| > The point was that nobody would consider a person acting under threat of death to be making freely willed choices, so defining choice in the naive and reductive sense that was suggested is just incorrect because it cannot exclude this case. Therefore this naive and reductive definition cannot be what people mean by "choice" in the context of free will. I disagree with this characterization as it omits entirely the moral culpability central to Frankfurt's argumentation. Frankfurt cases are about moral culpability[1]. I did not refer to morality or culpability but only the base naive case given that the question was "why can't you have both?" and I think the epistemic force of the base case is nontrivial. I think your error here is that you are presuming: (a) If you are acting under threat of death, you cannot do otherwise but save your life.
(b) When you define freedom as the ability to have done otherwise, you cannot be free in the case of (a).
(c) All cases of human choice must be free.
(d) Given (b) and (c), the definition must be incorrect. As the other person in the thread pointed out, some people can choose death in the face of death or some other choice. It has happened many times throughout history. So saying "you must save your life" is outright false. Some people choose one option, some people choose another. This has no force on the definition of freedom. Even if you say in that specific case a person is not free because they could not do otherwise, it does not follow that the definition of freedom can't handle the case. It may follow that the person is not blameworthy - which is what Frankfurt was getting at - but that's nowhere near saying that the theory can't handle the case at all. Some might say the person under threat of death could do otherwise, some might say the person under threat of death could not do otherwise. That's not fatal to anything, it just shows the definition is incomplete. [1] Wikipedia covers it somewhat here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_cases#Frankfurt's_ob... but if you don't like Wikipedia for some reason, the intro to this 2007 paper https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... gives more or less the same description. |