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A Modest Classical Compatibilism Cover
By: Matthew J. Hart  
Open Access
|Mar 2018

Abstract

The advent of Frankfurt-style counterexamples in the early 1970s posed a problem not merely for incompatibilists, but for compatibilists also. At that time compatibilists too were concerned to hold that the presence of alternative possibilities was necessary for moral responsibility. Such a classical compatibilism, I argue in this paper, should not have been left behind. I propose that we can use a Kratzer-style semantics of ‘can’ to model ‘could have done otherwise’ statements in such a way that the truth of such expressions is both (i) evidently consistent with determinism, and (ii) clearly such that Frankfurt-style counterexamples do not count as cases where the agent could not have done otherwise.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/disp-2017-0007 | Journal eISSN: 2182-2875 | Journal ISSN: 0873-626X
Language: English, Portuguese
Page range: 265 - 285
Submitted on: Jul 27, 2017
Accepted on: Feb 11, 2017
Published on: Mar 6, 2018
Published by: University of Lisbon
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 4 issues per year

© 2018 Matthew J. Hart, published by University of Lisbon
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.