Frankfurt, Failure, and Finding Fault

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V. Alan White

Harry Frankfurt’s famous examples of overdetermined moral agents who are nevertheless responsible for their actions and omissions have long been hailed as proofs that the ability and/or opportunity to do otherwise (Principle of Alternative Possibilities--PAP) is not a necessary condition for moral responsibility. In this paper I use recent clarifications of some of these examples by Frankfurt himself to show that their force relies in part on tacit ceteris paribus assumptions concealing a reliance on PAP that concerns matters of fairness in assessing moral responsibility.

Harry Frankfurt has long argued that examples of overdetermined moral agents prove that reasonable claims of moral responsibility against them do not entail that the agents involved could have acted otherwise (stated as a necessary condition of responsibility, Frankfurt calls this the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, or PAP). However, recent clarifications of certain of his examples reveal the subtle presence of ceteris paribus assumptions at work in them that, when examined more carefully, either call his entire project into question or at least require a narrower claim for what the examples establish.

In an attempted response to some criticisms by Peter van Inwagen to the effect that Frankfurt’s arguments do not address questions of the responsibility of failures to act, Frankfurt offers the example of an automobile driver Q who fails to drive attentively due to his preference to look left at scenery during a crucial moment. Frankfurt adds overdetermining conditions that counterfactually necessitate Q’s looking left at that time. He then remarks: "In these circumstances, Q cannot keep his eyes straight ahead. Is he morally responsible for failing to do so? Of course he is! The fact that he cannot avoid failing has no bearing on his moral responsibility for the failure, since it plays no role in leading him to fail." Frankfurt believes that this latter claim is justified because while the overdetermining conditions in Q’s case stand as redundant sufficient conditions for Q’s failure, they are not at all necessary for Q’s failing in the actual sequence of events, as opposed to necessary conditions external to an agent that were absent in a consequences-oriented example van Inwagen offered, and thus accounted (in part) for van Inwagen’s agent’s moral failure. Frankfurt concludes that judgments of moral failures such as that of Q are therefore completely justified without resort to either a PAP-like principle or reference to any existing (but actually inoperative) overdetermining conditions:

Failing to keep one’s eyes straight ahead is exclusively a matter of what movements a person makes; it is constituted by what the person himself does, and what the person does is therefore both a necessary and sufficient condition for it. It cannot be said, then, that Q’s failure would have occurred no matter what he had done--i.e., regardless of what bodily movements he made. If he had not moved his eyes to the left at all he would have not failed.

This passage bundles together not only much of the force of Frankfurt’s counterexamples against PAP, but the basis of his psychologically-structured compatibilism as well. For here he states quite powerfully what he takes to be the moral sufficiency of agents who act even in overdetermined conditions: "[f]ailing to keep one’s eyes straight ahead is exclusively a matter of what movements a person makes" in such circumstances that do not bring peripheral (i.e., non-agent-related) but actually present necessary conditions of moral action into play. It is the "moral purity" of the example of Q apart from surrounding circumstances that so effectively fixes our gaze upon Q as the only entity supposedly responsible for the failure.

However, as is the case with all Frankfurt-style examples, the intuitive judgment of Q’s responsibility is mainly driven by the apparent irrelevance of all surrounding circumstances, even ones of overdetermination, no matter what their counterfactual significance. The one subtlest factor in all this is that Q’s act in the given example is stipulated to be a failure. This begs some critical attention be paid to the fundamental issue of what a failure is, as well as how Q in Frankfurt’s example is specifically judged to fail.

Again, intuitively, it would appear that any agent’s failure arises because of an absence of some normatively expected act or consequences of an act. Since Frankfurt’s example requires that Q’s act be a failure in some sense, it should be made clear in what sense that act constitutes an absence of some normatively expected act. In Q’s case clearly this is that Q should have kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead during the time period he was actually judged to have failed. Note, however, that the normative expectation here is two-fold, both generally and specifically. Generally we expect that drivers attend to driving, ceteris paribus. Specifically a driver fails to be attentive if this expectation is unmet without qualification to the ceteris paribus specification--i.e., if there are no circumstances mitigating our normative judgment of failure. If we do discover such mitigating circumstances, then we may find a particular driver absolved of failure, such as when a driver is maliciously drugged or suddenly and unexpectedly attacked by a passenger. The driver may not have been properly attentive to driving in such a case, but we do not attribute a failure to her.

Of course, in the case of Q Frankfurt argues that there are no such mitigating circumstances, and thus we may hold Q responsible for failure. In so arguing Frankfurt draws a distinction between "personal" and "impersonal" unavoidable behaviors:

Now there are two ways in which a person’s action, or his failure to act, or a consequence of what he has done, may be unavoidable. It may be unavoidable in virtue of making certain movements which the person makes and which he cannot avoid making; or it may be unavoidable because of events or states of affairs that are bound to occur or to obtain no matter what the person himself does. . . . I shall refer to the first type of unavoidability as "personal" and to the second as "impersonal".

Frankfurt argues that Q’s unavoidable failure is personal, and thus he is "fully responsible for his failure." Why? Though Q’s act is overdetermined by external otiose circumstances, he fails due to his own behavior--not only because of some external condition or situation that requires failure come what may (as in van Inwagen’s own imagined "impersonal" case, involving an apathetic agent unaware that a telephone he should have used was actually broken). Recall that it is Frankfurt’s belief that "[i]t cannot be said, then, that Q’s failure would have occurred no matter what he had done--i.e., regardless of what bodily movements he made. If he had not moved his eyes to the left at all he would have not failed" (emphasis mine). Hence Frankfurt argues that Q, and only Q, is responsible for his failure.

However, it is instructive to note that in this latter supportive remark that Frankfurt appeals to something like a ceteris paribus case of (some) Q’s failure! In Lewisian modal language, the possible Q referred to in this latter statement (the "he" of the counterfactual antecedent) is a counter