Van Inwagen vs. Frankfurt

Frankfurt attempts to argue for compatibalism.  He wants to show that moral responsibility and determinism are compatible.  In order to do this, he shows that a classic incompatibalist thesis, PAP, is false.  PAP is the principle that states that you are morally responsible for an action only if you could have done otherwise.  Frankfurt provides thought experiments that are meant to show that there will be times that a person is morally responsible even if he or she could not have done otherwise than they did.

Van Inwagen wants to defend incompatibalism.  He thinks that there is a principle better than PAP that is not vulnerable to the kind of counterexamples that Frankfurt provides.  Van Inwagen's new incompatbalist principle is PPP: you are morally responsible for a something only if you could have prevented that thing from happening.

Remember Jones and Black.  Jones has decided to assassinate the president, and Black has put a device in Jones' brain that will make him kill the president even if he decides not to go through with it.  This is supposed to show that PAP is false, since if the reason why Jones does what he does is because he wants to (and not because he is forced to), then we would hold him morally responsible even if he could not have acted otherwise.  But when we apply PPP to this case, the tension seems to be resolved.  Jones could not prevent himself from killing the president,  so he is not morally responsible for this action.  This is supposed to be a principle that is not disproven by a case like Jones and Black.

According to PPP, moral responsibility requires the possibility to prevent states of affairs from obtaining.  So if determinism is true, then there are no states of affairs that can be prevented.  So there is no state of affairs for which anyone is responsible.

Frankurt responds that to talk about the ability to prevent things as a condition for moral responsibility (as states in PPP) is to stop talking about free will.  Frankfurt says that free will only has to do with what actions I perform with my body---the consequences that arise as a result of my actions are irrelevant to my free will.

Vocab from Van Inwagen

Free Will Thesis: Some human beings have free will. In other words, at least some humans have the power to (are able to) act otherwise than they do act.

Hard Determinism is the view that our actions are determined by external factors and that the truth of determinism is incompatible with free will. The hard determinist denies that there is any free will.

Soft Determinism is the view that our actions are determined by external factors but that the truth of determinism is compatible with free will. In other words, determinism and free will are compatible.

Libertarianism is the view that we do have free will and that free will in incompatible with determinism. In other words, the libertarian denies that determinism is true.

To say that a state of affairs obtains just means that some event or state happened. A state of affairs is a fact, or a situation that exists in the world. The phrase is just another way of saying that something happened.

PAP vs. PPP

Frankfurt's goal was to argue that determinism and moral responsibility are compatible.  He attempted to prove this by showing that PAP is false.  PAP is the principle that you are morally responsible for your actions only if you could have done otherwise.  PAP is a classic way of stating that incompatibalist thesis.  In other words, PAP means that moral responsibility and determinism are mutually exclusive.  By using thought experiments (Jones and Black) to show that PAP is false, Frankfurt attempted to defend the thesis of compatibalism: determinism and moral responsibility are compatible.

Van Inwagen thinks that Frankfurt has not successfully argued for the compatibalist thesis.  Van Inwagen thinks that PAP can be replaced with a better principle: PPP.  The Principle of Possible Prevention states that you are morally responsible for a state of affairs only if you could have prevented it from obtaining.  In other words, you are morally responsible for something only when you could have prevented that thing from happening.  PPP has the benefit that it cannot be proven false by thought experiments such as Jones and Black.

Free Life?

In Dan Wilson's "Free Life", he notes that 'we got these lives for free'. He also asks, "What you gonna spend your free life on?" Is he simply making a play on words or does he take it for granted that we are free? Also, as we read the Van Inwagen, it is further clarified that "free will" (according to the Free Will Thesis) simply means the ability to have acted other than you did act. What other definitions for "free will" are there?