Mind-Brain Lecture: David Widerker (Bar Ilan Univ)
Lecture text (pdf 200 kb)
Harry Frankfurt’s celebrated counterexample to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP): An agent S is morally blameworthy for performing a given act V only if he could have avoided performing it, purports to describe a scenario in which an agent makes a decision that he cannot avoid making, even though nothing in that scenario causes or brings the decision about. Call such a scenario an “IRR-scenario”. Adopting a libertarian stance, I first describe the logical structure of an IRR-scenario, and based on that I argue that such scenarios are conceptually possible. In the second part, I consider the question whether an agent who in an IRR-scenario makes a morally wrong decision is blameworthy for it, and show what sort of account of moral blame is needed in order to answer that question positively. In this context, I also show how the proponent of that account may respond to what I have dubbed elsewhere “the W-defense”.
All are welcome!
