فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

According to the principle of alternative possibilities, an agent is morally responsible for performing an action only if they could have avoided performing that action. The purpose of Frankfurt-style counterexamples is to demonstrate the falsity of this principle. Proponents of these counterexamples argue that scenarios can be constructed in which, despite the agent being unable to avoid a particular action, our strong intuition is that the agent is still morally responsible for that action. One of the most important responses from defenders of the principle of alternative possibilities, aimed at challenging the effectiveness of Frankfurt-style counterexamples, is the flicker of freedom strategy. Advocates of the flicker of freedom this strategy believe that, in Frankfurt scenarios, a flicker of alternative possibilities is still open to the agent, and this prevents these scenarios from being genuine counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities. Eleonore Stump, a supporter of Frankfurt-style counterexamples, holds that it is possible to design a counterexample in which not even this flicker is available to the agent, and yet, despite having no alternative possibilities, the agent is still morally responsible for their action. This paper seeks to demonstrate the incoherence of Stump’s Frankfurt scenario and argues in favor of the flicker-prone nature of Frankfurt-style cases. The main finding of this research indicates that the presence of a flicker arises from the very nature of Frankfurt counterexamples. As a result, Frankfurt-style cases, by their very nature, always leave a flicker of freedom for the agent and, therefore, do not constitute a threat to the truth of the principle of alternative possibilities.