topic with astonishing vigor and completeness in his article “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility”, in which he proves with examples and sound reasoning how the conventional train of thought in the free-will problem is and can be irrefutably proven to be false. He then proposes to replace the principle of alternate possibilities with a new and soundly proven principle. In this paper, I will be answering the question: “Is it ever fair to hold a person morally responsible for an action when they could not have done other than they did?” This will be achieved by responding to Frankfurt’s article in showing how his proposed new principle is vastly superior to the old principle of alternate…show more content… He then goes on to say that this principle is false by saying that a person may be morally responsible for their actions even if they could not have done otherwise. He reiterates how the principle of alternate possibilities is associated with the proposition that moral responsibility is debarred by coercion, and that it is not right to link the two. It could be said that the fact that a person was coerced to perform an action may entail that that the person could not have done otherwise, as well as saying that the person has no moral responsibility for their actions. However, this lack of moral responsibility is not caused by the inability to perform any other action. This shows that there is indeed something fundamentally wrong about the principle of alternate