You can be morally responsible even with no way out
For centuries, philosophers assumed moral responsibility requires alternative options: you cannot be blamed if you could not do otherwise. In 1969, Harry Frankfurt challenged this view. Imagine Black secretly implants a brain chip in Jones, ready to force him to cast a specific vote if he hesitates. Jones enters the booth and casts that vote entirely on his own. Jones had no alternative, yet we still hold him fully responsible.
The Long Reign of the Alternative
For much of the history of Western philosophy, an intuitive assumption underpinned debates about praise, blame, and justice: a person can only be held morally responsible for an action if they could have done something else instead. If an individual had no genuine choice, blaming them seemed as irrational as blaming a rock for falling when dropped. If you are forced at gunpoint, physically restrained, or trapped by circumstance, the inability to choose a different path appears to excuse you from moral fault.
In contemporary philosophy, this assumption was formalized as the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, often abbreviated as PAP. The principle states that an agent is morally responsible for what they have done only if they could have done otherwise. For decades, both compatibilists—who believe free will can exist in a deterministic universe—and incompatibilists—who argue that determinism eliminates freedom—treated PAP as common ground. Incompatibilists argued that because determinism ensures only one possible future, no one ever has alternate possibilities, and thus no one is responsible. Classical compatibilists countered by trying to redefine what it meant to have had an alternative, often through hypothetical statements such as claiming an agent could have acted differently if they had desired to do so.
Despite their disagreements over whether determinism destroyed alternative possibilities, almost all parties agreed on the premise itself: without alternatives, moral responsibility evaporates. That consensus remained largely unshaken until 1969, when American philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an argument showing that this long-held intuition was mistaken.