Question

Put Frankfurt’s Door A/B thought experiment with the neuroscientist behind the mirror into your words:

Answer 1

the experiment puts freedom and moral responsibility in a new light. According to the traditional view of freedom, it requires having the ability to select from a number of alternative possibilities that are open to us at different points in our lives. This idea is captured by the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP): An agent acts freely (in a way that is relevant to his moral responsibility) only if he could have done otherwise (or had the ability to do otherwise).

Harry Frankfurt’s paper “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” (Frankfurt 1969) argued against PAP, and thus against the traditional view of freedom. Frankfurt argued that, although PAP seems initially plausible, its plausibility is a mere illusion. This illusion, he argued, can be explained away once a conceptual distinction is made between two types of factors: (1) the factors that make an act by an agent inevitable, or that make it the case that the agent lacks the ability to do otherwise (inevitability factors), and (2) the factors that actually explain the agent’s act (explanatory factors).

So the experiment Black and Jones, seems to be a counterexample to PAP: it seems to show that being responsible doesn’t require the ability to do otherwise. This is what we see, Frankfurt argues when the inevitability factors come apart from the explanatory factors. Here the inevitability factors are the facts concerning Black, his existence and intentions. Given that Black never intervenes, the inevitability factors are not part of the actual explanation of Jones’s action. But, intuitively, the only factors that can be relevant to Jones’s responsibility for his act are the factors that actually explain why he acted (the explanatory factors). The explanatory factors, in this case, are Jones’s own reasons and the process of deliberation. This is why Jones seems to be responsible even though he couldn’t have done otherwise.