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Chapter 7 aims to undermine the view that seeks to preserve moral responsibility by cutting the ties between agents and the world (for instance, by holding that agents are morally responsible for what they intend to do, and not for the consequences of their actions). It puts forward a rival view of agency, according to which agents are partially constituted by world-involving events and processes. This view is developed through a consideration of Frankfurt-style cases. The chapter introduce a new kind of case, modelled on the Frankfurt-style cases, and argue that these new cases show that agential capacities are partially constituted by processes and mechanisms that seem at first glance to be external to the agent.

This chapter clarifies principles of alternative possibilities both for moral responsibility and for free action, locates the most important challenge that Frankfurt-style cases pose for libertarianism, and begins to develop an answer to that challenge.

This chapter constructs a libertarian view that grants the main moral of Frankfurt-style cases, and offers a resolution of the problem of present luck. Attention to how human beings may develop from neonates who do not even act intentionally into free, morally responsible human agents proves instructive in developing the resolution.

Can we be morally responsible for omitting to do things that we were not able to do? Although at first sight it appears that we cannot, some have argued that Frankfurt-style omission cases show otherwise. This generates a puzzle that resists an easy solution. This chapter argues that solving this puzzle is like opening a can of worms, in that identifying the right solution to it generates other even more intricate and more interesting puzzles. The chapter then offers some tentative solutions to the puzzles, old and new, but its main goal is to draw attention to the problems, and to uncover the kinds of elements that we would need to solve them.

The Frankfurt cases motivate the notion that we should adopt an “actual-sequence” approach to moral responsibility. On this sort of view, moral responsibility does not require freedom to do otherwise; rather, it is a function of (possibly modal) characteristics of the actual sequence leading to the behavior in question. This chapter addresses a significant challenge to the actual-sequence approach; the challenge has it that we cannot extrapolate from classical Frankfurt-style cases to a conclusion about the compatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility, since the Frankfurt-style cases feature “counterfactual interveners,” whereas causal determination is a property of the way the actual sequence unfolds.

This chapter’s guiding question is about indeterministic agent-internal processes that are still at work in a decision-producing causal stream when a decision results. The question is this: If incompatibilism is true, what contribution might such processes make to there being directly free decisions beyond being sufficient for the falsity of determinism? Two answers are offered, one for philosophers who believe that freely A-ing does not depend on being able to do otherwise than A and one for philosophers who reject this belief. Topics discussed in the course of developing these answers include Frankfurt-style cases, evidence of indeterministic processes in decision-producing causal streams, and evidence regarding the existence of agent-causal powers.

Mark Ravizza and John Martin Fischer have previously offered an account of moral responsibility for omissions. On this account, the conditions for such responsibility are parallel in an important way to the conditions for moral responsibility for actions: that is, neither responsibility for actions nor responsibility for omissions requires access to alternative possibilities. This helps in the semicompatibilist project (i.e., to show that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism). This chapter seeks to address some salient critiques of the account proposed by Ravizza and Fischer, especially in recent work by Randolph Clarke, Carolina Sartorio, and Philip Swenson.