Frankfurt : The Principle Of Alternative Possibilities ( Pap )

However, this cannot be said for all victims of guilt as the author makes sure to heed the consequences of

Over the course of time, in the dominion of philosophy, there has been a constant debate involving two major concepts: free will and determinism. Are our paths in life pre-determined? Do we have the ability to make decisions by using our freedom of will? While heavily subjective questions that have been answered many different authors, philosophers, etc., two authors in particular have answered these questions very similarly. David Hume, a Scottish philosopher from the 18th century, argues in his essay “Of Liberty and Necessity” that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that they can both be accepted at the same time without being logically incorrect. Alike Hume, 20th century author Harry G. Frankfurt concludes in his essay “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” that the two major concepts are compatible. These two authors are among the most famous of Compatibilists (hence the fact that they believe free will and determinism are compatible ideas) in philosophical history. The question that then arises in the realm of compatibilism particularly, is one dealing with moral responsibility: If our paths in life are not totally pre-determined, and we have the ability to make decisions willingly (using free will), then how do we deem an individual morally responsible for a given decision? Frankfurt reaches the conclusion that we are held morally responsible regardless of

The idea of blame, defined as, “A particular kind of response (e.g. emotion), to a person, at fault, for a wrongful action,” plays a significant role in the study of crime, with respect to degrees of “fault.” In most modern societies, “criminal culpability,” or degrees of wrongdoing, makes a difference between the kinds of punishment one receives for his action(s). To be culpable for a crime, there must be a guilty act (Actus Rea), and a guilty mind (Mens Rea). Degrees of culpability often depends on the kind of mental state, (Mens Rea), one brings to the act in which he engaged. How much one is blameworthy for wrongful conduct depends in part on the state of mind in relation to the wrongful conduct. One’s mental state while engaging in wrongful conduct, which in a legal sense is determined by legislators, is characterized by the following terms: purposely, knowingly, recklessly and negligence.

There are many ways to decide what makes a man guilty. In an ethical sense, there is more to guilt than just committing the crime. In Charles Brockden Browns’ Wieland, the reader is presented with a moral dilemma: is Theodore Wieland guilty of murdering his wife and children, even though he claims that the command came from God, or is Carwin guilty because of his history of using persuasive voices, even though his role in the Wieland family’s murder is questionable? To answer these questions, one must consider what determines guilt, such as responsibility, motives, consequences, and the act itself. No matter which view is taken on what determines a man’s guilt, it can be concluded that

Williams also delivers the idea of agent-regret which, to him, matters to the person in the unlucky case more than any extrinsic moral judgments. Agent-regret is defined as “thought being formed in part by first personal conceptions of how one might have acted otherwise”, (Williams, p.27), and required “a first-personal subject-matter” and “not yet merely a particular kind of psychological content, but also a particular kind of expression”, (Williams, 27). Hence, even if the driver A is morally treated as equal as driver B, the agent-regret of guilt may follow him to the

The rule states, " A defendant may be excused from criminal responsibility if at the time of the commission of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from a disease of mind, as not to know the nature and the quality of the act he was doing..." (3)

will and moral responsibility. I will argue, that Frankfurt makes an invalid implicit assumption that the

Frankfurt however believes that “the principle of alternate possibilities” is false. Frankfurt then goes on to say that “a person may well be morally responsible for what he has done even though he could not have done otherwise”. He then attempts to persuade the audience to see how the first principle is incorrect and that people are not to be held responsible for their actions in the following circumstances involving a man named Jones. Frankfurt uses this to defend moral obligation in situations where there are no alternative possibilities. Frankfurt then presents the cases of Jones1, Jones2, Jones3 and Jones4.

Frankfurt presents counterexamples to PAP to prove its falsity. He tells us to assume that there is a universal controller that wants to ensure certain outcomes. The controller makes it impossible for an agent to act otherwise, which causes her to act exactly as the controller wishes. Frankfurt argues that in such a case it is true that agent is not responsible for her action and that she could not have done otherwise, but he thinks that the agent’s lack of responsibility does not follow from her inability to do otherwise.

Opponents of Act Utilitarianism attempt to argue that Act Utilitarianism (henceforth AU) does not account for justice when applied to ethical dilemmas. It is the authors opinion that these claims are factually incorrect and this essay shall attempt to prove this through analysis of common arguments against AU, and modifying AU to allow for justice to be more readily accounted for.

Harry Frankfurt essay “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” is centered around two major ideas. First is a person’s will is a set of effective first-order desires, and the second is that a person is a creature that has second-order volitions. Frankfurt offes the concept of a person vested with first-order desires and second-order desires which play the major role in decision making process.

At the Wannsee conference, in Berlin, on the 20th of January 1942, high ranking Nazi officials gathered to discuss implementation of a plan – The Final Solution.

Law and morality work together to guide our behavior; while law does it by punishing us if we do something wrong, morality does it through incentives. In their articles, both H.L.A Hart in “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals,” and Lon Fuller’s reply to professor Hart in “Positivism and Fidelity to Law,” discuss the concept of law post world war II Germany and their re-imagining of natural law as put forth by Gustav Radbruch’s theory. In this paper, I hope to show how both law and morality is needed to create just rules, more specifically drawing from the “grudge informer” case mentioned in Hart’s article. First, I will explain the dilemma of the “grudge informer” case and the contradicting theory laid down by Radbrunch’s.

In the aforementioned studies, an asymmetry is found between the footbridge and the bystander cases which suggests that there is an independent reason to remove any asymmetry in the personal bystander and footbridge cases. The results showed that participants were aware of the difference between weak impermissibility and all-in impermissibility. In the first experiment, about 70% stated that is was not acceptable to violate a moral rule and all things considered both in the personal footbridge case. We can see a recognisable distinction in personal and moral cases, but this was not addressed in these experiments. In addition, a philosophical understanding tells us that when a rule is broken, it is wrong to go ahead with that action (e.g. Fried, 1978). It is clear then from both experiments that a difference between weak and all-in permissibility is not evident (Nichols & Mallon, 2005).

The general defence of necessity has long been disputed. The South African and English legal systems are intrinsically opposite, and neither seem to escape controversy. These systems differ greatly on the legal subject of defence of necessity in the context of killing an innocent third party. The legal aspects of this defence, as well as accompanying problems which may arise, will be briefly discussed in terms of the South African as well as the English law. Utilitarianism and Kantianism will be used to analyse specific case law that made an enormous contribution to the legal dispute regarding necessity.