ABSTRACT
In this chapter I defend Harry Frankfurt’s compatibilist-friendly attack on the demand for alternative possibilities as a condition of moral responsibility. 1 Frankfurt’s attack is meant to provide succor to the compatibilist in that, if successful, it would defuse one important argument for incompatibilism. This incompatibilist argument holds that determinism rules out free will and moral responsibility by ruling out an agent’s access to alternative possibilities. 2 If free will and moral responsibility do not require alternative possibilities, then this incompatibilist argument is otiose. Frankfurt’s argument invites (though it does not entail) a form of compatibilism that characterizes the freedom pertinent for moral responsibility solely by virtue of properties present in the actual sequence of events in which an agent acts, not in terms of possible ways that an agent might have acted differently than she did. This new form of compatibilism can be called actual sequence compatibilism. 3
