Responsibility and Frankfurt-type Examples

This article examines recent attempts to strengthen Frankfurt's argument against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) by providing better examples of FR-situations. It considers these examples from a libertarian viewpoint and argues that they do not succeed either. Even if at one point a defender of Frankfurt might be able to come up with a genuine example of an FR-situation, avoidability would still remain a necessary condition for at least one important type of moral responsibility-that of moral blameworthiness. In the course of defending this last claim, the article defends a more comprehensive constraint on moral blameworthiness than avoidability, and then applies this constraint to meet a well-known recent objection to PAP by John Fischer.