Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Frankfurt and free will

Here is a version of the Principle of Alternate Possibility that is immune to all of Frankfurt's counterexamples:

If x freely does A and Mr Black is nowhere near, x could have refrained from doing A.

2 comments:

Jeremy Pierce said...

It doesn't get you around the divine versions, though. It also doesn't handle cases where Black can act from a considerable distance.

Alexander R Pruss said...

What's worse, it doesn't get you around cases just like Frankfurt's, but where the neurosurgeon is named "Green". :-)