Why Frankfurt-Style Cases Don’t Help (Much)

Contemporary debates about free will and moral responsibility frequently focus on arguments around Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs). Their centrality reflects the fact that they have widely been seen to constitute a decisive step forward in a debate that had seemed to be irredeemably bogged down. In Fischer’s (1994) influential phrase, they break the ‘dialectical stalemate ’ that had come to be characteristic of the free will debate – and they break it, moreover, in favor of compatibilism. By showing that alternative possibilities are not necessary for moral responsibility, they remove the main source of the intuitive attractiveness of libertarianism. In this paper, I will argue that this view is false: FSCs do not break the dialectical stalemate at all. Instead, they leave everything more or less as it was. This paper, unusually, therefore does not claim to advance the debate, but to take it backwards. How are FSCs supposed to have decisively advanced the debate over the compatibility of free will and causal determinism? Before these cases came onto the scene, debates about the compatibility problem often turned on the questio