What time travelers cannot not do (but are responsible for anyway)

The Principle of Alternative Possibilities is the intuitive idea that someone is morally responsible for an action only if she could have done otherwise. Harry Frankfurt has famously presented putative counterexamples to this intuitive principle. In this paper, I formulate a simple version of the Pr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophical studies 2013-10, Vol.166 (1), p.149-162
Main Author: Spencer, Joshua
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Contrafactuals
Counterexamples
Education
Epistemology
Ethics
Free will
Grandfathers
Killing
Metaphysics
Morality
Paradoxes
Philosophical logics. Philosophy of language
Philosophy
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Mind
Prisons
Saliency
Time travel
Travelers
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Summary:The Principle of Alternative Possibilities is the intuitive idea that someone is morally responsible for an action only if she could have done otherwise. Harry Frankfurt has famously presented putative counterexamples to this intuitive principle. In this paper, I formulate a simple version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities that invokes a course-grained notion of actions. After warming up with a Frankfurt-Style Counterexample to this principle, I introduce a new kind of counterexample based on the possibility of time travel. At the end of the paper, I formulate a more sophisticated version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities that invokes a certain fine grained notion of actions. I then explain how this new kind of counterexample can be augmented to show that even the more sophisticated principle is false.
ISSN:0031-8116
1573-0883
DOI:10.1007/s11098-012-0029-y